I'm fat, I'm Black, and my curves are not hourglass. Here's why your body standards won't stop me

White beauty norms will always find themselves a seat at the table, even ours, and that includes vicious fat phobia.
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I’m fat. Let’s start there. Not only am I fat, the ancestors saw fit to deny me the proportions that are so frequently admired in other Black women. Rather than collect my excess in rounded hips and ass, most of it has decided to settle in my arms, back, and what I affectionately call my tire: the circumference around my lower abdomen, which includes the space above where my ass crack ends and my sagging belly. “Flat” is an understatement when describing my ass. My butt is more square shaped than anything else, and from certain angles it appears to be actively trying to squeeze itself into the rest of me, perhaps hoping even after all of these years to get some of the jiggle the rest of my body has in abundance. I’m tall—not WNBA tall, but at five foot eight, I’m taller than most women—and my legs didn’t seem to get the memo about what size the rest of my body wanted to be.

If I’m a size 22 up top, I’m a size 18 in the legs. For the sake of comparison, it was once said on Facebook that I’m shaped not unlike a wisdom tooth. On my more disparaging days I feel boxy. When I’m feeling more gracious and accepting, which is the majority of the time, I settle on “wavy” as a good descriptor of what I look like. It’s more than curvy but soft and jiggly. According to the kids (by “kids,” I mean folks of all ages who body-shame on the internet), I’m “built bad.”

My body has always been in excess of what is deemed acceptable and appropriate, and outside what we’re told is sexy and pretty. Throughout school, I was one of the fat kids. It was a sin made worse as I aged, and instead of acclimating, I just became more wavy. I have been reminded of this failure often and loudly.

There is a myth that Black people aren’t fat phobic—and bigger Black women, by extension, are confident and unaffected by their size—and we need to put that to rest right now. Generally speaking, Black people do have a higher tolerance for body fat on feminine bodies than other groups do. We like our women to have “some meat on their bones,” “something to grab on to,” or to put it plainly, we like them “thick.” But thick and fat are not the same thing. The difference between being a “big fine” and just being “big” has as much, if not more, to do with body shape as it does with body mass.

A woman twice my weight can still be stamped “bad bitch” if she carries her weight everywhere but her midsection. Hourglass and pear-shaped women are typically celebrated amongst Black folks and idolised in trap music. Young Dolph said, “If she ain’t got a fat ass, then she can’t get up in this car.” Describing a girl he shouldn’t have to f*ck “for free,” Drake said her “stomach on flat flat… ass on what’s that.” I could go on for days, but you get where I’m heading here. There is a formula for what makes a bad bitch, and it starts with an impressive hip-to-waist ratio. Right beyond that, though, are the familiar trappings of fat-phobia.

You ever peep how many exceptions to the hourglass standard are made for Black girls who are thinner? Think: Rihanna, Ciara, Halle Berry, Tyra Banks, or any of the unshapely, skinny light-skinned girls you went to school with. We call those women who are shaped less like hourglasses and more like the hour hand on a clock “slim thick” or “model material” and keep it moving without comment. Have you ever noticed that there are no such concessions made for fat Black girls, ever? White beauty norms will always find themselves a seat at the table, even ours, and that includes vicious fat phobia. If you’re a Black girl like me, with the misfortune of being both fat and “built bad,” existing outside the aesthetic rules means that you’ve committed an egregious act against the social order. Women who find themselves too far away from the center of beauty norms are often treated as if they’ve committed treason, our aesthetic a public-facing betrayal of our refusal to conform, our refusal to go to any lengths necessary to be valuable to society—specifically, to its men.

My body has put me on the receiving end of violently hurtful fat phobia and sexism, but it has simultaneously created an opportunity for me to reconsider my gender identity, sexuality, and feminism outside of the rules that had been written for me. When I first started to vocalise that I, too, identified as a bad bitch, many of my peers treated it as if it was satirical. They thought it was one big joke because I didn’t look like the women who had been placed at the top of the fine-ass hierarchy. But my rationale was: If I was already written out of the narrative based on how I looked, then where else could I fit in, based on what I thought and what I did? What was the source of my value if it didn’t come from my hip-to-waist ratio? When Rae Sremmurd said, “I don’t got no type. Bad Bitches is the only thing that I like,” I ran with it. There’s room for all of us. I’m not beholden to the meanings that other people have made about my body. I’m not a trap feminist in spite of my body. I’m a trap feminist because of it. I’m not just a homegirl. I’m a fat homegirl. I’m not just a hood bitch. I’m a big hood bitch. And I’m not just a bad bitch. I’m a fat bad bitch.

Extracted from Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist by Sesali Bowen, out now.