More Louie & Fat Girls

[Content Note: Misogynist fat hatred; appropriation.]

Yesterday, after I wrote about the widely-discussed scene in the latest episode of Louie about fat (straight) women and dating, I've had a number of conversations on Twitter and elsewhere about the scene.

And one of the ideas that keeps coming up over and over is that Louis CK "started a conversation" about fat women, or is "listening" to fat women.

No. Nope. No.

And even fat women who loved the scene should be deeply concerned about this framing.

If you say with a straight face that Louis CK "started the conversation" about fat women, it just means you've never listened to fat women.

And if you place a lot of value on what Louis CK had to say about fat women, you need to ask why you didn't value it when fat women said it.

Why do these words and these ideas suddenly matter to you only now, once they have been written by a man?

If that makes you uncomfortable, it should. IT SHOULD.

And here's the thing about listening: Listening isn't co-opting fat women's lived experiences. Listening isn't appropriating conversations that fat women have been having, publicly, for years. Listening isn't simultaneously exploiting our voices and silencing them.

One of the most absurd and insulting and flatly wrong things I've read is that Louis CK is giving fat women a voice. FUCK THAT. I had a voice before Louis CK wrote some words about (some) men's feelings about fat women and put them in a fat woman's mouth on his TV show. He didn't give me a voice.

That is the reprehensible assertion of people who couldn't be bothered to listen when it was fat women speaking for ourselves.