Our guiding voice here is not the victim of fat-shaming, but its perpetrator. The last segment explores Oral Roberts University’s weight-loss policy. Will this space accommodate me? the anxiety asks. Wheelchair accessibility, for example, or the amount of light, or noise, or any other physical navigations one must make when spaces do not generally cater to one’s body. But this sentence could so easily apply to any number of issues. At a certain size, one’s body is prohibitively large, so that, as Roxane says, “This whole nonstop anxiety conversation happens in my head all the time for just basic life functions…Before I will go out to eat, I research a restaurant extensively on Google…And if I don’t think I’m going to be comfortable, I simply won’t go.” Roxane is talking, here, about the size of chairs, the spaces between tables, the presence or lack of armrests. Here, the Voice of Society appears through physical structures. She talks, mostly, about what it’s like to constantly think about and navigate her size. She puts fat people into three categories: “20 pounds overweight,” or a Slim Fast diet away from not-fat “Lane Bryant fat,” or able to fit into a typical plus-size clothing brand and “super morbidly obese,” like Roxane herself. In the next segment, Ira Glass talks to Roxane Gay, who wrote about weight in Bad Feminist and whose forthcoming book, Hunger, delves deeper into the topic. New Elna didn’t have to be a good person. And here, too, we have the Voice of Society, which gives New Elna everything that Old Elna wanted: “ tried so hard for everything that now got so easily. New Elna is thin, and has a job and a partner, but she’s not as good a person. Old Elna was fat but happy (although I wonder how happy she was, given that she lost 110 pounds for the expressed reasons of getting a job and a boyfriend). In the segment, she comes out as a person who struggles with her body image, and who uses questionable methods to keep herself looking how she feels she must. Unlike Lindy, she dealt with her weight by losing it, rather than by accepting it. The second segment is told by one of my favorites, Elna Baker, whose story is based, in part, on an essay she wrote for Refinery29.
But, as Lindy says, “You’re not concerned about my health-because if you were concerned about my health, you’d also be concerned about my mental health.”** And there we have, more or less, the thesis of this episode.
Dan, here, speaks in the Voice of Society at Large, a voice that claims to care about things like fat people’s health. Dan wrote insulting, disparaging things about fat people, and Lindy wrote back-all while they remained friends and colleagues at the Stranger. The book, and this segment, are about her journey from a hyper-ashamed fat person to a fat person whose advice includes, “At a certain point you just have to be like and do you.”* The segment’s underlying conflict is the feud between Lindy and her boss, writer Dan Savage. The show starts with Lindy West, whose book, Shrill, sparked the episode. This week’s episode, “ Tell Me I’m Fat,” hit home hard. Once or twice a year, This American Life, a consistent favorite of mine, hits home with a punch-to-the-gut episode, and I remember just how great their work can be.