I took a Zumba class tonight that had a lot of latin hip movement. After class one of the women came up to me and said that I was a “great dancer” but that she thought I should “tone down the hip movement” because it “just looks dirty on someone your size…it’s not your fault…I mean, no offense…” she trailed off, I assume because I was looking at her like she was out of her damn mind.

Okie dokie. First of all, I don’t know why people say these things to me. I was wearing a shirt with a picture of Kung Fu Panda that says “I’m not a big fat panda. I’m THE big fat panda” so you would think that she might have caught the Fat Pride wave but I guess not.

I got some control over my facial expression and decided to try responding with a series of questions in the faint hopes that she would lead herself to some kind of revelation: “Why do you think you feel that way?”

“Um, I guess it’s because you have so much more body – it just looks more…decadent… when you do it. Obviously you have great technique.”

“And you feel that’s a bad thing?|

“It makes me uncomfortable”

“And you feel that the solution is to tell me that I should move my own body based on what makes you comfortable?”

“I don’t know what else to do”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Sure”

“You could try looking at your own biases and prejudices about people of size. Would you have said that same thing to a dancer about her skin color?”

“Oh, I honestly hadn’t thought of that. Oh my gosh, I’m …holy cow I was totally out of line – I’m so sorry. Thank you for talking with me about this.”

I love it when a plan comes together. (I also love it when somebody says “holy cow”, I don’t know why.) Seriously, I’m really happy that I could help her through that and that she was willing to be open to rethinking her strategy. But it brings up an issue that I still sometimes have as a fat dancer.

I typically dance “kinesthetically”- When I watch someone do a move, I feel how it feels to do it in my body and then my body can reproduce it without much trouble. That’s all well and good but my coach Rowdy will back me up that this does not work for me in Waltz or West Coast Swing. For whatever reason, I just don’t “feel” those dances. This created a problem because, not matter what I did I never looked like other dancers. I would work on something, then look at the mirror or video and it wouldn’t “look right”. My attempts to look like other people’s bodies lead me far away from proper technique.

I realized the problem one day when my friend, the brilliant plus sized model/actress/life stylist CJ Legare, was talking about the difficulty of making clothes for fat people because of the varied three dimensionality of our bodies. In other words, our bodies are so differently shaped from each other and from the way that thin people’s bodies are shaped that it’s much more difficult to make clothes for us. Eureka! That was the problem with my dancing. I almost exclusively see dancers who are thin and so I’ve become conditioned to think that what looks “right” is however a thin body looks.

The bad news is that the is really prevalent, and that some jackasses try to make themselves feel better by making fun of the way fat people look when we move. (Because they are so very concerned with our health that they discourage us from moving our bodies. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense….)

The good news is that just because that’s the way it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it will always be. And those of us who enjoy movement and athletics have the power to start changing it. One of the super coolest parts of my trip to San Francisco (and there were many super cool parts) was attending a rehearsal of Big Moves Bay Area. They were so incredibly welcoming to me and their rehearsal was a lot of fun and hard work (Kick Army!!!) It struck me as we leaped, transitioned to the floor, spun and kicked, that dancing looked amazing on us. We didn’t need to look like thin people to be dancers, we are dancers and so the way that we look is perfect. Dance has always been about evolution, and we fat dancers are evolving it in our own awesome way.

I think that can be the case for lots of types of movement. Most of the people we see moving are thin but that’s just what’s happening – not what has to happen in the future. Not only is it rarely about “looking right”, but in truth “looking right” is different for us than what we are used to seeing, so we get to create that for ourselves. And this is one of those awesome times that we can change things just by doing what we love to do. The more fat runners, cyclists, mountain climbers, dancers, soccer players, Zumba participants etc. there are, the more we get to see what movement looks like on a fat body. Hell we may even *gasp* normalize fat athleticism and how awesome would that be?!

And if people have something negative to say about that then let’s marvel at the fact that they can still be heard with their heads so very far up their asses and hope that they get that colorectal head extraction for Christmas this year, then go about the business of being us and changing the world.