Plus Sizes Disappear - The End Of Fictional Reality And The Demise Of Identity Culture

Letty Marshall was a 'plump' girl.  That was how her parents always referred to her even as she burst even sizes three grades too big for her.  

The girl had an insatiable appetite.  'Growing girls need food', was how her father kindly observed as his daughter put away enough food for an army base.  There was no end to requests for more, no matter what was served. She was insatiably omnivorous. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, salads, and deserts were all the same to her.  She was simply unstoppable at the dinner table. 

She raided the refrigerator, kept bags of Pecan Sandies and Oreo cookies under her bed at night, drained carton after carton of chocolate milk at school lunch, and begged and cadged the Salvadoran ladies behind the lunch counter for seconds and thirds. 

Most parents are used to buying new clothes for the children as they outgrow the old; but in Letty's case, the Visa bill was extraordinary.  She ballooned into a caricature of Michelin Man before she was ten, nd adolescent hunger only accelerated her weight. 

 

Fortunately for her, she grew obese at a time when fat-shaming was a no-no and inclusivity was in. Plus size women were no different than anyone else, said progressive advocates, and should be treated with the same love and respect.  Stores like Lululemon were outed for discriminatory sales practices when they limited their selections to Size 12 - 'a normal size for normal young women', said then CEO Charlton French who was summarily dismissed by the company's board.  Plus sizes returned to the racks.  

Lululemon didn't want fat girls ruining their svelte, youthful image. They put the plus size racks near the rest rooms and broom closets and wished they could somehow engineer a special entrance for them.  Image is everything in sales and marketing, and Lululemon resented the social pressures that were trying to force them into a market miasma they had fought years to avoid.  

'We are not for everyone', the Marketing Director announced when the company policy reverted to 'normal' and the fat racks were removed.  He might well have said, 'Fat people not welcome, they ruin the brand'. 

Meanwhile, in a tribute to diversity, Letty Marshall was elected Prom Queen at Lincoln Roberts High. She waddled up the stairs to the podium to give an address to the student body and then climbed down to dance with her partner, Prom King Randall Owens, captain of the football team, dreamboat, voted the most desirable boy on campus.  

Randall knew it was a set up.  He and his girlfriend, the svelte, Hollywood-ready darling of the school, voted most likely to succeed, most likely in the movies, laughed at the proposition.  He, this gorgeous hunk of manhood dancing with a preposterously grotesque Jabba the Hut caricature because the principal, proudly out of the closet, all dykey with butch haircut, suit, tie, and cordovans, a caricature of all lesbian women, wanted to show her true colors and the flag. 

Students were not supposed to notice either the obesity of Letty Marshall or the Bernal Heights tough girl persona of Ms. Weldon, the Principal.  They were instructed to treat everyone as equals, accept their differences as part of the human condition but never the laughable circus performer ridicule to which they would have been subjected in a less tolerant, obtusely ignorant period. 

The school gym was overheated - despite May weather outside, the heat pumps had not been shut down - and Letty because of her size always the first to perspire with even modest effort, sweated like a pig, drenching her prom dress and leaking onto the rented tux of the Prom King.  

The scene wasn't exactly like the prom scene of the horror movie Carrie where the prom queen is set up by a group of catty girls, has pigs' blood dumped on her from the rafters, and then in horror and with violent anger uses her supernatural powers to set the gym on fire and incinerate everyone. However it was on everyone's mind as the chosen couple danced around the floor to the enforced silence of the crowd. 

Then the dam burst and the students couldn't take it any more.  They had been so corralled, trussed, harnessed, and intimidated by school administrators anxious to present the school as the most evolved and progressive of the district, that it was inevitable that there had to be a tipping point.  A shout came from the back row, something about Burger Queen and Big Whopper, then echoed again and again up and down the assembly.  Before the principal was able to restore order, the place was like a bear pit. 

You really can't blame the students.  After all day after day they were told to see things that just weren't there.  The school valedictorian was a dummy from the inner city, transferred to this predominantly white school to make it more diverse.  In his graduation speech, dressed in a dashiki, Rasta braids down his back, a stand out for nothing except his origins, he babbled something about the Mississippi River, Gone with the Wind, and the white oppressor.  Assuming loud and prolong applause, he continued to stand at the podium until the principal gave him the hook. 

The president of the class was a gummy 'little person' perhaps the least likeable of any of the hundred or more students, a pissy little runt who pushed and wheedled himself to the front of the cafeteria line. 

Teachers whaled away during each and every class about diversity, equity, and inclusion, banging on about Engel's work on 'Classless Equality' and the plight of the black man.  Even French I had its go at diversity. In textbooks the Cafe des Deux Magots, the Latin Quarter hangout for Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, now had Algerians and Nigerians sipping wine at the front tables. 

In other words the school had it coming.  What were they to expect?  A herd of complaisant, obedient sheep?  What was adolescence if it wasn't objection, defiance, and individual expression.  The school with their incessant reminders to respect diversity, their sensitivity seminars, and their public admonishments to hew the progressive line should have seen the prom event coming. 

Poor Letty Marshall.  She was the victim in all this. She was too dimwitted to realize she was being used as a pawn in someone else's game.  She was just as manipulated, used, and abused as the affirmative action students who don't belong in competitive circles, and who are seen for the undereducated and less intelligent social props they are.  

If people were simply left to rise and fall in the same Darwinian epic that has described human and animal society since the first signs of earthly life, everyone would be far better off.  Honesty is the best policy and when fiction is foisted off as fact, the wheels are soon to come off the bus. 

When the diversity dust settled and it no longer had the foothold in American society it once did, Letty Marshal went on a diet, and thanks to Ozempic, lost an elephant weight.  She was much healthier and much happier, especially because she could now fit into those cute Lululemon jumpers.