Showing posts with label size prejudice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label size prejudice. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2020

Fat Friday: Thoughts from an Irritating Overweight Woman

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

As my fan club of -666 readers knows, I review books for a living, such as it is.

I was presented with a book to possibly review, and was, initially, excited. It was a collection of short stories about a group of female friends.

The short story is an undervalued art and female friendships are an undervalued treasure. I was interested in reading this until I saw one of the characters described by another reviewer as "an irritating overweight woman."

The comment about the "irritating overweight woman" gave me pause. Why is her weight such a determining factor in her characterization? Many authors tend to write large people in a negative light. As a person who fights with my abusive partner ED (Eating Disorder) constantly, I don't really need to read works that vilify people who look like me. It's a shame because a good short story collection about female friendship sounded like just the ticket.

I decided to give the book a hard pass.

Authors (like society as a whole) love to scapegoat, stereotype, and vilify large people. I have enough problems wrestling with ED on a daily basis. I don't really need to read fiction putting down people who look like me yet again. ED does that quite often enough.


Fat and Ornery
Image copyright Open Clipart Vectors

Sly and Snarky
Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com


Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Sly's Tackle It Tuesday Holiday Edition + Inner Champion Workbook: Chapter 9: Find Strength in Adversity



Disclosure: If readers purchase a copy of the book through the above link, I earn a small commission from Amazon.

Today's post is written by my social activist alter-ego, Sly Fawkes.

Lessons I’ve learned from challenging experiences:
When it comes to people who are hateful towards me, I've learned that it really isn't me, it's them. Note that this does not prevent the things they say from hurting or stop me from going into a downward spiral of self-loathing in every case. However, these days I am more likely to consider the source. 

If you feel the need to say crappy things about another person, it says more about you than it says about that person. I am not talking about criticisms of bad behavior, I am talking about ad hominem attacks and negative stereotypes. 

dumb blonde
lazy welfare recipient
lazy fatty
lazy (insert race here)
slut
they could just try harder
at least I'm not...
like a girl
maybe if they laid off the cheeseburgers
it's for their own good
users are losers
just get a job
if they just tried they could (insert oversimplified action here)
if they just didn't look so gay people wouldn't pick on them
godless (person who doesn't worship as I do)
disgusting bum
looks too healthy to be sick
probably faking their illness to get out of things
needs to just be more positive
was probably asking for it

Have you ever said any of these things?

Then your New Year's resolution should be to stop being judgmental and hateful. You don't know what anyone else is going through or what conditions or circumstances led them to be where they are now.

Even "if I can do it anyone can" is no excuse for being horrible to someone else. No, not "anyone can." Everyone's circumstances are different. 

Five ways I can positively channel negative energy in my life:


1. You think I'm bad at the things I do? Fine, you are welcome to think that. I'm going to do them anyway.

2. Try to educate through action. I hate the fact that damn near everything I read has to have its Moment of Size-Shaming, which immediately lowers my opinion of the work and its author. It doesn't make me popular, but I call this out wherever I see it. I also try to put my money where my mouth is. I try to have at least one large character in every story who makes a positive contribution. Actions rather than appearances are what makes a person good or bad. Fat is not synonymous with slovenly or lazy. Small is not synonymous with weak. Old is not synonymous with incapable. 

3. Realize that seeking approval from others doesn't work. Anyone who needs me to be perfect or they will ostracize me is not someone I want to keep company with.

4. Tell my story so that others who are being bullied and ostracized realize that they aren't alone.

5. Engage in activism. Try to encourage change in the way people like me are treated. Call out the use of words like "obese," which are used to stigmatize, shame, and silence larger people. 

Obese is a word used to excuse poor treatment of larger patients, to shame them into silence, and to practice lazy medicine, attributing any malady the patient reports to their adipose tissue. This attitude results in dead patients, and I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that.


Ellen Maud Bennett was a 64-year-old Canadian woman. She had been feeling ill for years, but every time she went to a doctor to try and find out what was wrong, they told her that if she just lost weight, she would feel better. When a doctor finally took her seriously, it was discovered that she had stage 4 ovarian cancer. She died a short time later.

Ovarian cancer is extremely treatable in the early stages. If doctors had listened to Ellen instead of dismissing her because of her physique, she would probably still be alive.

