Leith, William Read online

  Then she said, 'What we need is beautiful images. To get resources, you need to be appealing.'

  The Private Pleasures, the Hidden Delights

  I went to the French and Teague fashion show at the department store. It was a big enough attraction to fill one floor of the building with people. Many, but not most, were large-sized women. The women drank champagne and talked positively. It was a great thing that, at last, they could have designer clothes. Here, on racks, were the soft, velvety ensembles in midnight blue and sensual chocolate; they looked like a sultan's pyjamas. Here were the long skirts to echo the private pleasures, the hidden delights; a collection, to quote the publicity handout, 'which captures all a woman's emotions the seductress, the feminine, the wife, the lover'.

  Helen Teague got up on stage and made a speech. Then Dawn French spoke. French was in the sensual chocolate. She looked roly-poly. She said, 'Big women are not alienated in this store,' which was, at last, true. She went on, 'I hope that ultra-skinny people will be green with envy.' Then the models took to the stage in the brown and blue outfits, the fluffy, huge-collared opera coat, the diaphanous slip dress. But these women were not fat at all. They were oversized models tall, beautiful, shapely. I talked to them afterwards. One of them

  was almost as tall as me and weighed 154 lbs. She looked like a fantasy version of Kim Basinger. 'I'm just more woman than people like Kate Moss,' she said. If this was Fat Acceptance in action, I could see what Shelley Bovey was on about.

  I asked French if she would talk to me about the politics, the design of the clothes, the fat issues. French looked cagey. She said she didn't know, and referred me to her publicist.

  A few days later, Teague mulled over the show's coverage. She felt piqued. She'd watched a TV clip of the show. The TV station, she said, 'picked the biggest girls they could see, and filmed them. Some of them were size 36 and 40!'

  Dawn French's publicist called me a few days later. Would she talk? 'Dawn's done all that now,' said the publicist. 'She wants to steer away from that. She wants to concentrate on the label, rather than the issue of size.'

  Staring You in the Face

  And that's when I realised that the answer to my question was no. Nobody accepts fat people. Not even fat people. Particularly not fat people. When you are fat, part of you doesn't like yourself, and you wear this self-loathing like an outfit, a clown's suit that tells other people to devalue you. 'Above all in our culture,' writes the Princeton cultural historian Richard Klein, 'being fat means you get no love, because you deserve no love.'

  Klein relates a telling story: a man asked a fat woman out on a date. All very well, you might think. But then she discovered that he was a Fat Admirer a 'chubby chaser'.

  `She was angry and frustrated,' said Klein. 'It reinforced her dream of having a man who wants her in spite of her build.' She didn't want a man to want her as she was. She was like Groucho Marx, who wouldn't want to belong to a club that would accept him as a member. After all, when you are only pretending to accept yourself, it is unbearable be loved for the very thing you cannot love in yourself: your fat.

  Being fat blots out parts of your mind just as it blurs your outline. Sometimes, as Shelley Bovey says, it's hard to know where you end and where your fat begins.

  When you are fat, you are lost in an alien territory, and that territory is you. But it's not you. But it is you. It's maddening. And sometimes, you think you can see a way out, and then you look again, and you can't see anything. It feels as if you're searching for something, and you know it's there, it's staring you in the face, and you look again, and it's gone.

  Part of the Problem

  Reflected in the glass of the newsagent's window, my face looks puffy, ill-defined. Should I buy a stomach magazine? Are stomach magazines the solution? Or are they part of the problem? In her book The Male Body, weight guru Susan Bordo hints that pictures of muscled, bulky men are history; a new, more feminine aesthetic is beginning to rule. In the old style, the engorged muscleman the surrogate penis, according to gay theorist Ron Long stares straight ahead, blank-eyed, ready to fight, unwilling to show weakness. Bordo calls this image 'the rock'. She calls the new, Calvin Klein-inspired

  male pin-up 'the leaner' 'because these bodies are almost always reclining, leaning against, or propped up against something in the fashion of women's bodies'.

  Leaners are also like female fashion models in another way they are leaner. Like women, they are depicted as objects rather than subjects. They challenge the advertising credo, defined by art historian John Berger in the 1970s, that 'men act and women appear'.

  These days, men appear.

  Another thing John Berger wrote was, 'Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.'

  We all know what happens when women are encouraged to be self-conscious about their bodies. According to the feminist Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Kim Chernin, author of The Obsession, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food. According to the feminist Caroline Knapp, author of Appetites, they start to hate the way they look, and then they diet, which leads to a disordered relationship with food.

  So I'm inclined to think that stomach magazines are not the solution. I think they are part of the problem.

  Disaster Movie

  I walk past a deli and past a diner and past another deli and past a food store with a picture of a cake in the window, a photograph the size of a billboard, a huge crumby cake with red slop on the top, and I'm asking myself the million-dollar question.

  Why do I eat too much?

  I walk past a place with a neon sign that says 'Hot Bagel we bake freshly every day', and another place with a sign that says `Ohhh that coffee ... mmmm that bread', and even though it's a bright, crisp morning, a cheerful morning, a toasted bagel sort of morning, I am filled with a nameless dread, a sense that I am in imminent danger, that very soon, any moment now, I will be picked up and hurled into oblivion by terrible, malign forces I cannot control.

