AND who said beauty is what you find on the cover of a womens magazine? Too many for too long have been victims of those editorsor at least of advertisers and their anorexic models. No more, says the Fat Womens Group in London which has gone international with an exhibition to promote fat women. Big can be beautiful. And if it isnt, its Us anyway.
Fat women, the group is saying, are not masses of mistakes piled over years but, in a world of different people, only another kind of difference. "There is no acceptance of yourself", says forum member Diana Pollard, without acceptance of your size. The life you want in the body you have. That is the way for fat women to live.
Fat News, the groups newsletter, has advice against diets, encouragement to stay fat and much more. This, the newsletter advises, "is not an eating disorder therapy group". Its not about getting together to think ways to get thin. Its about staying fat and loving it.
Fat groups predictably look to the US for inspiration. It takes America to produce a Fat Chance Theatre for the fat by the fat, Fat Lip Readers with comedy shows to promote awareness of size discrimination, two video tapes doing the fatty rounds called Nothing To Lose and Throwing Our Weight Around, belly dance shows by a fat womens group called Fatimas, or a group of fat feminist singers who call themselves This Heavy Heart. Britain has its own music group, the Roly Polys, with its 4 ft 11 inch tall and 60-inch bust star Big Mo, more affectionately called the Darling Dumpling.
Diet Breakers, UK, a group led by recovered anorexic Mary Evans Young has launched a celebration of No Diet Day on May 6 every year. Prayers are held by fat groups that day for the dieting and the suffering. And for the victims who did not survive their diets. For Diet Breakers, dieting is no laughing matter. "Its the real killer, not fatness. We all know theres a whole lot of women out there starving themselves to death", says Pollard.
You can be fat and fit, women across the fat sisterhood are being told. But how fat is really fat? "Studies have shown that people up to 20 per cent over their ideal weight live longer and more healthy lives than those at their ideal weight", says Dr Jill Welbourne at the Eating Disorders Clinic of the Bristol Royal Infirmary. "Being very fat can present problems," she says. "If you cant reach your feet you cant clean them. But being a little cuddly is good, being underweight is not good at all." The fat women sound dire warnings for most women who are always just starting a diet or finishing a diet. The danger, they cite dieticians as saying, is in the yo-yo pattern of gaining and losing weight, not in gaining it and keeping it. "The last seven anorexics I treated have been patients who cut out fat and sugar and took strenuous exercises to become underweight", Dr Wellbourne said.
According to her, the fat often live longer and healthier than the thin. Fatness is not always an issue in itself, it must be seen with other risk factors. And so a part of the fat womens campaign is to educate doctors to treat fat patients with respect and to emphasise that you cant use weighing scales to measure health.
Or to measure desirability. "If somebody says you have to be thin to have a love life, then that somebody is lying. The fact is that 47 per cent of British women buy dresses of size 16 (38-inch bust) and over", says Pollard. "And nobody is saying that 47 per cent of British women are without partners." You dont have to be Barbie doll-like to be fallen in love with. "Its this western culture that pushes beauty as tall, white, blonde, blue-eyed and slim", he adds. "There are a whole lot of us for whom that is not genetically possible, and we shouldnt be trying to achieve the unachievable."
The fact is most men live in the real world, though some are getting sucked into all this, continues Pollard. "Women are falling victims to a body fascism in a fat-hating culture." Helen Jackson, a lawyer who describes herself as a large lady, has been fighting cases of a fatism that can get as oppressive as racism. Fat people have been denied jobs, some have been sacked. One fat woman was not allowed into a gym as that would ruin the aesthetics of the gym.
But fat can be aesthetic, the exhibition suggests. The exhibition now in Manchester on the way to Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden aims to get fat women working together internationally. "We would love to exhibit in India", says Pollard. The women are looking for signs of fat acceptance in perhaps a non-western culture where the fat are not punished, and where looking cuddly is valued.
Quite the centre of the exhibition are sensitive photographs of fat nudes from the book Women En Large by Laurie Toby Edison. Photographer Melanie Cole has presented a series of photographs of fat women swimming underwater, Sarah Aleck has done paintings of fat nude women at Turkish baths and sculptor Dor Walker a set of eight figures of nude women.
Fat women are looking to history as much as to art, celebrating fatness by recalling fat celebrities. Louis Armstrong, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and, more unfortunately, Nero who fiddled while Rome burnt.
What have the slim, or those in-betweens done that the fat haven't? Very well-fed women now demand a place for themselves, from movie theatres with special seats, to attractive clothes for their sizes in country after country. As yet, clothing stores for large women are rare. The misleadingly named London store, Fat Face, does not do clothes for fat women. "We do XL," said a saleswoman. "But I'm afraid that's as far as we go."
