Skip navigation! I always wear headphones when I leave my house. I like music more than I like people. My anxiety sometimes means that a lot of noises β say from traffic and people and music from shops β stress me out to a certain extent. But more importantly, I get shouted at in the street. It does not happen every day. But it does happen. Enough that I feel safer with my headphones on. I stay away from nightclubs. Again, I am not a fan of people or loud, fast music.
It is not a big sacrifice that I have made, cutting out nightclubs. Even if I were not fat, I probably would have stayed away from them. But I had a period of trying to fit in when I went to them quite a bit. Maybe I could trick more people. Allow me to introduce to you the normalisation of the abuse and violence against fat people in the form of 'fun party games'. Two examples of these are 'pull a pig' where a group of guys compete to 'pull the ugliest-looking woman' to win the game and 'fat girl rodeo' when a guy pulls a fat girl in a club, whispers this in her ear to let her know, and then holds on to her tight, like a 'rodeo', as she tries to get away.
And I know plenty of people who have been victims of these 'games'. When I was twenty years old, I kissed a boy in a nightclub. A few seconds into the kiss, I heard the sound of a group of guys laughing. The guy kissing me started laughing too. I was so embarrassed that I kept kissing him because I thought that it would make it worse if he realised that I knew what was happening.
Only a couple of weeks later, I chatted to a dreadful guy in a bar. I was bored because my friend was dancing and this guy seemed more interesting than staring into a wall.
It turned out that the wall would have been a bundle of joy compared to him. Ew, gross,' and then he left. The loud music in the bar made it impossible for him to hear what I shouted at him as he was walking away. I think that might be why people like him enjoy nightclubs. The loud music makes it impossible for them to ever be called 'cunts' to their faces. I have rejected guys who gasped, 'But you are fat! I have been chatted up at 2am by men who seemed close to crumbling under the pressure of needing to 'pull', and who had hoped that I would be grateful for their attention.