  I don't know. Why am I getting so fat? Why are we getting so fat? Standing here, panting on these fat streets, in this fat city, having bolted a large plateful of albumen, having passed on the toast, I'm glaring across the street at a mobile bagel cart a bagel chariot. I want a bagel. I am not satisfied. I want more. I want more, even though I know that, by having more, I will want still more. I know that having more will not satisfy me. But still, I want to give it another chance. More is my creed. More is our creed, here in the greedy West. That's all our society has to offer us. More. We are fat, we are getting fatter, and we are not going to stop getting fatter.

  I am fat.

  I am getting fatter.

  Is there any hope for me?

  We are, surely, going to get fatter and fatter, until what? I don't know. But the Fat Crisis is already well under way. The Fat Crisis is rolling. Just the other day, in fact, I was talking about it. I was talking about the Fat Crisis because sometimes it seems there's nothing else to talk about. It's been in the newspapers, on the radio, on the TV. People are beginning to talk about an 'epidemic' 'a sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular undesirable phenomenon' (OED). This is how America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refer to the Fat Crisis. It is also the term used by the World Health Organisation, and its younger sibling, the International Obesity Task Force.

  Everybody knows the situation is bad, and getting worse. Everybody intends to do something about it. We all have a policy. We all have a diet. The word 'diet', derived from the Greek `diaita', means 'a way of life'. A diet is nothing less than a philos
ophy.

  Oh, everybody has a diet. Dr Atkins has a diet. Catherine Zeta-Jones has a diet. Sophie Dahl has a diet. Renee Zellweger has a diet.

  Kirstie Alley from Cheers she has a diet.

  And now we have a diet crisis, a diet disaster. That's what somebody was telling me the other day. It's bad, he said so bad, in fact, that sixty-five million Americans are overweight. We shook our heads, appalled. Sixty-five million. That sounds bad, doesn't it? And then somebody else said no, you're wrong, it's not sixty-five million it's 65 per cent. And I checked, and he was right. Now, that really is bad. According to the World Health Organisation, 65 per cent of Americans are overweight. That's 127 million. Thirty per cent are

  obese. And get this: ten years ago, 20 per cent were obese. And this: according to Professor Kelly Brownell, the director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, 'The number of people with very high body weights where disease risk is extreme has tripled in the last decade.'

  How will this disaster turn out? Will it be like one of those disaster movies in which the terrible threat comes from outside, and can therefore be repelled, like the Triffids in Day of the Triffids, or the birds in The Birds? Or is this more like one of those movies in which the threat comes from inside, where the threat is not plants from outer space, or winged predators, but ... us?

  At My Age, Brando Was Slimmer than Me

  Well, at least I'm walking, rather than what I'd normally do in this situation, which is go back to my hotel room, bagel-bloated, and order something on room service, possibly just a coffee, possibly not, and loll around my bed, fretting and sweating in front of daytime TV. At this hour, 10 a.m., fat o'clock in the TV schedules, I could watch obese people sitting on sofas, with that anti-poise obese people have, talking about how bad it is to be obese, how unfair, how humiliating.

  I like watching obese people it can be a good appetite suppressant. They talk about how they want to get slim, but they can't, they've tried everything, and it keeps going wrong. They try to exercise, but they can't fit it into their daily schedule. They try to stop eating fast food, but they crack on

  Day One or Day Two. I saw one show in which a man was frustrated with his obese wife; she said she'd been on a diet, but she hadn't lost a pound, had in fact gained weight, and one day he left the house, got to the station, then realised he'd forgotten his wallet, and walked back to the house, and let himself in, and there she was, sitting at the kitchen table, in flagrante. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Large bucket. Large fries. He looked at her and said how long has this been going on, and she started sobbing. How long, he said. Eventually, she told him. She'd been doing it the whole time. She'd never even started her diet. She didn't know how to stop eating. She was Just so hungry'. She was 'so hungry all the time'. She 'just couldn't trust herself around food'.

  Fat people and their excuses. It really makes me angry. They're always whining, the whiny fat pigs. Why don't they just stop whining and do something about it? Why don't I just stop whining and do something about it?

  The answer to that question is that I already am doing something about it. I'm on a diet. I've been on the diet for five minutes already, and I'm holding up fine. I'm doing better than that woman, anyway. Look I'm walking past the bagel cart! No eye contact with the bagel man. I am full of Day One thinking. Such as: if everything goes according to plan, the lowcarb way of life might make me slim, and, slim, I might become a better person. I might become my old self, the person I was before I became bloated and weak and self-deceiving. Sure, I got fat because I have problems. But maybe, if I get slim, I'll be able to tackle those problems in a more effective way. I can just see it myself, in however many months' time, sitting at my desk, slim, paying bills. Myself, in

  however many months' time, slim, standing in the kitchen, holding a wet cloth. My girlfriend saying, 'Oh, you shouldn't have it was my turn!' Myself, slim, taking my clothes off, slowly, slim-style, before getting into bed. My girlfriend looking at me. Me not minding. Torso like Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire. (When Brando was rehearsing the original play, Truman Capote went to interview him; later, Capote said that 'it was as if a stranger's head was attached to the brawny body'. The body was taut and muscular; the head was 'so very untough'. Ten years later, when Brando was beginning to be haunted by his personal demons, the powerful feelings of self-loathing that live inside the fat person or, in this case, the future fat person he told Capote, 'Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalised and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalised, develop scabs.' Then he said, 'Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you feel too much.'