Ellen did not want her death to be in vain. In her obituary, she called out the lazy and bigoted practices which resulted in her untimely demise.

Personally, I think that one Ellen is worth a million sanctimonious medical "professionals" half-assing their way through patient "care." Either treat your patients--all of your patients--with respect or find another profession. 

Sometimes doing the right thing means distancing yourself from people or ideologies who refuse to treat you with respect. I have stopped calling myself a feminist after 46 years of proudly bearing the title. I began identifying as a feminist in 1973 when I was eight years old and sick to death of being told what I couldn't do because I was a girl.

Feminism, however, has changed a lot since then. These days, it seems more and more that feminism is only for women who meet a certain standard of attractiveness, and that certainly doesn't include fat women. In fact, most feminists will tell you that they refute size activism because it "promotes obesity and unhealthy lifestyles." Meanwhile, all fat people, but fat women, in particular, experience great difficulty in obtaining compassionate and competent healthcare. Women's concerns already tend to be dismissed by a sexist healthcare system as "hysterical." Fat women are seen as hysterical, lazy, and stupid.

Our current healthcare system literally kills people due to size bias. This bias, by the way, kills thin people too. A thin person is automatically assumed to be healthy, which leads to health problems being overlooked. Medical "professionals" believe that fat people would all be healthy if they'd just lose weight, thus their real health concerns are overlooked. 

Model and photographer unknown

The fact that fat women are seen by modern feminism as unworthy of activism to improve and in some cases save their lives means that modern feminism is unworthy of my support. This does not mean that I will no longer fight for all women's rights to equal treatment and opportunities. It simply means that I will no longer identify as a feminist while doing so. My actions may be feminist A.F., but until feminism embraces all women, including the round ones and those deemed "unattractive" in other ways, then feminism and I must part ways.

Sly wishes you happy holidays, be you thick or thin, and hopes that one day we can find more reasons to embrace rather than ostracize one another.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com



Friday, August 9, 2019

Fat Friday: How to Interpret Fat Liberation Completely Wrong


Cie takes a step back and leaves today's Fat Friday post to her politically incorrect alter-ego, Sly Fawkes.

I recently read a rant by a young (thin) woman proclaiming that fat liberation shouldn't intersect with feminism because fat liberation is all about desperate fat women wanting to force men to think they are beautiful.
First, no.
Second, what the fuck?

This young lady has confused Ashley Graham curvysexalicious (yes, Ashley actually referred to herself that way) Fun Empowered Free the Nipple Liberal Feminism For Plus Size Babes with real fat liberation or fat acceptance. Sadly, I thought she had something on the ball before she wrote this steaming, hateful pile of nonsense.

Real fat acceptance has fuck all to do with wanting to force men to think fat women are beautiful.
Most of us fat women give this many fucks about having some contingent of pea-brained douchebros think we're beautiful.


Here is what fat acceptance is actually concerned with, and I think these issues are very much feminist concerns. While fat men suffer too in a thin-centric society, there is additional pressure placed on fat women for not conforming to misogynistic and unrealistic standards of hotness. Racism and classism also come into play in the thinness equates with beauty while fatness equates with slovenliness, commonness, and undesirability screed. The Slender White Woman is held up as the ideal by women's magazines. Men's magazines also hold up the Slender White Woman as the ideal, while insisting that she also have impossibly large yet perky breasts.

Fat acceptance is concerned with the fact that fat people tend to not receive adequate medical care. Doctors prescribe weight loss for every problem imaginable while not listening to the patient's actual concerns. Since women's concerns tend to be dismissed as it is, this goes doubly for fat women. The case of Ellen Maud Bennett may seem extreme but is sadly far more common than people realize. 

Ellen was a 64-year-old Canadian woman who died from ovarian cancer, which could have been treatable if it had been addressed in its early stages. She had been feeling ill for years, but doctors never did anything beyond telling her to lose weight. Shame on all of them. They should all be held accountable for her death.

