To read these experiences consolidated in one place, written so clear-heartedly, is to understand the exhaustion of living in a body under surveillance. "Sometimes I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder." She writes of going to the doctor only if she really has to in order to spare herself the shaming of the indignities involved in air travel of the unsolicited evaluations from strangers. "I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days," she writes. Gay and the other authors were expected to climb up, despite the sheer inaccessibility of the expectation. Gay tells the story of giving a reading at the Housing Works bookstore in New York. In Roxane Gay's new memoir, Hunger, these intrusions happen every day, verbally or otherwise. The cartoon itself is not malicious, but the meaning is all too real: If your body is "the bad kind," others will tell you, even if – like that meddling avocado, its confused little grimace the proverbial facial gesture of condescending ungraciousness – they haven't been asked. Because the fat in human bodies is a stigma, or a punchline, or an asset, depending on whether it pleases or repulses the eye of the beholder.
One of them is crying and the other is chasing after it, apologetically pleading via speech bubble "I said you're the good kind of fat!" Because the fat in avocados is monounsaturated. Two anthropomorphic avocado halves are in a fight. A few weeks ago, I came across a cartoon that enraged me: