Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
Recently, I was at home sick with my first head cold since 2019 and had the energy to do exactly one thing: lie on the couch and watch television. I watched all of Lizzo’s new Amazon show, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, in two days.
I cry watching people dance, and sometimes I cry while I dance, though that is exceedingly rare these days. I cried watching Beyoncé during Homecoming. I cry during almost every Lip Sync for Your Life at the end of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I’ve cried in a Zumba class twerking in a gymnasium full of women.
Some of you may not know this, but there was a time not that long ago when we all had to watch network television. There was nothing else. And a very popular reality television show that unfortunately many of us watched consisted of thin people screaming at fat people while they nearly exercised themselves to death. This show shan’t be named, but for our purposes, I’ll call it The Jillian Michaels Screaming Show.
Like so many things about my mid-40s, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls made me wish I had a time machine. I wish I could tell my younger self that nothing is wrong with her or her body. I wish I could tell her not to lose her creative spark, her love of dancing to pop songs and memorizing the choreography to all the popular music videos. I wish I could go back in time and never watch The Jillian Michaels Screaming Show. I wish I could go back in time and meet every single person who made money off of me hating my body and invoice them for all the therapy I’ve had to have. And that’s as a small-fat white woman with considerable privilege and fewer odds stacked against me.
During the pandemic, some people turned to sourdough. I turned to TikTok. I leaned into fat liberation. I started using “fat” as a neutral descriptor for myself. I learned that I don’t actually hate how it feels to be in my body. The thing I hate is society’s response to a person not pursuing thinness. I found community with so many fat and plus-size people just living their lives — wearing cool clothes, dancing, creating book reviews, eating great food, repotting house plants. Turns out, you can just live a whole-ass life at whatever size your body turns out to be. And, spoiler alert, it’s genetically predetermined — but have fun trying to outwit your genes, I guess.
Sometimes we need someone to look to for permission — permission to be ourselves, permission to be fat, permission to be loud. When the contestants on Watch Out for the Big Grrrls meet Lizzo for the first time, I get the sense that Lizzo represents some of this to these women. Throughout the season, no one apologizes for or makes disparaging remarks about their body. Sure, there are some clips where contestants talk about past struggles, but this is not a show about fat and plus-size women who are trying to be thin.
These are women with weight distributed in all kinds of different ways, wearing shorts and sports bras and dancing at a very high impact for long periods of time. I am well aware that weight is no indicator of health or physical endurance — despite living in a thin body and doing Crossfit, The Screaming Show’s trainer Bob Harper went on to have a near-fatal heart attack. But I also rarely get to see fat women moving for joy, especially on a mainstream television show. The Screaming Show did more harm than I think our society can actually reckon with, but the greatest harm it did to me was to teach me that you can’t be fat and healthy. It taught me that you can only be in a fat body in public if you’re trying to lose weight. It taught me that fat people are a problem to be solved, and to be solved by thin white people at that. Thin white people who build brands and make money off of your fat body.
I wish we never talked about Lizzo’s body. I wish her success and immense talent were enough. I wish there were less disbelief that you can be in a larger body and be incredibly physically fit. But unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. I don’t know what it feels like to be Lizzo. How could I? But I know what it felt like to watch her put 13 plus-size women on a television show and dare us not to see their humanity. In the first episode, when the contestants walked into a tent and realized Lizzo would preside over their audition, I cried.
