Leith, William by The Hungry Years Read Free Book Online Page A

the company a bad image. She pointed out that she worked on a radio programme. Yes, came the reply, but some of the interviews she did were in the field, where she could be seen. Once, she went to a doctor because she was worried that her year-old child would not eat solid food. The doctor said, `What are you trying to do? Make the child as fat as yourself?'
    `I actually feel,' Bovey told me, 'that prejudice against fat women is the biggest social injustice, bigger than racism, bigger than sexism, bigger than anything else.' In The Forbidden Body, Bovey describes a fat woman being treated by a slim woman 'as though she were a different species'.
    Bovey believed in the Cannon Conundrum. She believed she had got fat because she had dieted too much. As a fat child, she went through endless starve-and-binge cycles, dieting until she was weak, and then bingeing wildly to keep her strength up. 'I've lost thousands of pounds over the years,' she told me. She lost 42 lbs, from 182 lbs to 140 lbs, in the run-up to her wedding, and then put on another 84 lbs afterwards. 'If I hadn't dieted,' she said, 'I would not have been as high as 224 lbs; I think I would have been about 168 lbs. That would have been fine. I'm sure my natural weight is 168 lbs.'
    She wrote something chilling: that being fat made her feel like an outcast, and that she worked so hard to hide the pain of feeling like an outcast 'that I found it difficult to differentiate what was really me and what was the public face'. I began to wonder why, if being fat was so awful, she was so resigned to it. In her work, she was a reporter from the centre, the very core, of the fat world. But she was entirely concerned with the consequences of being fat, rather than the causes. I wanted to find out about the causes.
    For now, Bovey was concerned with the issue of prejudice. She told me, 'Just think about it for a while. Look at how people treat fat women. The prejudice is insidious. It creeps into everything. Once you start noticing it, you'll be amazed.'
    I Wouldn't Want You to Bring a Photographer'
    Was there anybody out there who accepted fat people unequivocally? Surely somebody did. Perhaps that somebody
    was a company called 1647, an outfit that designed clothes for large women. The name had been taken from the statistic that 47 per cent of British women wore a dress size of 16 or over. The company was run by two women, the designer Helen Teague (5 foot 6, 154 lbs) and the actress Dawn French (5 foot 2, but 'We don't put out details of Dawn's weight.')
    French was extremely upbeat about fat women. She said, 'I long for the day of the fatter supermodel.' Like Bovey, she was also inspired by anger. She said, 'It gets me so angry that sassy, proud girls get stuck in that horrible stuff chain stores think fat women should wear.'
    French was relentlessly positive. She pushed the angle that fat women are actually very sexy. She posed in skimpy gear in Esquire. 'Big women,' she said, 'are told by the men in our lives that we are lovely and good in bed. We're delicious, we're voluptuous. Then everybody else, including the media, tells us that we're not.'
    Here, it seemed, was a simple dispute. The media which, as French kept pointing out in the media, is largely run by men promotes images of thin women, causing endless anguish for fat women. And then there are the fat women who want to fight back by promoting more realistic images images of themselves, happy to be fat. From where I was standing, it looked like things might be getting better for fat women. French and Teague, for example, not content with producing the 1647 clothes for day-to-day wear, had just launched a new designer range, simply called French and Teague. These were upmarket clothes for large women. Glamorous. Sexy, even.
    I met Helen Teague in a bar across the road from the 1647
    shop in Primrose Hill, north London. The shop been designed to make fatter women feel less self-conscious about themselves; it had an air