The Fatslayer Chronicles

One of the advantages of being fat is that you don't get treated like a slab of meat.

I can only really recall one time when I was ever made to feel that way, and I hated it.

I was working at a mental health trust at the time, and I was invited to a meeting in their secure unit. The unit housed 120 patients, all of whom were designated criminally insane. 115 of them were guys, and of those, 100% of them had committed sexually motivated crimes of various degrees of seriousness. The other 5 patients were women who had been on the receiving end of sexually motivated crimes, and had killed their attackers. Those 5 poor women were incarcerated alongside 115 of their worst nightmares!

Anyway, I was let into the unit and escorted by the Head Nurse through three air-locks and various other bolted doors, until I eventually came into one of the main recreation areas. I was there as an accountant for a finance meeting, for chrissakes, and he was giving me a fucking guided tour!

Because this was a psychiatric facility, not a prison, the patients were not confined to their 'cells', and within reason were allowed to roam unchecked through certain communal areas of the building. The rec room contained around 40 guys and a thick blue cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the guys might’ve been nurses, but without uniforms it was impossible to differentiate them from the patients. I think that was intentional.

The Head Nurse proceeded to break every rule in the book by telling me confidential information about the guys lounging around the room - that guy over there raped a 92 year old woman, that guy buggered and murdered a 5 month old little boy, that guy raped his mother then set fire to her etc. etc. etc.

I was horrified. For one thing, we were standing in an open room talking about human beings less than 10 feet away from us as if they were animals in a zoo, and for another, he was scaring the bejesus out of me with all the horror stories.

The guys all started to stare at me in a really intimidating way, grabbing their crotches, licking their lips, getting up and pacing around us etc.  Admittedly they kept a couple of arms lengths away, but I was as spooked as hell, and all the while the head guy continued talking about rape and murder as if he was discussing the weather or the price of eggs. I think he was as weird and fucked up as the patients!

I’m guessing that most women would have found it disturbing, but for someone totally unaccustomed to male attention like myself, it was really really disconcerting.

I felt totally vulnerable and dehumanised – I knew it didn’t matter that I was fat and plain, to these guys that was immaterial. For the first time ever I really began to appreciate that sex crimes are not about sex, or attractiveness, or lust – they’re all about power and control and violence. It was seriously fucking scary.

You want to know something really worrying? Up to that point I’d considered myself almost immune to sexual attack because I’d assumed rapists were inflamed by lust for their prey, and I knew I didn’t have the face and figure to inflame your average guy with uncontrollable passion. I dread to think of the danger I could have put myself in with that kind of thinking – fat ugly girls get raped too!

But anyway, the whole point of this post is to say that ordinarily I don’t attract too much attention from male strangers, and ever since that day I’ve been grateful for that and I want it to stay that way.

Attention from strangers scares the shit out of me, if I’m honest.

This has been on my mind since yesterday, when my best friend said “you’ve dieted loads of times in the past but always panicked and quit when guys started to chat you up. The only reason you’re pushing on with it this time is because you had your 40^th birthday and you think it’s safe to be skinny ‘cos the guys will still leave you alone.”

In the main I think she’s wrong, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t at least a grain of truth in that. My mom was raped and brutalised really badly when I was 12 (she was in hospital for 6 weeks, it was such a bad attack), and deep down I think I’ve always been scared that if I catch the wrong guy’s eye I’d regret it.

I really want to succeed long-term with this plan, and to stand a chance I need to see that weight loss and vulnerability aren’t necessarily synonymous. England's a safe homely place, really, and monsters aren't going to leap out of the shadows at me just because I've lost a few stones! I've got to stop being a wuss about this!