No Fat Chicks Allowed

Ko Mataatua tōku waka

Ko Pūtauaki tōku maunga

Ko Whakatāne tōku awa

Ko Motītī tōku moutere

Ko Pupuaruhe tōku marae 

Ko Te Patuwai tōku hapū

Ko Ngāti Awa, ko Ngāpuhi, ko Te Arawa, rātou ko Waitaha ōku iwi

Ko Cameron MacCausland Taylor tōku ingoa

It’s 5:30 pm on a weeknight. Friends is on TV2, before the six o’clock news. My family of four is dispersed among our array of couches. Whenever Fat Monica pops up on the screen, it sends my parents into hysterics. Her sloppy eating, stuffing chocolate into her face and licking her fingers dripping with brown. Her awkward dancing, chubby face and rolls jiggling on the screen. The ridiculous fat suit, treating the size of fat people as a hilarious costume. She’s the absolute peak of comedy in my parent’s eyes. In mine? Not so much.

Problematic is an understatement. Monica’s past self as a fat woman did a world of damage. The character allowed the audience to project all their insecurities onto fat people. To laugh at their expense. To feel better about themselves cos at least they don’t look like that. At least they aren’t that sloppy, that awkward, or that fat. Apparently, being fat is one of the worst things someone could be.

She was seen as less human. That is until she lost weight. Then, suddenly, she was deemed desirable and acceptable within society. The only happy ending possible for her was one in which weight loss occurred. 

Many questions flew to my chubby child's mind: Am I never going to be loved until I’m skinny? Am I never going to be accepted until I drop a few sizes? Is this my future? Eating the whole fridge messily, not being able to dance, having people laugh at me simply based on how I look while doing mundane things? Was I never going to get a happy ending unless I slimmed down? 

As a kid, that crushed me.

When in doubt, go with the classic weight-related jokes to be guaranteed a giggle from your audience. Whether it’s a cheeky fat joke, or a character perpetuating all the negative stereotypes around fatness, it’s a popular trope perpetuated through decades of film and television. 

But, at whose expense? 

Damaging social constructs have been created around fat people, a barbed-wire fence shutting us in like sheep. The fat community is dehumanised through the media and treated as undeserving of the bare minimum: basic human decency and respect. This makes it seem okay to treat fat people like this in real life.

Flashback to when I was sixteen years old, my backpack clinking with vodka cruisers. I lied to my mum and said I was staying at a friend’s house. Oblivious to the glass bottles rolling around in the bag, she let me go, not knowing I would be getting fucked up at some random party. It quickly turned into one of the worst nights of my life.

Minding my own business, I remember swaying to the DJ’s music in the middle of some field, sipping on the sweet sugary flavour of raspberry cruisers. Chanting began all around me, a circle enveloping my drunken self. There was a wooden sign with shitty handwriting reading ‘no fat chicks allowed’. The chanting turned into screaming, a choir of angry male voices: get the fuck out, no fat chicks allowed here, just fuck off already.

Like Monica, simply dancing made me a target. A gigantic bullseye just begging to have arrows shot through me. As my father said, ‘If you don’t want people bullying you, don’t be fat.’ Those words shook through my body. How could I come to this party being this size and not expect to be bullied? My life was a film, but I wasn’t the main character. I was ‘the fat one’. A joke, just waiting to be made fun of no matter what I did. I couldn’t exist without my size becoming an issue to someone else.

Fat.

That forbidden word we dare not speak. Like a cuss word, you’d get punished for speaking in school. 

That naughty word we would never call another, at least not to each other’s face. 

That word represents one of the worst things you could turn out to be: a failure, a joke, a fat person.
In society, we are encouraged to use ’nicer’ words: curvy, plus-size, queen-size, on the bigger side, thick. 

But fat is simply a describer. It should be treated as such. A neutral word with no negative connotations. A physical description of mass, not an insult used to belittle and discriminate. But, there’s still a long way to go in getting rid of that stigma. 

That’s why Fat Amy came as such a shock.

Pitch Perfect was released when I was twelve years old, the peak of my obsession with Glee and all things musical. I was incredibly excited to watch another group of young adults tackle covers, but in a capella and on a huge cinema screen. Like every girl my age in 2012, I memorised Anna Kendrick’s The Cup Song flipping routine and used it as a party trick in every situation.

Now, there’s no denying that Fat Amy is a badass who seems hugely confident in herself. She’s okay with her size, which was great to see! She’s comfortable owning her fatness in all its glory, and it’s truly phenomenal, no doubt about it. But she’s not the romantic lead, the hero, or the main character. She never could be. Fat women are often used for cheap comedic value. So, it wasn’t a surprise when Pitch Perfect literally named one of their characters, ‘Fat Amy’. 

