Aubrey Gordon
Appearances
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
I folded in on myself, muscles aching with contraction. That, of course, is... Aubrey Gordon. My pronouns are she, her, and hers. I've written a couple of books, both What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat and You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. Those are books that I wrote after writing anonymously for several years under the name Your Fat Friend.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
And now I co-host a podcast with Michael Hobbs called Maintenance Phase.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
I try not to drink very much water so I don't have to go up and go to the bathroom. I also know that my mouth gets dry sometimes, so I bring a lot of mints so I don't have to ask for drinks, which also means reaching over the row and again, reminding them that there's a fat person here who's making them physically uncomfortable in some way, right?
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
Um, I bring my own seatbelt extender and I check for it as often as I check for, you know, my phone or my boarding pass or my wallet. Right. I have a very specific posture and I feel like most fat people I know who fly have similar sort of postures for themselves. I use one hand to grab the opposite elbow so that my arm, so that as little of my arm as possible, um, is in balance.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
Anything that anyone else could interpret as their space, right? So I end up sort of with my back twisted and my elbow pulled off to one side for most of the flight. It's not super comfortable.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
When someone near you asks to be reseated, it's usually after everyone else is in their seats, and the whole plane becomes like a theater, right? And everyone's just watching this one thing play out, and you just become aware that there are, like, hundreds of people around you who understand exactly what's happening and don't even feel compelled to check in with you and see how you're doing.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
People just silently watch and it feels like the clearest referendum that I get that like not one of these people on this plane is thinking of me as a human being who is deserving of their compassion. You know, they're just watching it play out and thinking I would feel the same way or whatever they're thinking.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
But none of that has to do with I wonder if that person's OK or this is terrible and this person shouldn't have to experience this.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
That is a culturally acceptable way of processing our frustration with flights or feeling out of sorts when we get off a plane or whatever. It's totally fine to say there was a crying baby or there was a fat person, right? That becomes our way of expressing frustration, and no one tells us not to, generally speaking. So we just sort of keep doing it rather than anyone going... Hey, wait a minute.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
If you were uncomfortable, what if the seats had been different? What if you just had more space?
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
I think the main narrative about fat people is I don't have to have sympathy for you or consider your humanity because as far as I'm concerned, you brought this on yourself, right? Like if there's a villain here, there's no question that it's airlines, right?
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
If you've ever been uncomfortable on an airplane, the people you should be mad at, and frankly, the people I'm mad at are the Boeing designers, right?
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
I have yet to meet anyone who raves about the cushy seating in the coach section of a commercial airliner. Flying is expensive, cramped, trying, and taxing. Luggage gets cumbersome. We miss connections. Our relationships get strained. And at the height of all that stress, boarding, my wide, soft body becomes their target.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
Rather than being a compatriot stuck in the same cramped, uncomfortable position as everyone else, I become a scapegoat for all their frustration. In moments like those, it's hard to get angry with a corporation, its executives, and industrial designers. It's much easier to get angry with the fat person who dared to fly.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
Not only are we going to make these seats small enough that they don't fit most people, but we're actually going to shrink them over time under pressure from airlines. Right. In between, I think it was 2009 and 2019, the seat width on U.S. airplanes decreased by about 10 percent. That's just within 10 years.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
I would aim for planes that are designed with the principles of universal design in mind. Because I'll tell you what, planes are not very accessible for fat people one bit. They're also not super accessible for parents with little kids. They're also not super accessible for disabled people, for wheelchair users or anybody using mobility aids, right?
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
So if instead of thinking, the only people really designing for here are short and thin people, What if we thought about, here's the breadth of human bodies that exist. What's the vehicle that we could make that would carry the most of those human bodies, right? The widest range of those human bodies. That, to me, would feel like a huge win.
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What’s it like to fly when you’re fat?
To have us designing planes for people rather than insisting that people fit planes.