“Fatty, fatty, two by four…”

I hate to write the first line of a disgraceful ditty that I probably said more than once with other girls when I was a fourth or fifth grader. I was ashamed to say it, I knew it was wrong, and yet I did, which is probably the case with all wrongdoing.

I was reminded today of that disgraceful ditty when I was eating a lunchtime sandwich in a little café. I stared at a woman who walked in, then quickly looked away, but she had noticed my stare—a tall young woman who looked as though she weighed more than 200 pounds. But she carried her weight with a difference, wearing what must have been custom-made slacks and shirt, form fitting, in bright red. She seemed to present herself to the world as she was, and the devil take the hindmost. She’d ordered a pastry and accepted it in a paper bag, leaving, with a backward glance at me, the starer. Before she was out the door, she was devouring the pastry. I imagined there was no way she would have taken a seat and eaten the pastry with the rest of us. So the shame was still there.

Yesterday The New York Times gave a big chunk of its front page and a full page and a half inside to a woman, also large, named Virginia Sole-Smith. She’s recently written and published a book called Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. In her book and in a five-hour interview, she persuasively argues that fat is a personal choice, and a legitimate one, challenging theories that fat is unhealthy. She does not divide food into good and bad and allows her two young daughters to eat Cheetos along with their chicken and broccoli dinner and substitute brownies for everything. She was not appalled when one daughter ate a whole quarter pound of butter, thinking it was cheese; I would have expected the girl to notice the difference after one bite. They read at meals, absolved from talking, and wander away from the table at will. Yet, as she says herself, a minute of connection with a daughter is more important in the scheme of things than eating or not eating, a connection thwarted during the interview because the daughter was wearing earphones. There seems to me to be a contradiction here: is allowing a self-chosen diet the same as blocking communication by wearing earphones?

Another branch of her argument, having nothing to do with food, had great resonance for me: “that you can be a mom who doesn’t live solely in service to other people, that you deserve time to yourself and that you’re a person with needs, and that those needs matter.” Even now, decades after the women’s movement that has meant so much to me since 1972, this is still a radical idea—and it is often mothers who find their meaning in perpetual self-sacrifice.

And, most radical of all, she wonders if heterosexual marriage might be another form of diet—a diet which deprives women of our freedom. Divorced from a man she calls attractive—”and he finds me sexy”—Sole-Smith is basing her decision on a more complex understanding of the inevitable constraints of marriage itself rather than on the shortcomings of a certain man.

Now that’s revolutionary.

In Women Women