As you know, I’ve been painfully working my way through Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. This morning, I encountered the article about sweathogging, which I’d read before. I barfed up my rambling reflection into my paper journal. Apologies beforehand for the repetitive/arrogant focus on my appearance.

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I’m fat. It’s no secret to me or anyone else. Because of an unfortunate flowering that occurred in high school, I also happen to know that I’m good-looking. I can’t always see it myself, but other people sometimes do. I’ve been getting hit on steadily by strangers from 160 up to 260. Despite considerable experience, I’ve never gotten good at enduring it. Instead, when I was young, I developed a stony, forbidding facial expression that has stuck to this day. The attention always scared me; it still does.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about sweathogging. It’s something that I know goes on among some groups of young men. They sound like sorry assholes to me, frightened and desperate and weak. They pick up fat girls in bars or wherever, just for the fuck or the suck, and then compare stories like war veterans who relish the goriest battles. And they don’t just get off on the easy, casual sex, they get off on degrading fat women into the dirt. At least, that’s what they say. That’s what they tell their friends, what they laugh about when it’s over.

No doubt, to these men, I’m a hog. Luckily for me, I’m married to one of the finest beings ever to grace this infested rock, and I’ve been borderline agoraphobic for over a decade. I’ve not had much chance to cross paths with these fellows. Come to think of it, maybe these circumstances render them the lucky ones. I have a hard time finding the good in such people; I would much rather find revenge.

But what would I do? I’ve lived so long in the sheltered, personal world I constructed as a teenager, I’m not even sure how things like dating and rejection — the matrices of hogging — work. I’ve been too busy figuring out marriage and, for the most part, succeeding. Everything else, all the trials of the contemporary single woman — the waxing and shopping and working out and first-dating — are, to me, the tea-customs of an exotic country. I spend my time cooking and negotiating chores with my husband when I’m not studying, at the hospital, or writing. I barely maintain basic standards of hygiene. I don’t shave my legs, I hate prescribed exercise, and I wouldn’t diet if someone threatened me with a branding iron. I never wear heels or skirts. I have one pair of work trousers and a white lab coat. So far, that’s all I’ve needed.

I wonder how many women live like I do, in relative freedom, almost like a man. I’ve largely stopped wearing makeup, and I was never big on jewelry or perfume. I don’t think of myself as any less feminine, just less cowed. It’s one thing if you enjoy the trappings of traditional femininity, relish the girly rituals of preening, like a drag queen…and quite another if you do them just to feel human, just to feel worthy of going outside and existing among other humans.

I’ve found that, the more attention I lavish on my appearance, the more uncomfortably self-conscious I become; the higher my standards of personal appearance rise, the less worthwhile I feel for simply being the person I am when I wake up in the morning. I like the idea of all that grooming and elegance, but in practice, it’s only ever given me grief. I keep hoping that, someday, I’ll suck the poison out of self-adornment, much the way I’ve finally managed to suck the self-hatred from moving and eating well.

Though I feel fairly comfortable in my own skin, within the tiny domestic kingdom I’ve created for myself, I mentioned I am borderline agoraphobic. I avoid going out in public as much as possible. I’m an inveterate class-skipper, shirker of walks, reluctant errand-runner, exquisitely miserable grocery-shopper, a cranky, wingless social butterfly. Clothes shopping is a punishment, and I flagellate myself only once or twice a year. I patch the holes in my jeans and wear the same pair of shoes until they fall apart. It makes me happier than shopping.

I even avoid getting my hair cut more than once a year, because fat-hatred in a beauty salon hangs in the air like perm solution. In one, where I got a lovely cut and was convincing myself that I should go back regularly, the hair-stylist introduced me to her friend, a large woman who was dieting, and told me she’d “lost a person” in weight. They both looked at me proudly, expectantly. All I could think to say was, “Wow.” Since then, I have endured more silent haircuts than a deaf-mute.

The male stylists are the worst. The women, at least, seem to pity me, or else feel prettier in comparison to the fat, unfashionable thing bibbed and wedged into their hydraulic high-chair like a monstrous toddler. I leave exorbitant tips for the effort it must cost them to touch me, hoping to buffer the acidity of the conversation that must open when I close the door behind me. I can laugh at the absurdity later, in private, of being pitied or despised by people whose greatest ambitions in life probably involve the skilled manipulation of hair mousse, but while I’m enduring it, I can almost feel their nasty little assumptions encase me like clay, glazed over with pity or strange hostility, hardening into ceramic with the firing of the hairdryer. I walk out slightly less human than I arrived.

I think I put up with all of this hatred, imagined or not, because I can also imagine that most people simply don’t know any better. They’re like three-year olds on a city bus who can’t stop pointing at their first black person, their first really fat person, their first exposure to the near-incomprehensible range of human variation. Sure, it’s cruel and sometimes mean-spirited, but it’s also mostly unconscious, the reflex of an invisible muscle that’s been relentlessly toned by the culture since birth. Maybe the naive, Anne-Frankish part of me that always gave people the benefit of the doubt is not really dead, just somewhat more selective.

But the hoggers know what they’re doing. They’re not telling themselves they’re concerned for fat women’s health, believing that we’re all essentially equal except thin people are slightly more equal. They don’t bite their tongues to spare someone’s feelings and count solely on the release of derogation after-the-fact.

They’re weak in the midst of a sick culture, and I do pity them for that, but only as much as one can pity a war criminal who was simply following orders. Our social contract exists on the premise that I will not wantonly hurt you, no matter who whispers what into my ear, if you have done nothing to hurt me. The only thing separating hoggers from serial rapists is a two-bit mask that comes off before the blowjob is over, and the only thing separating rape from murder is that the victim does not die.

Some would rather.

I know that, outside the 500 square feet that comprise my world, nothing is fair or just, not even in nature. The lust for individual survival balks at nothing: cannibalism, incest, murder, infanticide. A day in your average woody glen makes the most ruthless multinational’s career-ladder look like puppy daycare. In a just world, hoggers would go to jail and enjoy the popularity of incarcerated pedophiles. But because they won’t, I like to fantasize how I’d level the scales myself.

(To be continued.)