energy; it leads to ridicule and abuse and prejudice, for beauty standards have always depended on scarcity and difficulty. In poor societies, fat is in; among rich people, thin is in—so that U.S. women who can afford to dine grandly brag instead that they've learned to starve themselves. Ms. Mentor has heard that some women actually interrupt delicious dinner parties to denounce their own thighs.
And now universities, seemingly in cahoots with the sadistic designers of airline seats, have added a new torture. The latest brand of classroom furniture installed at, among other places, the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, features seats that are only fourteen inches wide. The distance between the seats and their attached writing surfaces is so small that pregnant women and male athletes literally cannot fit inside the desks they're supposed to sit in.
(For further information about the madness of thin people, Ms. Mentor directs her readers to a marvelously funny ‘zine called Fat? So! available for $12/year from Fat! So?, P.O. Box 423464, San Francisco, CA 94142. NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, can be reached at 1-800-442-1214, and they can share some surprising facts—not myths. Ms. Mentor also recommends the classic book Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, and a new encourager: Cheri K. Erdman's Nothing to Lose: a Guide to Sane Living in a Larger Body.)
But all this does not answer your real question: Can a woman of substance be an academic?
To which Ms. Mentor responds: Yes, but you must be sly and choose your battles. Usually it is not worthwhile to try to educate the scrawny self-punishers about the uselessness of dieting: that will just frustrate you. You can leave around Fat? So! and NAAFA leaflets; you can give them to your adviser, if you think she's open to seeing fatophobia as a form of bigotry. If not, shrug and try to be amiable: you still need her approval.
You can also make yourself feel better by bedeviling and misleading the fatophobes around you:
• If you have a boyfriend—most fat women do, since men like a lot of woman to hug—flaunt him.
• Now and then, wear darker clothes: the skinnies will be bamboozled into thinking you've lost weight. Loose-fitting dresses rather than pants will also confound them: they can't easily see and judge your body. (A tip: under skirts, you can wear divided slips for comfort.)
• Silence patronizers (“You'd be so pretty if you'd just lose weight”) by claiming you're on a slow, medically approved diet. They don't have to know that your basic four food groups are whatever you like best—such as chili corn dogs, sour cream and onion-flavored potato chips, Godiva Chocolates, and Budweiser.
• Tell the skinnies that you're “part bulimic.” (You know which part: you like to binge, but you never purge.)
• Use the sterotypical role of Fat Woman as Everyone's Jolly Pal to get inside information. People will tell you secret stuff you need to know—not only gossip, but who really runs the show in your academic department. That's enormously useful.
Ms. Mentor also recommends finding a self-loving Women of Size support and exercise group: they'll be women to eat and laugh with. Call whichever local hospitals are touting the so-called ills of menopause: they'll be looking for ways to hook women. And use the Net for support and discussion groups.
Meanwhile, in grad school, Ms. Mentor recommends that you work most on your writing. If you write well, with lively and interesting prose, you can get to the point where no one knows or cares what you look like. The great women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was fat, and deliberately so; Gertrude Stein was monumental; Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds and other books, strides around and collects her millions in a muumuu.
Ms. Mentor cannot guarantee that all this will cure fatophobia and get you academic success, but she does know that activity is always better than brooding—just as eating is always better than starving. Toffee beats tofu.
And eventually, as Americans grow older and simply can't have tiny bodies, women of substance may be seen as a wise avant-garde. Ms. Mentor likes to imagine an alternative world in which anytime a woman starts to worry about calories or eating, she tells herself, “Eating well is a contribution to women's well-being and therefore to worldwide feminist revolution and the betterment of all.” Then she chows down, with relish, on those chocolate chip cookies and gooey fried cheese nachos and mile-high ice cream pies.
Imagine a world of happy, well-fed, self-loving, intellectually alert women instead of the bulimic, the cranky, the anorexic, or the walking-dead-from-dieting.
That would truly be revolutionary.
Dissertation Dilemma
Q: I'm choosing a dissertation topic, in literature. What should I keep in mind to be marketable?
A: Ms. Mentor is reluctant to contribute to her own growing reputation for fogeyism, for possessing antiquated ideas. Yet she cannot divest herself of the belief that pursuing one's own intellectual interests is the only valid reason to be in graduate school. And so, in her well-mannered way, Ms. Mentor periodically rails and sputters at the idea that dissertation writers must put “marketability” first.
Ms. Mentor hereby declares: Academia does not pay well enough for people to sell their souls in that way.
She further advises that before choosing any topic, you should undertake a serious self-study. Now, Ms. Mentor is not recommending therapy (or gynecology). Rather, she means for you to start a diary, write letters to yourself, and initiate thoughtful chats with nonacademic friends and family, in order to ask yourself truly:
WHAT DO I WANT FROM ACADEMIA?
Some possible answers:
• To follow my intellectual interests.
• To do new research about women, or people of color, or lesbian writers.
• To get a job with a clear structure of deadlines, rewards, and punishments.
• To continue the life that gives me ego boosts, since I've always been good at schoolwork.
• To make a good living as a professor.
The last is the worst reason, as the job crunch deepens and salaries fall even further behind those of other professionals. Many university faculties are now more than half part-timers, underpaid and without benefits. Some community colleges in the Northeast now consider a typical teaching load for a “part-time adjunct instructor” to be three courses per semester, $1500 per course, no benefits, no chance for tenure or promotion. (This information is available in the Chronicle of Higher Education.) Older professors are not dying or retiring at the expected rate, and when they are, they are often not being replaced at all.
You need better reasons to stay in school. For some students, familiar routines are powerful pulls: they need deadlines and grades, carrots and sticks. Overwhelmingly busy with reading, students too rarely ask, “What for?” (beyond the fact that it's assigned). Few grad students will dare say, “This is boring.” As Leslie Fiedler pointed out a generation ago, academic types generally have a huge tolerance for boredom and an equally enormous fear of risk. The real world is scary. Stay in school and do your homework.
(In reality, there are many highly structured 9-to-5 jobs, such as technical writing, that pay better than academia does. They don't require homework, and technical writers also don't risk being publicly heckled by teenagers.)
Further,
