🐷 Lipstick on a (Fat) Pig

The first thing you need to know is this: I’m fat.

I’ve been fat pretty much forever. And for the most part, I’m happy. I’m happy with my body. I’m happy with the clothes I wear. I’m happy with the food I eat.

I’m happy not knowing how much I weigh. I’m happy with the men I attract and I’m happy with the hookups I have and I’m happy with my love life.

I am fat, and I am happy. And when I’m not it’s because of society’s pervasive anti-fatness—not because of my body.

It might also help knowing that in 2023 I made a play about that, about how fat people are complex and messy and complete—as is. We called it Full Cream and it won some awards and a lot of fat people came and watched it and cried because not many people have ever seen fat people being happy on stage before. Because not many fat people have realised that they can be happy.

In making Full Cream we surveyed the Australian landscape of fat performance-makers making work about their bodies. And look folks, it’s dire. I wrote a bit about that for ArtsHub in 2023.

Since then, I saw skinny playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale staged last year, replete with fat suit and some sentimental platitudes in the program about the power of Hunter’s story. The below from director Jennifer Sarah Dean:

It’s a story of someone who is imperfect, racked with grief and guilt and yet he is striving for connection, redemption and a better future for his daughter. I love that this play isn’t afraid to explore some of the more challenging, complex and conflicting parts of us that are inherently human.

Got it. Fat folks are metaphors for skinny people to interrogate the worst of humanity with. Sounds great.

I bit my tongue when I saw that show because I thought whatever I might say about it wouldn’t achieve much. And besides, I’m tired.

To be honest, I’d rather move on than write some sardonic piece asking why no one in the below creative team thought that a fat suit in 2024 might be inappropriate.

But it’s 2025, and now I’m more tired of biting my tongue.

Let’s start with Neil LaBute, a playwright who I would describe as ‘fat’ or, as he describes himself in the preface of his play Fat Pig, a ‘stress-eater.’

I’ll be the first to admit that I hadn’t engaged with Fat Pig or any of LaBute’s other works before this week. Call it protecting my peace. I was aware of its existence, and I’ve had it sitting on my shelf since Fleur Kilpatrick gave away her copy. I suppose the title looked interesting and I thought one day it might come in handy.

A gift really, to finally crack it open and discover this omen waiting for me inside.

Fat Pig follows a character named Tom, he’s skinny, handsome, and well-to-do, and after a chance meeting with a fat woman named Helen he falls for her. (This makes sense, fat people are sexy.) Helen doesn’t really date though so this is all pretty new for her. (This doesn’t make sense, fat people are horny fucks).

Tom has these two fuckwit friends, Carter, and Jeannie. Fit. Sexy. Skinny. They’re spiteful little shits who can’t believe Tom would find someone fat sexy, let alone date them.

Tom has a beach picnic scheduled with his friends, and he’s not sure if he’s going to bring Helen. After all, he’s been bullied relentlessly the whole play for daring to fuck someone who’s fat.

It might also help to know that Jeannie is Tom’s ex. She’s just started Pilates, and she can’t believe what Tom is doing. She thinks it’s some Freudian thing; that he’s dating a fat woman to try and date his mom. Mostly I think she’s just cut up she was broken up with, but you love to see a diva try and spin her breakup with psychoanalysis.

The big day comes along and we’re off to the beach. Tom introduces Helen to Jeannie and Carter. And after some bullying from the pair of them (Jeannie taunts Helen by inviting her to play some beach games) they retreat deeper into the dunes.

While alone, Helen brings up some issues she’s noticing between them, begging him to choose to love her openly and generously. Immediately after this poorly written ultimatum filled with fat jokes—seriously, this script is defined by a litany of second-rate fat puns—LaBute has Helen say to Tom:

I'll do something radical to myself if you want me to.

Like be stapled or have some surgery or whatever it takes-one of those rings because I do not want this to end. I'm willing to do that, because of what you mean to me. The kind of, just, ecstasy that you've brought me. So ... I just wanted you to know that.

Famously, it takes one twink fucking a fat girl for her to want to self-mutilate on the altar of the scale. /s

After that, Tom basically realises that loving a fat person is not worth the fatphobia, even if she‘s just promised to change for him. So he tells her that he’d totally love her if they were on a desert island and no one was around. Then he declares himself to be a weak and fearful person and ends it with Helen.

So that’s that.

A lot of discourse around Fat Pig suggests that it’s a story critiquing beauty standards for obstructing people’s pursuit of joy and fulfilment. And look, there’s probably a way to read it as that: one in which everyone hates themselves, and each other, and society’s beauty standards are to blame. That definitely feels like a story worth telling because yea—society’s beauty standards do fuck with our capacity to live lives filled with joy and connection.

But I question LaBute’s decision to centre the story around Tom. Why should the protagonist of a story about fatphobia be a bloody twink for fuck sake? Fat people already don’t get our stories told, and now we’re telling them via proxy? Not on my watch.

Helen is deprived of agency and essentially just a foil for Tom, a plot device giving him a reason to be shamed. It’s fundamentally not a play about fatness or fat people—LaBute could have written a story about a man falling in love with any marginalised person and being shamed for it.

It’s not about who he loves, it’s about a weak-willed pathetic man unable to stand up for himself or his lover. It’s misanthropic and pessimistic bullshit which doesn’t add to discussions of masculinity or self-worth. That’s because all it says is something any marginalised person could tell you for free: most people suck and don’t like to change.

