Fat

The Iowa State Fair is running currently, and the most popular of the fifty-something varieties of deep-fried food on a stick? Is deep fried butter on a stick. Yup, frozen butter that is dipped in batter and deep fried, then covered with honey sauce and eaten with rapture by the fair attendees, who claim that it is "out of this world."

Uhhhh.... Okay.  I am not certain how I ought to react to this news.  My immediate, real reaction is one of repugnance.  "Eww, gross!"  my inner child says, with her face all twisted up.  Melty and greasy and run-all-over-your-clothes-y!  I cannot imagine it tasting even edible, much less like "a hot, soft cinnamon roll." 

I shudder to think of the horribly soft, fat, oleaginous bodies that people who ate deep-fried butter regularly would have.  And I say that with an open eye to the strident, fat-acceptance people who think that we should all embrace fatness as an acceptable human look.  Which, being a lifelong fat person myself, and very deeply ingrained with both resentment at the way the world works in relation to fatness, and with guilt and despair (buried deep, but still faintly fluttering) at my evil sinful laziness in "choosing to be fat," I am both sensitive to, and contemptuous of. 

I don't even want to get into all the different ways in which fatness affects our world, both in its prevalence and in its lack.  Girls killing themselves -- literally -- to avoid it.  People without any fat-making genes, apparently, sneering delicately with faint horror at the rest of us who put on a few ounces from smelling the caramel-popcorn booth. Men, whose bodies do not stockpile fat, since they will never have to bear a child during a famine, (which is presumably what my body is telling itself is about to happen) making casual judgments on the desirability as a partner, as a co-worker, or even as a human being, of an overweight woman.  But let's just accept that I know, and understand, every single way of looking at this problem, from every direction, and with every ramification.  I got that disapproval from my father, my mother, my husband, and my doctors. In different ways from all of them, of course.  Also from saleswomen, from casual friends, and from my sisters.  Everyone in the country, apparently, has an opinion which needs to be expressed, because for heaven's sake, I must be blind to the problem, since otherwise I couldn't possibly allow myself to be so fat!

In any case, I said I didn't want to get into that, but there I was, getting all into it.  Apologies!