Fat Girl Syndrome

Girls are raised to be pretty.  Carefully think about that statement before you disagree with me in your head.  How many times has someone shared a photo with you along with a statement similar to, "look at my beautiful wife/daughter/sister/mother/aunt/niece/granddaughter/friend".  The quantifier of value is beauty.

Girls are raised to be pretty.  At least they were when I was growing up.  Don't get me wrong, the 80s were slightly more progressive than the 50s, but girls were still raised to be pretty.  We are told to fuss over our hair, make-up, clothes, bodies, etc to make sure we are attractive.  Because the judgement you get from the world perceiving you only comes initially based on your appearance.

Fat girls don't fall in with this stereotype.  What's the old joke?  "What does a fat girl and a moped have in common?  They're both fun to ride, but you don't want your friends to know."  The first impression that any fat girl makes on another person is one of being the fat girl.  Unless you also happen to be a really clumsy fat girl (like I am) and the first impression may be the falling fat girl.  I digress.  Point being, since you can't just fall into line with being a pretty girl, you have to come up with something else that defines you as a person.

I call this Fat Girl Syndrome.  You are not good enough just being who you are because you are fat.  So, you have to make up for your fatness by also being something else.  A really pretty girl can be just that.  She can just be beautiful.  She doesn't have to be smart or funny or creative or have an interesting life.  She has value with her pretty face.

A fat girl has to make her value apparent through some other measure.  I want you to think about the obese/overweight women you have known throughout your life.  And then compare them to the list below and see if they don't overtly fall into these categories.  Or, into more than one.

The Funny Fat Girl:
This girl overcomes the daily judgement of others by turning comedic tricks.  She is sharp-witted, or sarcastic, or (more often than not) self-deprecating.  She provides value to her peer group by being entertaining.  She will legitimately laugh at your joke about the size of her ass, and make a return joke about the size of your bald spot to put you back in your place.  She will make fun of other people with you, mostly to ensure she is not the target of the jokes.

The Smart Fat Girl:
This girl derives her self-worth from being the smartest girl in the room.  When you are younger, this can be easier, particularly if most of your female peers are more concerned with how their lip gloss looks or whether Marcus thinks they're cute.  You can outshine some because you get all of the awards at school, or scholarships, or better grades, or better college opportunities.  The value in this usually ends when school does.  It can be very easy to be the smartest girl in a class of a few hundred if you study hard enough.  It is impossible to be the smartest girl in your company of 5000, or your city of millions, or the billions in the world.

The Yes-Girl Fat Girl:
This girl is the nicest person you will ever meet.  She will laugh it off when people say mean things to her (or behind her back) and continue to try to be a part of the group by being apologetically nice.  She will never tell you no when you ask her to help you move, or to set up for a party, or do your work for you, or to be the designated driver.  This fat girl is always on the go, doing things for other people, being the shoulder to cry on, helping out her "friends" who are always in need.  She is also usually putting their needs before her own.

The Bitchy Fat Girl:
This girl usually doesn't appear until later, maybe in her 20s.  She has had enough of your shit and she is tired of it.  You can say something rude to her, and her response will sound something like, "I might be fat, but I can lose weight... you'll always be ugly."  She has reached a point of having had enough of the verbal/emotional abuse from everyone and is on the path of being the abuser instead.  I mean, if everyone has always been hateful to you, why not hold up the mirror and reflect it right back?  Or even better, attack first to establish your power/control/dominance in the beginning.

The Fag Hag Fat Girl:
This is a straight girl who surrounds herself with gay men.  It is easier to be friends with gay men.  Being friends with other straight women bring up issues of competition (I am not as thin as she is, I don't have a boyfriend like she does, my job is not as awesome, etc).  Being friends with straight men bring up issues of possible attraction (which most men do not reciprocate at the same level of interest).  But a gay man is safe.  You can go to the bars with them, never having to feel bad about yourself because no one is hitting on you.  Because the expectation in a gay bar is that no one will hit on you because they are all gay.  This kind of life is extremely safe, yet overwhelmingly lonely.

The Slutty Fat Girl:
Here's an interesting fun fact: men will have sex with whomever is willing.  There are a LOT of men (the vast majority in my experience) who would never consider dating or marrying a fat woman.  These same men will fuck a fat woman.  For him, it's easy pickings.  I have actually met men (too many to count) who only hooked up with fat women because they're "easier".  I literally had one guy I met on an online dating site (note: dating site, not a hook-up for sex site) tell me he wouldn't want to be seen with me in public, but he'd love to come "hang out" with me at my house.  No thanks, asshole.  There are fat women who try to regain the control in this dynamic by being whores.  You aren't getting the kind of attention you actually want from men, but at least you're getting some attention, right?

The Talented Fat Girl:
Similar to the funny fat girl, this girl has cultivated some area of expertise as the thing that defines her (instead of being the fat girl).  She is an artist.  Or a seamstress.  Or an amazing cook.  Or an expert in her field of work or study.  She derives her self-worth from being better at something than everyone else is because she doesn't get it from her reflection or her relationships.  The relationship she may have with a painting, or a costume she is making, or a dinner party she's planning, or a big project at her job is more fulfilling than the human ones are.

The Giving Fat Girl:
This girl will give you the shirt off her back, the car in her drive way, the money in her bank account, and the milk out of her refrigerator.  She will buy you gifts to make you feel special to purchase some friendship or love from you.  She will never give you anything with the expectation that you would buy her something in return because she has literally turned her friendship in this scenario into a monetary transaction.  You are basically her escort in life, though she would never view it that way.

The commonality among all of the fat girls is that they are using something else in their life to give themselves value.  There are other things, besides being beautiful, that they have to come up with in order to be a part of the peer group or feel like they fit in.  It isn't as simple as being one of the girls in the vast sea of girls if you are the fat girl.  You have to find something else about you that makes you desirable to the group: unless you particularly enjoy being the butt of every joke or the wallflower that no one notices at all.

Personally, I have been all of these fat girls at one point or another, some of them overlapping in different periods of my life.  There were a lot of times that I convinced myself that being smart, funny, creative, artistic, giving or any of a myriad of other things would make up for the fact that I was fat.  And at the end of the day, I still felt alone (even inside of relationships or friendships) and not ever quite good enough.  

There was never a time that I thought to myself that people valued me (for just me) without having these other attributes to make up for my being fat.  This remained true probably until I almost died last year.  In the immediate aftermath, I was only myself and mostly incapable of being anything other than that.  I found that I was surrounded by a cultivated group of people who actually valued just me.  I didn't see it that way until then.

Perhaps this is why I am now trying to find that value within myself.  When will it be enough for me to be just me for myself?  When will I see that I (just me) have value?  Not the artist, or the brain, or the cook, or the caregiver... just me.  I'm not sure.  Because I think I am still at the point where I don't really know who that is, without all of the other quantifiers...