Nobody really knows how heavy I am, because I look good. I mean good. If only I could count the number of men who've turned their heads to see my butt as I walk by them. And they always have their arms around the waist of some waif-like, bony woman. Obviously, she's their item to display. On the other hand, I'm their fantasy (or so it seems).

Long ago I turned away from reading women's magazines. As teenagers, girls find them everywhere, but I couldn't look at them for long. Their pages were filled with dying girls who had hollows beneath their collar bones (you have to be damn skinny to have hollows under your collar bones!). I only saw the desperation in the models' eyes, not the clothes, the hair, the lipstick, or the advertiser's name. "Somebody take that girl out to lunch!" I'd think. "A whole pizza just for her. And no running to the bathroom to barf it up afterwards, either."

It's no accident that younger men often think I'm gross, while older men can't wait to get my phone number. The young guys--twenty-somethings cultivating hip personas defined by what they've seen on MTV or in magazines--can't let themselves be seen with a woman who weighs more than 90 pounds. And if she's a tiny bit exotic--part-Asian, one-eighth Black, sorta Hispanic, a redhead, whatever--so much the better. They crack me up. Image is nothing. It takes men who've lived some, been through hell and back with a skinny, obsessive woman, been married and divorced and married and divorced again, tried in vain to carry on a conversation with a woman who can't think about anything else but how little she just ate and how long it's going to be till dinner, to know just what I'm saying. And what I'm saying is: my fat is what's good about me.

Here's where you think I'm gonna talk about how "grateful" fat women are when they meet a man who treats them nice. You're expecting me to say: "My, how thankful we are! How well we obey when men show us fat girls a little attention!" Well, forget it. When you get a hug from me, it's 'cause I'm doing you a favor. You never had a hug like that from a barbie doll.

Would you believe--and this is deeply shocking to me--that there are women out there who mutilate themselves to get rid of what's best about them? There's a whole industry that thrives on that self-hatred. I try to get my mind around the idea, but it's hard. Even the word that describes it is difficult to say: liposuction. "Liposuction," I whisper, and it gags me, turns on my lips, and bores down my throat like a stomach tube. I first found out about it from reading a story, and I'd like to tell you that story.

A 47-year old woman in the prime of her life decides that she hates her fat, her face, her wrinkles--everything that gives her a little character. Maybe her husband hates those things about her, too. Perhaps her friends were all on diets. Or she just wanted to look like the teen models with hollow cheeks and knobby knees. So she went to a plastic surgeon.

This surgeon gave her a special deal: she could have more surgery for less cost if she got it all done at once. Sort of like the full-meal deal. She paid down $20,025 and here's what she got: one full-face laser procedure, one endoscopic browlift, one minifacelift, and liposuction--ow! that word!--liposuction on her abdomen, thighs, hips, arms, back, calves, and knees ... and then some of that fat got re-implanted into her buttocks.

She had what doctors call "megaliposuction," a procedure that involves scraping as much as 10-20 pounds of fat tissue from under her skin. To get that much fat, the plastic surgeon had to flood her tissues with a "tumescent solution" that contains lidocaine and epinephrine to lessen pain and bleeding. So she got a whole lot of potentially dangerous drugs, too.

But that's not the end of the story. She got a lot more than that. After being asleep on the table for 10-1/2 hours, her blood pressure dropped drastically, her pupils dilated, and her surgeon panicked and called an ambulance to take her to a real hospital. After two hours of CPR, several defibrillations (electric shocks), and open-chest heart massage, she was finally pronounced dead from cardiac arrest caused by shock and blood loss. You see, she also lost her life ... and, of course, her plastic surgeon lost his license.

Does anybody but me care that she died for nothing? That she tried to erase big pieces of herself, and thereby erased herself forever? If anyone had really loved her, they should have loved her fat, too--just like I do.

March is Women's History Month. Take the opportunity to honor a woman in your life who's not ashamed of her own history--and lets it show on her body.