In my own case, I did not have a pelvic exam for close to thirty years, in part due to past sexual trauma, in part due to fear that I would be shamed for my body. I only went to an OB/GYN within the past two years because of post-menopausal bleeding, which turned out to be due to simple endometrial hyperplasia with normal cells. As this only raises the risk of endometrial cancer to 1.6 percent greater than the risk for someone who has no hyperplasia, I have opted against a hysterectomy (the recommended procedure) at this time. If I had presented with complex hyperplasia or abnormal cells, which raise the risk of endometrial cancer to 36% greater than a woman with no hyperplasia, I would have had the hysterectomy.

The appalling treatment of larger people, particularly larger women, by the current size-shaming medical system should definitely be a feminist concern. I give no fucks if some dumb dudebro finds me attractive. I want my health concerns to be taken seriously when I seek medical treatment. I do not want medical professionals to dismiss me as either "hysterical" because I am a woman or a pariah because I am fat.

Fat people tend to be passed over for promotions, that is if they are hired at all. Discrimination against fat applicants means that fat people are more likely to live in poverty. Given that women already have strikes against us when seeking employment, fat women face even greater discrimination. I would say that is very definitely a feminist concern.

Just because a small number of plus-size models describe themselves using dumb terms like "curvysexalicious" and a few (understandably) angry big women make the regrettable error of posting "real women have curves" or "only dogs want bones" types of memes does not erase the real goals and real concerns of the fat acceptance/fat liberation movement. By the way, don't post those memes. They're ignorant. Nobody should be shamed for their body type. And you can refer to yourself as "curvysexalicious" if you want, but I'm gonna give you the side-eye if you do.

All fat people face stigmatization and discrimination. Fat women get an extra helping of discrimination for not adhering to arbitrary and unrealistic standards of beauty. These are absolutely issues which should be addressed by the feminist movement. Unless feminism is only for thin women, which is what some "feminists" seem to be implying.

Also, the assertion that fat liberation only concerns itself with forcing men to think fat women are beautiful makes me wonder if the individual making that (inane) statement is unaware that there are fat women of the non-straight persuasion. 

Guess there have never been any fat bisexual or lesbian feminists. Nope, can't think of a single one.

Radass Badass Andrea Dworkin (26 September 1946 - 9 April 2005)
Apparently a figment of fevered feminist imagination.

As Andrea Dworkin once said, "if an ignoramus you are, speak you should not."
Oh, wait. That was Yoda.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com

Thursday, February 21, 2019

The Party: A Modern Tale of Prejudice and Revenge

Angela Bassett as Marie Laveau was my inspiration for Aunt Mila

Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie was my inspiration for Maria

The Party

Genre: Supernatural/Horror
Words: 1000
Content Warnings:
Body shaming, sexual assault, profanity, sexism
Rating: PG-13 

Note:
This story was originally published on my flash fiction blog for a Halloween  2018 short stories contest. Pretty much to a person, everyone who commented missed the point about the attitudes of sexism and sizeism and the intersection thereof, which led to the abuse of the protagonist. Readers instead fixated on my modernized take on the magical gender-swap revenge exacted on the protagonists. I was admonished that I should not refer to transgenderism in anything but the most glowing light.
I felt that my reference to gender reassignment was neutral and was only done to put the story in the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth century. In modern times, gender reassignment surgery is a reality and people are more likely to believe that their relative who has been transformed into the opposite sex underwent gender reassignment surgery than that they were switched to being the opposite sex by magic.
Perhaps I could have done a better job of imparting this idea, but the story was not about gender reassignment. I was rather appalled that a neutral mention of gender reassignment surgery entirely overshadowed the actual point of the story, which was the way society objectifies women, despises and abuses larger women, and excuses the abuse and objectification of women.
There was absolutely no intention of belittling the struggles of transgender people when I wrote this story. I simply wished to modernize the setting rather than going with the old "it's magic, I don't need to explain shit" tactic.
The contentious tale follows below.
~Sly~