  Well, that's how he lived his life. Trying not to feel anything. Eating and feeling hungry and eating and feeling guilty and eating and getting fat and feeling bad about being fat, in order to avoid feeling his real emotions. Which is exactly what I do, and I know it. But I don't want to know it. So I don't think about it. I'm fat, and I hate being fat, but there is something else, something I believe is worse than being fat, something I can't bear to think about. What is it?

  At my age, Brando was slimmer than me.)

  52

  Wearing High Heels

  I'd like to walk briskly, but my stomach muscles have gone, pushed outwards by the blob of churning dough which is my belly, so that the bottom half of my body feels as if it is not quite connected to the top half. I'm not a great walker. I'm a sloucher, a schlepper. I walk at the pace of a woman wearing high heels. Fat, I feel the raw power of the earth's gravitational pull. I move forward discordantly, propelled by the prow of my gut, my feet splayed outwards for maximum balance. Whenever I say I'm walking, don't imagine someone actually walking. Imagine effort, discomfort, pain, shame. A long-standing injury in my left ankle has been aggravated by my excess weight. My ankle is weak, but I'm fat, so I don't exercise it, so it gets weaker, and sometimes the ankle turns, just gives way, and I spill over, I fall down with an almighty crash. Falling down is much, much less dignified a thing to do when you're fat than when you're slim. I've fallen down slim, and I've fallen down fat, and there's a big difference. For instance, when a slim person falls down, people turn their heads and look in sympathy. A fat person falling down, on the other hand, is a tragicomic sight. And when I heave myself up, I stand on my bad ankle gingerly, to test it out. And when I walk, I naturally favour my right foot, which further weakens my left ankle, and puts a strain on my right calf. Recently, I had an ill-advised run the panic exercise of the not-quite obese male as he enters middle age. That morning, I looked at the scales. 230 lbs. I put on a pair of old trainers I had not worn for years. They felt brittle, deep-fried. I donned a tracksuit. I jogged through the park, hobbling slightly,

  will consume. And, as Critser points out, the number of new snack products launched in America every year is growing exponentially from 250 per year in the late 1970s to 2,000 per year by the late 80s. And now what? Now what?

  Perhaps more worrying still, Professor Schwartz believes that this degree of choice is driving us nuts. This overabundance, he says, 'may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world'. What happens to the consumer's head, Schwartz thinks, is that this level of choice drives up the consumer's expectations, which leads to disappointment, and eventually depression. People are spending more and more time searching the aisles for what they want, and then, when they get it, they find out that it's not what they want. It's just a cellophane bag full of reconstituted starch, flavoured with stuff like monosodium glutamate and methyl-2-peridylketone. It's not what they want at all, which makes them feel hollow and empty.

  And when you feel hollow and empty, what do you want to do?

  You want to eat. Just like the rats in an experiment conducted by Anthony Sclafini of Brooklyn College. Sclafini gave his rats access to foods high in carbohydrates and fat. They ignored more nutritious food, and became obese. The bad food had l
eft them feeling empty, which made them want more of it. Presumably, the fat tasted good, and the carbs made them hungry.

  I want to eat, of course, but, more importantly, I don't want to eat, I really don't want to eat. I want to be slim. If I eat any more, I'll be obese, putting myself at greater risk of, among other things, arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease,

  carpal tunnel syndrome, deep vein thrombosis, diabetes, gallbladder disease, gout, heart disease, hypertension, impaired immune response, impaired respiratory function, infertility, liver disease, lumbar pain, pancreatitis, sleep apnea, stroke, and urinary stress incontinence.

  So I drift back out of the deli, smiling, hands in pockets, avoiding the evil eye of the man behind the counter who is trying to kill me.

  More

  According to Dr Atkins, carbohydrate snacks, quite simply, do not satisfy you. That's why, as a product, the snack is doing so well. Americans spend $32 billion on snacks per year. You eat one, and you want another one. Eat. Want. It's a vicious circle or, if you're a manufacturer of snacks, a virtuous circle.

  Snacks are an advertisement for themselves.

  In a time of material abundance and consumer choice, the successful manufacturer must create more than just a product he must also create a need. Successful products are the ones that make you hungry. In other words, the products that do well are the ones that do not satisfy. Or, to put it another way, in the Darwinistic struggle of the modern marketplace, the ideal product is addictive.

  The ideal product is the one that does not work. Like, say, pornography. Pornography doesn't really do the trick. Pornography is an advertisement for itself. The more pornography people have, the more they want.

  a place where people actively repel each other. It is, in the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, 'the anti-Ark'. In some ways, it's the loneliest place in the world.