SINCE I've left college, a spectre has been haunting me.

"Alam mo, tumataba ka."
"You're fat."
"Have you been gaining a lot of weight lately?"

I've tried all the tactics available to me to retaliate against such insensitivity: smiling sweetly, playing deaf, or changing the subject, and deadpan sarcasm. Nothing works. Just a few days ago, I met a fellow aktibista. I haven't seen him in a couple of months, and of course he had to say the ugly words upon my arrival. "Would you like it," I told him as I looked at his thinning hair, "If I told you that you were balding every single day? Opps, there goes one hair! Opps, another!" He shrugged.

It doesn't matter if I can be spectacularly funny, generous, or intelligent. These qualities apparently are not enough for relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues. It doesn't matter if I have actually spent more time exercising this year than I ever had in my sedentary lifetime.

And it's not just my weight that people keep harping on, it's my entire physical appearance. Even with a couple of layers of make-up (which is too hot to wear in Manila), I still look like I'm fresh out of high school. This doesn't help in conducting conferences, interviews, or even trying to find a date.

The dormant feminist in me is outraged to be solely judged on my physical appearance, reduced to a fixed point which my abilities cannot help. There
was once a time in college I believed I was in a stage of post-feminism since gender issues were beginning to bore me, and I became more involved in other social and economic theories. Now that the definition of what my body is has been turned into a battleground by others who insist on designating me as too fat and/or too young, I have to retaliate, if only through intellectualism and concrete fact.

First, there is no scientific basis for the "too fat" angle. Depending on the scale I'm standing on (from the one in the doctor's office to those automated malls units) I weigh between 95 pounds to 100. At 4'10'' it is hardly what one can call obese, while admittedly it is a far cry from that time in elementary school when I weighed 50 pounds (perhaps the ideal body weight of Calista Flockhart). Then again, I also had the vital statistics of 23-23-23, and spent time in the hospital for malnutrition.

I feel pyschologically damaged from the perennial battering, and wonder how many other women and men feel the same way. It's not healthy for my self-esteem to be judged for something I cannot control without the help of cosmetic surgery. Even if I did have surgery done, what am I going to tell the doctor? "Suck out the fat on my thighs and implant them on my chest, and oh, by the way, can you add a couple of wrinkles so I don't look too young?" Aside from being wholly ridiculous, it's just a waste of my precious time and money.

I figure at this point the easiest way for me to please my critics is to be cremated because ash hardly weighs a thing, except that all the urns I've
seen are in really morbid colors and materials.

A night doesn't pass I don't throw off all my clothes and look in the mirror. I've accepted mostly what I see there: bits of cellulite, a head with abundant curly hair, some triceps that need firming up, hips that have widened for the possibility of child-bearing, a face with firm, childlike cheeks. I also see a person who can sashay her pelvis in time to Cuban music, enjoys a variety of hobbies, and has the perseverance for social work. I see, in short, a person who hasn't buckled down from the struggle of daily life given the conditions of our society.

If I sound defensive it's because I find myself pushed into a corner where I am not even allowed to define who I am. I try to accept myself in totality, but other people I know refuse any attempt.

In this world where people keep uttering cliches like, "Don't judge a book by its cover," they also like to rate relevance based on appearance and flash (Rico Yan's contributions merit a sainthood; who the hell is Levi Celerio?) and go around selecting leaders based on Photoshopped photos and smiles. It is frightening to consider that people also accept everything else -- religious beliefs, economic policies, political statements--at face value. They start rolling their eyes, saying I'm being hyper-sensitive or hysterical, whether I'm talking about my weight, the cultural merits/demerits of Harry Potter, Meralco price hikes, or the glossed-over human rights violations of the US-led war on terrorism.

So you say I'm fat. I say sweetly, in a muscuvado sugar-sweet whisper: you're stupid.

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Reitch is a freelance writer and editor and a volunteer for Kalikasan-People's Network for the Environment

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