This story is sad, but it’s
hopeful too. I like the way that I was able to love this person, this man so
disjointedly separate from me, so deeply. It gives me faith in my heart, even
if my taste in humans is once again not the best.
Conversation came back
again to the “morbidly obese” who were, Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager kept
saying, a problem. “For them,” (us, I meant) “MAYBE, but it’s not fair when
society tells people what our bodies should look like. It makes me want to
punch society in the face.”
WHY was I IN a
conversation about his, about ANY of this, at work? With the Assistant Manager
and the Store Manager? The Store Manager cosigned my feminism out of empathy
for his teen daughter, which was comforting, but it hurt to have to defend my
body weight in the middle of my stupid day job.
Even when I told Cute
Pansexual Assistant Manager directly that he was hurting my feelings, he
maintained that it was “just a difference of opinion.” He had thoughts on the
matter if I was interested. NO, REALLY, SUPERVISOR AT WORK, tell me more about
how the size of my ass is burdening you.
Lately I’ve been thinking
a lot about a comp class I was in fifteen years ago at Syracuse. The professor
had ostensibly chosen food politics as the semester’s theme, but in retrospect
I can see she was doing body terrorism before I knew there was such a term. As
we watched Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size
Me show shot after shot of headless, poorly dressed fat people, revealing
the filmmaker’s contempt for both the fat and the poor, I sat in my slightly
two small classroom desk feeling scrutinized. The fat at my middle felt naked,
my boobs too big. I felt exposed in a way that reminded me of my long-ago rape.
In 2018, I would have
been OUTRAGED, would have called every campus official, but instead I wrote
about objectification in my class papers, got an A and moved on. Now, whenever
I see Morgan Spurlock’s book, or any other piece of body-shaming trash, in the Little
Free Libraries around town, I put them in the recycling where they belong.
Anyway, back to the
bookstore, fat-shaming comments weren’t the only ones to come out of CPAM’s
mouth—he seemed determined to dismiss any existence of sexism or racism
ANYWHERE. “It’s 2018,” he said, “It sucks for everyone.” He brushed off feminism
as man-hating, ignored my complaints about his frequent casual racism, and
seemed personally injured by any kind of justice talk. I was only DOING any justice
talk because his gentle but constant stream of prejudice kept nagging my
conscience to say something.
“Stop trying to school me,” he eventually
said, the third time I tried to calmly explain that fat people aren’t
less-than, that we haven’t necessarily “let ourselves go,” that we haven’t
somehow placed a burden on him or on other straight-sized people just by
existing.
I can see how the “schooling”
was annoying to him and how it DEFINTELY wasn’t my job. I gave him way too much
leeway because I needed a friend, because I wanted a new bookstore home. I
should have reported him to the Store Manager, but he had a ways to go, too—I’d
had to also gently call HIM out when he referred to an old Cosby joke that was
only sort of about rape. (At least SM was receptive to pushback and didn’t make
me explain myself, but the reference hadn’t exactly inclined me toward trust. )
Partly, I was doing a bad
white person thing: I didn’t want to give up comfort to do what was right. I
wanted a break from being like this. I
wanted to be a part of things without being an SJW for like FIVE SECONDS but I
think what I’m learning is that those days are behind me. Good.
I’m not sure why I tried
so hard to belong there, when there’s so much belonging available all around me—there’s
marches, there’s canvassing, there’s yoga and massage and occasionally stopping
into (super liberal Unitarian) church. There are my feminist-bookstore-owning
neighbors who still have their Hillary sign (from primaries!) up. I have a home
in the world no matter what. I’m not sure how or why that bookstore got so important
to me.
Because of that needless
struggle to belong, or because of my poor handling of it, (and, to a greater
degree, because America puts children in cages now) the first half of this summer
was about battling depression, about really struggling for hope. I want
sometimes to go back to my life before activism, before Nazis came back to the
streets, before Heather Heyer got murdered, but this is where we are now, and
there’s no way out but through.
At the bookstore, that would
mean a few more snits and a lot more HR.
Next Time: Does he know what he’s saying?