“Did they force you to their will, my girl?”
Ludmila Lum’s angular face bore a staid expression, but Maria could see the little vein in her aunt’s set jaw pulsing. Aunt Mila’s warm brown eyes had gone black as the sky over an angry sea, the kind of sky that produced storms which sent ships to their graves on the ocean floor.
Mila’s expression softened at the worry in her niece’s eyes. Her bony hand enfolded Maria’s soft, plump one and a gentle smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
“It’s all right, Mee-Mee. I am not angry with you. Even if you were drunk or high, even if you were flirting with all the boys. Now, you tell your Auntie Mila, did those boys force you to their will?”
“It wasn’t…sex,” Maria said softly, looking down at her feet. “I suppose I am making too much of nothing, as the University President said.”
Maria’s soft, round face, usually so sweet and happy, reflected shame and self-loathing. Ludmila tried not to project anger, lest her sensitive niece believe the ire was directed at her. Maria was a big girl in a world that made no bones about its hatred of soft, pillowy bodies. Ludmila worked hard to teach Maria to love herself as she was, to give her shy, plump niece the confidence that reflected her loving spirit. Ludmila was enraged that awful people had exploited the innocent girl’s attempt at sociability in an unspeakable way.
“They did not put themselves inside me, Auntie,” Maria explained in a quavering voice. “When they first invited me into the party, they were nice enough. It was guys and girls together, just showing off their costumes, just everybody dancing and having fun. The boy who invited me in, I started to think that perhaps he was falling in love with me, as he seemed only to have eyes for me in those first two hours.”
“Does this boy have a name?” Ludmila inquired.
“Omer, Auntie,” Maria revealed quietly.
“Omer Raines? Doctor Raines’ boy? The one you’ve carried the torch for since you were ten years old?” Ludmila demanded.
Maria nodded, her body shuddering as she wept.
“All these years he was my friend,” she sobbed. “In school, he defended me whenever anyone made pig noises at me or called me names. I thought we were destined to be only friends, but at the party, he seemed to echo my feelings. I gave thanks to Erzulie for the gift. ‘His heart echoes my heart,’ I thought, and at that moment, I was so happy.”
“He brought me to the front of the stage where the band was playing, and he told me to dance,” Maria continued. “’Show the world how beautiful you are, Chere,’ he insisted. ‘Dance for us!’”
“So, I danced, and at first, it seemed that all the years of hate and shame for this big body were burned away. Here I was, dressed as the Queen of Hearts, but a kind queen, not one calling for heads to roll. Everyone was clapping and cheering, and I was dancing, Auntie! I was getting down, and everyone was getting down with me, and no-one was laughing at me. But then the fraternity president gave a signal with his hands, the band changed their tune, and so did everyone else.”
“Any special tune they played?” Ludmila inquired, and by the look in her eyes, Maria was sure her aunt knew the tune she meant.
“The stripper song, you know, the one they always play in cartoons and stuff. I thought it was a joke like maybe some of the fellows would drop their trousers and do a moon, all in fun like that. But then one of the boys called out ‘take it off, Fat Girl.’ I flipped him the bird, still laughing because I thought perhaps it was a joke. But then they started pulling at my clothes, boys and girls alike. There was a blonde girl wearing almost no clothes at all who slapped me and said: ‘you don’t belong at a party, you pig, you belong in a barnyard!’”
Maria shuddered as she dropped to the floor and rested her head against her aunt’s lap. Each of her niece’s violent sobs threatened to shatter Ludmila’s heart.
“They tore the front of my dress and exposed my breasts,” Maria revealed. “The boys were grabbing my breasts and slapping my backside. The skinny blonde girl kicked me in the backside and said ‘get your fat, ugly ass away from our party, Petunia Pig! This party is for people only!’”
“Omer followed me from the party,” Maria continued. “He asked where I was going. I said I was going to the police. He tried to stop me, said it was only a joke that got out of hand. I slapped him and told him to never talk to me again. The police just said I should have known better than to go to such a party. I went right to the home of the University president. He told me that he was sorry it happened and that he would talk to the fraternity President, but he asked me to keep things quiet because we would not want to bring shame upon the school. I have always believed in a just and fair world, Auntie, but I see now there is no justice for people like me.”
“There will be justice,” Ludmila reassured her niece. “You rest now, my love.”
While Maria slept, Ludmila worked her spell.
“Justice is served,” the Voodoo priestess declared, leaning back in her chair.
A day later, there were multiple articles about the sudden rash of gender reassignment surgeries among students and faculty at Bayou College. The wives of both the University president and the chief of the campus police publicly expressed their shock, and local doctor Henri Raines declared that he’d no inkling that so many students, including his own former son Omer, were seeking gender reassignment surgery.

