Of course, I think it's great that The Women's Press has brought out Sizeable Reflections, a book about fat women leading fulfilled lives. I believe absolutely that Dawn French and Jo Brand and Jenni Murray are good at their jobs and also very sexy.
I also believe that fat people are routinely discriminated against and that the constant scrutiny of the media, diet magazines, thin models, fashion pages and that weird, embryonic-looking Calista Flockhart are all instruments of oppression. Oh yeah and that hipster jeans and the sizing system in Agnès b (I mean, I can't get my arm in those trousers) are not just instruments of oppression but probably a worldwide misogynist conspiracy.
Naturally, I hate worldwide misogynist conspiracies - don't we all? - and I also hate Lynda Lee-Potter for being so horrid in yesterday's Daily Mail about the book and about anyone else, like lovely Kate Winslet, who has happened to put on a pound or two. I also hate being stuck in a changing room with too-small trousers around my knees and my bottom reflected in the mirror like unkneaded dough. I hate the deep, undermining blows experiences like this deal to my sense of self-worth and the pain I see in the faces of my friends when they go through similar experiences. I hate seeing the girls I teach go through anorexia and bulimia, and the circular, mind-numbing tedium of trying to counsel them.
Most of all, I hate the number of hours in my life I have spent learning the calorific value of everything and thinking the thoughts outlined above. I'm bored of them. And I don't think Sizeable Reflections is going to help. It isn't the contributors' fault: after all, they're not advocating solutions, just offering up their exceptional lives as examples.
The problem is that these women are exceptional, not just in being so talented and successful, or even so fat, talented and successful, but in being fat and rich. For, though more than 40% of British women are overweight, they are also disproportionately represented in the working class. It is a commonplace of anti-fattist literature to state that other cultures celebrate fat, but the fact is that such societies usually lack food, so fat means wealth. In our society, fat means poor, or at any rate non-aspirational, and while this is true, it will never be sexy, whatever the example of powerful individuals.
Fat in Britain means cheap, high-fat, processed food and a sedentary working life with poor access to leisure facilities. Fat means Asda - that trim pocket full of change is a lie - or, since the recent take-over, Wal-Mart, with its drive-in cheap food. Have you seen what Wal-Mart has done to the inhabitants of Middle America? Look, next time you tune in to Rikki Lake or see the teenagers stagger away from a gun-wielding classmate on the news. Even the children look as if they've been blown up with a bicycle pump.
The strange thing is that, even though fat is clearly related to what we eat, and what we eat is clearly related to the society we live in and the amount of exercise our society allows us to take, the solutions offered are always individual ones. Diets are lonely and guilt-fuelled, the exception to the rule. Exercise is an extra (probably drive-in) to our lives, not integral. Women are particularly susceptible to guilt and personal responsibility, which is why they diet more. Over Christmas, I read the "food diary" of one of Britain's most fashionable nutritionists. Her diet - and she was rake thin - was strikingly unrelated to the people around her. She lived on her own. She ate alone. She ate only foods that were imported (sinful pecorino cheese!) or out of season ("a passion fruit as a pick-me-up"). When she ate bread, she had to lie down to recover from the starch shock. Nothing she ate was available at Asda, or could have been shared with a family.
This sort of diet is not going to help our ever more obese nation to get thinner, any more than Dawn French can stop me hating my bottom or posh gyms can make the population healthier. Time was when The Women's Press, with its 70s little iron logo, would have advocated collective action. We could have linked arms round Wal-Mart, for instance, bicycled en masse round its car park, picketed Cadbury's or organised a boycott. All horribly uncool now, of course. Collectivism badly needs rebranding. Political action makes you thin? Now, that might have mileage.
• Sizeable Reflections: Big women living full lives is by Shelley Bovey