Fat Amy’s weight quickly became one of the biggest running jokes throughout the trilogy. Almost her entire narrative revolved around her size. In a Time Magazine article, Sarah Silverman put it best: ‘The most basic is the fat kid making the fat joke first.’ Therefore, it is not a surprise that a large amount of humour was drawn from her weight by Fat Amy herself. There’s a quote that sticks out when asked why she calls herself by her nickname: ’Yeah, so twig bitches like you don’t do it behind my back.’ 

It’s wonderful that Fat Amy owns her fatness and isn’t afraid to admit it. But, while this comes off as comical, it spells out something more tragic. A plus-size character makes the fat joke first, in order to avoid bullying from others about their weight. I remember adapting this coping mechanism to my own life at a young age. Truth is, it didn’t help me at all. It was just a way to mask the pain of how I really felt about my body – disgusted, ashamed, embarrassed and unlovable. With the immense amount of anti-fat attitudes shown in the media over decades, no wonder I viewed my body through such a horrible lens. 

I was cheated on by my long-term boyfriend of two and a half years in 2020. Destined to enter into an infamous ‘hoe phase’, I scoured Tinder like a dog in heat, desperate to get my paws onto someone, and drooling at the mere thought of it. Throwing caution to the wind, as they say, I slept with as many people as I could. Most mornings I’d fill in my best friend on the previous night’s mishaps, giggling like a little girl who’d stolen candy from the top pantry shelf. 

When I’d gossip to my friend, I’d leave out the part where I sat crying alone after my latest hookup left. The part where I didn’t make them wear a condom because I didn’t want to upset them. The trip to the pharmacy to get the morning-after pill as soon as it opened. How that void I was searching to fill remained empty, along with my standards. I couldn’t let it slip how much I craved male validation, how I was addicted to it, and how I couldn’t live without it. 

In 2008, Beth Younger examined the cultural assumptions about slim women and fat women in the media. Slim female characters symbolised ‘control, responsibility, assertiveness, and sexual monogamy’, while fat female characters the opposite through ‘passivity, irresponsibility, and sexual availability’.

I wanted the ‘thin girl’ sexual experience, a circumstance fat people have been told they will never encounter. I wanted to be desired by others, in control of my sex life, who it involved, and assertive in getting what I want. Things I never imagined I could have because I’d grown up thinking I was undesirable and I had to take what I could get. 

I know I shouldn’t have been striving for this so-called ‘thin girl’ sexual experience. Unfortunately, I felt like I had to prove everybody wrong. I HAD to show everyone that boys liked me. The fact I felt so strongly about proving something so superficial is incredibly sad.

There is no denying that the media is beginning to centre fat people as lead characters, and doing so in less derogatory ways. But reading through an essay on female fat protagonists in YA literature, Nicole Ann Amoto quotes Maria Mochado who makes an excellent point: there aren’t really any storylines of fat women in fiction who just ‘get to be’. This applies to film and television also. Their weight is almost always mentioned.

I’d love to see movies and TV shows where fat women just exist. No mention of size, weight-related jokes or references. No centring her entire narrative around the fact she is fat. Where she is confident and happy and sexy, lives a regular life and does things that humans do without it being a big deal. Where she achieves her happy ending without needing a weight-loss glow-up, like Monica in Friends, Hanna in Pretty Little Liars, or Patty in Insatiable. The representation around these themes is rare, but oh, the change that could happen from implementing these messages into our media. Just envisioning it wraps me up like a burrito, warm and soft and full of comfort.

That burrito is sawed in half, my insides spilling out like loose pieces of chicken and salsa when I think about the darker side to fat representation: no representation at all. 'Symbolic annihilation', or complete absence of representation in the media, is a theory by George Gerbner referenced in Sofie Hagen’s 2019 essay on why we need a fat Disney princess. Sending the awful message that we, as fat people, don’t matter is a well-planned method to ensure that society continues to oppress us. 

Take time to reflect on the media you see. The negative messaging is constantly fed to us about fat people. How rare an occasion is it that you may see fat bodies on TV, in magazines, and even in pornography? Naked, fat bodies? Odds are, like me, you have grown up to see fat people as either hated or invisible.

There are more naked and murdered women on television and in films than there are fat women. 

Would someone rather see a bloody corpse than someone like me?

Is my physique more disgusting than rotting flesh and chopped-up body parts?

I’m a confident, fat woman, but there’s no denying that the media’s outlook on fatness has damaged me more than one should ever be damaged. 

At whose expense are fat jokes made? 

 Mine.