~The Real Cie~


Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Sly Speaks: Why I Noped Out of my Hysterectomy


I'm 53 years old and I have a history of sexual trauma and issues with my endocrine system including my reproductive system. I have PCOS. I have a degree of endometriosis, and I have polyps and fibroids in my uterus. The fibroids are small, not some grapefruit-sized thing.
I avoided having pelvic exams for close to 30 years because of past sexual trauma and fear of being shamed for being a larger person. I finally found a doctor I could trust to be honest with about my plumbing problems, so to speak. I see her quarterly because of my endocrine issues. When I told her that I had my "annual period" and was hoping this would be the last year for that mess, she said that wasn't normal and referred me to a gynecologist.
The gynecologist was a very sweet person who made me feel at ease. She never shamed me for my size. She did a D&C, which sucked because I felt like someone had been up in my business with a cheese grater, but I wanted to rule out cancer. The biopsy showed that I have simple endometrial hyperplasia with no cellular atypia. My risk of developing uterine cancer is 1.6% greater than the risk for someone who has no hyperplasia.
Hyperplasia is par for the course in someone with diabetes and PCOS. I produce too much estrogen. My primary care doctor is having me try a bio-identical progesterone, which may reverse some of the issues with my plumbing. One can always hope.
I was scheduled to have a hysterectomy, but I canceled the night before. Let me be clear that I'm not fanatical about women keeping their uterus come hell or high water. My son's best friend's mother had such horrible endometriosis that it had invaded her digestive tract. Some people have fibroids the size of a full-term fetus. There is no reason that these people should be forced to keep an organ that is malfunctioning to that degree. But this is not my case.
I always had miserable periods from hell and was glad when they came to an end. Initially, I was gung-ho to get rid of my reproductive organs, but after doing some research I realized I might be trading one problem for another (i.e. my incontinence could get significantly worse) and the inside of my hoo-hah could turn into the Great Southern Desert for the remainder of my life. In the end, it didn't seem worth it to undergo major surgery for a 1.6% higher risk of possible uterine cancer down the line.
Although two of the doctors involved in the process are women themselves (the person who would have done the surgery is a man) and they were all respectful to me, not a single one of them said a thing about the downside of having a hysterectomy. I think that doctors are taught to have this attitude that post-menopausal women are no longer able to have children, so why not just take the uterus out? But major surgery comes with risks. For me to agree to it, the risks have to outweigh the benefits, and they simply do not in this case.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright Juliahenze @123rf.com


Saturday, May 26, 2018

Sly Says: Food Insecurity in America: What Can Employers Do?