But thank god for Neil LaBute who spent 83 pages telling me of that. Just in case I forgot.

I should really stop being shocked by skinny people.

But, ever the optimist, I was surprised and mildly curious to see that fortyfivedownstairs had programmed an Opera adaptation of Fat Pig produced by Forest Collective and BK Opera.

I should’ve clocked something was amiss when the blurb refused to describe Helen as fat. Obviously she ‘happens to be plus-sized—and then some.’ Not fat. Never fat. Except when it’s used as an insult in the title of the work, or when all of the skinny characters spent the whole show disparaging Helen for it. Then it’s OK I guess?

I’ll say this of the production, it was staged well enough. The lighting and set design was strong, the vocal performances were powerful, and the music was pretty fun.

Amanda Windred who played Helen was marvellous, with an immaculate and haunting performance fighting for her character’s agency in a story which refuses it. She deserves all her flowers—and then some. It’s a genuine joy to see fat artists be given platforms to excel and I have to commend this team that at least they didn’t use a fat suit (the bare minimum).

I’ll also say this: my butt didn’t fit on the seat. That’s nothing new, nothing that hasn’t happened to me a hundred times before, but it points out in quite material terms who this show was made for. Because it certainly wasn’t for me or my fat ass, or anyone else with an even fatter ass. It doesn’t take much to lower your capacity and spread out your seats (I’ve done it before), but for whatever reason the creative team decided not to do that.

In the process of making this show it seems the team took a portion of the work to A Plus Market. A Plus Market is one of the most beautiful community events I’ve been to. It brings together a myriad of indie clothes labels, artists, and folks selling second hand for a joy-filled market full of clothes which actually fit me. It’s a beautiful event which stands as an embodied rejection of society’s anti-fatness.

So I have to wonder then, what was the production doing courting an audience of fat people whomst they made no effort to welcome in the venue? Why are our wallets important enough for you but our bodies aren’t? Was there genuinely no single person in the creative team who thought it was inappropriate to market to fat audiences while denying a single accomodation for our bodies or lived experiences?

It could read to you like I keep going on and on about seat width, but this is genuinely one of the most basic barriers keeping fat people from going to the theatre. Theatres are space which are literally built to exclude us, so of course we don’t go to them (yours truly, stubborn fatty I am, excluded). Activists and artists like Sofie Hagen are engaging in brilliant advocacy to ask theatres to consider how they can include and welcome fat people, and this production took on board none of it.

This isn’t optional when you’re asking fat folks to buy tickets. You’d never ask someone who uses a wheelchair to visit Explosives Factory (a venue only accessible via stairs) so why are you asking fat folk to squeeze into chairs which won’t fit us?

Furthermore, in the opera adaption Helen’s line about doing “something radical to [her]self” becomes a continuous repetition that she’ll let herself be “cut, stapled, or starved” for Tom. I can’t even begin to describe the horror of seeing a staunch fat character give up all of her self-worth for a scrap of affection from some skinny nothing.

This single moment, Helen’s biggest solo of the whole show, was re-traumatising after a life spent learning how to love myself. The content warnings on fortyfivedownstairs’ website only include “strong language, partial nudity and loud noise” which don’t even begin to capture the emotional impact of this moment.

Let’s see if we can figure out what might’ve happened.

I don’t want to draw a line in the sand and say “you’re fat,” and “you’re not.” But looking at this team doesn’t make me feel represented. It doesn’t make me feel like care for fat people was prioritised in the making of the work. It doesn’t make me feel like what I saw on stage was what a fat person wanted me to see. It doesn’t make me feel like anyone on the team wanted fat people to see this show, let alone enjoy it.

Why do skinny people keep wanting to tell our stories anyways? What’s the saying? Nothing about us, without us.

I feel so cynical writing this, especially in the face of the earnest social media campaign from the team to highlight why Fat Pig is so relevant today. And they’re right, we need stories addressing society’s rampant anti-fatness urgently. I’m terrified about what the rise of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic mean for bodies like mine, for people who love themselves and don’t want to change. I don’t want to be the only fat person left in the world.

But this story isn’t the one doing that work. The show’s marketing copy contorts a nihilistic and paternalistic critique of body-image into a ‘vital play confronting society’s anti-fatness.’ You’d be forgiven for looking at any of these posts and thinking the show’s about Helen—but it’s not her story, as much as I would have preferred it to be.

I mean just watch the goddamn show… Helen only appears on stage when there’s food to eat or a man to fuck her. What sort of story is that?

I am tired.

I am tired of skinny theatre makers staging work about fatness.

I am tired of my body being reduced to metaphor and symbol and dramatic device.

I am tired of your anti-fatness being my problem.

I am tired of biting my tongue and I am tired of being forced to say something.

I am tired of being deprived of joy in the stories I see about my body.

I am tired of not seeing any fat people in your creative teams.

I am tired of being told what my body is and what it means by people who don’t look like me.

I am tired of fat suits and fat jokes and the way you tiptoe around saying the word fat, I am tired of being plus-sized and big-bodied and being forced to fit into your endless euphemisms.

I am tired of your fear of being fat, I am tired of your fear of my fat.

And frankly, I’m goddamn tired of not fitting in your fucking seats.

Nothing about us, without us.