![]() Both write about how sexual trauma can lead someone living in a fat black body to believe they are neither entitled to caring touch, nor to making the first move towards a lover, nor to deserving intimacy at all. ![]() ![]() Both write about how body dysmorphia is not just the domain of thin white women (Gay by recounting purging and vomiting Laymon by detailing his excessive exercise and dehydration routines). ![]() I intimidate,” Gay writes in "Hunger," both lamenting how she wants to “go unnoticed” because she is so visible and so openly watched, while also refusing to “hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself.” But, even as she honestly reveals the pain she experiences in a big, black, bisexual body, Gay doesn’t name the feeling as a failure of self loathing she says, instead, “I hate how the world all too often responds to this body.”įrom her perspective as a black woman and his as a black man, Gay and Laymon both lay bare many of the similar (if distinctly gendered) struggles of being large, black and considered too smart for their own good. Opinion Being a black woman in America means realizing that doing everything right may not be enough ![]()
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