Click to Enlarge

The United States needs to change a lot of things before we can have an overall healthy and happy population. Let's start with the absolute basics: food and shelter.
In this piece I'm going to focus on food, so I will address shelter in a cursory way. I work delivering food, which is ironic because I don't have enough money for adequate food. I drive past groups of homeless people, some of them in wheel chairs huddled together for warmth. This is so wrong. There's no excuse for it. I will address this problem in detail in another post.
Both lack of shelter and lack of adequate food lead to costly health problems that could be avoided. It would be less expensive in the long run to provide basic shelter, food, and health care to the public than it is to pay for medical crises and chronic health problems resulting from inadequate access to the necessities of life.
A while ago, a Facebook acquaintance who perpetually shares about her perpetual diets shared a picture of a fully stocked freezer. Granted, this freezer contained a lot of prepared foods, i.e. frozen dinners. Said acquaintance and her perpetually dieting cronies proceeded with the inevitable food shaming that happens when you live in a society which believes in size normativity rather than health at every size and which refuses to acknowledge that not everyone has access to the same resources. There were comments like "OMG, inflammation!" "OMG, diabetes!" and "OMG, teh OBEEEESITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111!!!!!!!!!!" 
I stated that as a person who is food insecure, this refrigerator looked like the larder of Heaven to me, and that I did not believe in food policing.
Granted, it is ideal to eat fewer processed foods. However, time and money play a huge part in determining what people can and will eat. For instance, when I was making $40,000 per year and cooking for just two people (my son and me) I would order meal kits from services like Home Chef and Chef'd. The ingredients were fresh and minimally processed, and I enjoyed preparing them. When I lost my job due to health problems, all that went out the window.
I have diabetes and should eat at regular intervals to avoid blood sugar dips and spikes. This, however, does not happen. Because I'm rationing food (or simply don't have food) I tend to wait until I am close to passing out before I eat. Believe me, I am not thinking very much about carbohydrate content when I finally get my hands on food. I am thinking about getting some chow down the hatch so I don't end up doing a face-plant.
In spite of being a large person, which people have been conditioned to think means that I must eat 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken every day, I actually don't have much of an appetite. I eat to ameliorate symptoms such as brain fog and dizziness. Sometimes I feel hunger, but I know the sensation will pass. My hunger cues have been messed up for years and will probably never be normal again. This is thanks to developing an eating disorder at twelve years old because society taught me that the worst thing a person could possibly be was fat.
You know, I wish I had the money to afford 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on a daily basis. I wouldn't eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don't like it. The amount of MSG in it would make me wheeze for a week. However, if I had the money to buy 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken every day, I'd be doing okay. That stuff ain't cheap!
Regarding the obesity and poverty connection, it isn't so much that poor people gorge themselves whenever they get their grubby mitts on food. The fact is, dieting destroys a person's metabolism and promotes weight gain. For all but a very small percentage of dieters, the weight temporarily lost through dieting returns with friends. People living in poverty are forced to be on a perpetual diet. The body goes into starvation mode and does what it was made to do: store fat for times of scarcity.
Instead of focusing on making everyone look like svelte supermodels, we as a society should be focusing on insuring that everyone has access to adequate food. Not because doing so will make everyone become a certain arbitrary kind of pretty, but because people who have access to adequate food, whatever size they may be, are healthier and happier.
I will now jump off my anti diet culture soapbox and onto my Everyday Socialism soapbox. 
You can call it "charity" if the word socialism is bothersome to you.
Since the GOP Clown Car will oppose doing the right thing for anyone but the one percent and corporations at every turn, it is up to We The People to do right by our neighbors. So, until we can vote the current mess out of office, what can we do?
When it comes to donating to non-profit organizations, you do better giving a monetary donation to a charity such as a homeless shelter rather than a non-perishable food donation. This is due to the fact that the people who work at shelters can order supplies in bulk. They are attempting to provide for multiple people. One can of corn isn't going to make that much difference.
However, in a smaller setting, individual items can make a difference.
I propose that employers set up donation boxes where people can leave food items for their co-workers to take, no questions asked. People can then give according to their means and take according to their needs. That can of corned beef hash could be a lifesaver for someone who wasn't able to afford to bring lunch. 
Employers could provide basic food items for their employees, i.e. bread, cheese, peanut butter, canned soup, crackers. They could leave a donation jar in the break room. Thus, if an employee had a little spare change, they could drop it into the donation jar to offset the cost of providing basic food items for the staff.
Restaurants and cafeterias could provide a low-cost food item free for employees who needed such, i.e. soup or a grilled cheese sandwich. 
Knowing they had access to food at work could reduce employee absences.
A person who is starving is not motivated to get up and go, particularly when they know that the more energy they expend, the hungrier they will get. Hunger doesn't inspire people to work hard. It inspires depression and demotivation. Food deprivation inspires obsession with food. People who can't think about anything but food are not going to be able to focus on other tasks.
Adequate food, adequate shelter, and adequate health care are three non-negotiables in a successful society. We need to demand these things and keep demanding them until we get them. 
Until our government stops failing us, We the People need to find ways to take care of one another as best we can.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze @123rf.com








Thursday, January 26, 2017

Fat, Old, Ugly, But at Least Not a Sexist Piece of Crap

Kiss my fat ass

Mary says: Feeling really upset just now after seeing that two senators have made mean remarks about the women who were marching. I did march in DC and to see what's in the hearts of our government and the institutionalization of sexism, makes me sick.

Sly says: Fuck them. So what if they find us ugly? So what if they call us fat? I am fat. I'm also old. I'm also pretty sure most people don't find me to be in even the same zip code as pretty. Doesn't matter. My worth isn't tied to how desirable some cretin finds me. Took me a long time to get to this place, but now that I'm here I want to be in the face of so called men like this even more because it pisses them off, and that makes me happy.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Copyright Juliahenze@123rf.com