Dan Savage

Dan Savage is both a formative editor in Lindy West’s career and the target of her most consequential workplace confrontation. His talent for satire and forceful argument made him influential, but also gave his repeated writing about fatness a reach and sting that private criticism alone could not undo. West’s account follows the tension between his professed editorial values and the harm she experienced, then records a gradual change in his public conduct without claiming to know exactly what caused it.

Editorial Role and Influence

By the time West joined The Stranger’s staff full-time, Savage had moved from editor in chief to editorial director and was not regularly present in the office. His influence nevertheless shaped its culture. He convened meetings every few weeks, sometimes disappeared on long trips, and could reappear with a pointed editorial direction for a story that had stalled. The office also had a rule of thumb for interpreting his silence: staff were doing well if he had nothing to say about their work. That atmosphere combined considerable editorial freedom with the knowledge that Savage could intervene decisively.

West credits The Stranger with teaching her to write and help run a newspaper, and describes its editorial culture as one of risk-taking, political engagement, and irreverence. Savage was central to that culture, even in absentia. His instinct for satire—knowing where to aim and how to make a point land—was, in her assessment, exceptional. It helped make him a prominent pundit, but the same confidence could turn into defensiveness when people challenged him. West presents his influence, then, as double-edged: he taught writers to confront what they saw as wrong, while sometimes resisting that same confrontation himself.

Public Writing About Fatness

In the mid-to-late 2000s, Savage repeatedly wrote about the so-called obesity epidemic, amid a broader public campaign that framed fat people as a social burden and treated concern for their health as justification for stigma. West was beginning to question her own internalized assumptions about fatness; Savage’s writing made that process harder because he was not a distant commentator but her boss, colleague, and friend. She did not believe that he personally hated her. She had worked well with him, and at times received his direct praise. The contradiction was that his published arguments continued to describe fat people in ways that implicated her and other readers at the newspaper.

A 2004 column criticized women, particularly fat women, for wearing low-rise jeans and dismissed concerns that stigmatizing language could contribute to eating disorders. Savage argued that public attention should instead focus on obesity-related illness. West understood the public-health framing as part of the problem: it treated disputed claims about weight and health as settled, while making ridicule seem permissible so long as it was presented as concern. She contrasts that approach with an account of health risks shaped by broader conditions, including poverty, food access, and the healthcare system. Her objection was not that Savage had invented a hostile climate, but that his influential writing reinforced it.

Savage also used the idea of banning fat marriage to expose what he saw as the faulty logic behind arguments against same-sex marriage. In that post, he invoked Iowa figures—more than 1.4 million people classified as obese, nearly 30 percent of the state’s population—and associated fatness with social costs and shorter life expectancy. West could follow the satirical argument: if an alleged difference in life expectancy justified banning same-sex marriage, the same reasoning could be extended to fat people. But she found the comparison dehumanizing and medically reductive, especially given the history of arguments that fat people should not have families. Because Savage had already written about fatness in ways she experienced as dismissive, she objected to his using her struggle as a provocative analogy.

Private Confrontation and Public Dispute

In November 2009, West wrote to Savage privately. Looking back years later, she realized her memory had softened the exchange: she had remembered herself as timid and pleading, but the email was pointed and angry. She challenged the imagined group of fat people supposedly claiming that eating indulgently was healthy, called his argument a straw man, and told him that the case against fat people had already been made repeatedly. She also explained a specific consequence of his writing: online commenters were using his views to taunt her about her body and to suggest that her employer regarded her with contempt. Her request was that she not have to endure that treatment from within her own workplace.

Savage’s first reply was brief. Rather than directly addressing the broader effect of his writing, he asked whether West had detected personal animus from him. She said she had not, clarifying that this was not her point. He said he had heard her, but the exchange did not lead to an office conversation or a discernible pause in his writing about fatness. West later recalled trying several approaches—being good at her job, speaking privately, describing the harm, and making a brief public criticism—and seeing none of them change the pattern.

On February 11, 2011, she published Hello, I Am Fat, a public essay accompanied by a full-body photograph taken that day by The Stranger’s staff photographer. Its caption stated her age, height, and weight. West had rarely used the word fat as a self-description, and had not previously claimed it publicly without shame. Publishing the essay marked a deliberate change: rather than waiting for Savage to understand her through private appeals, she made her experience and her objection public.

Savage responded the following Monday with a 2,931-word post. He accused West of personal attacks and framed her criticism as a projection of her own internal conflict. His response also reproduced and endorsed disparaging comments from readers. The length and tone sharpened the conflict between their professional roles: West had written about the impact of her boss’s public rhetoric, and his answer treated that criticism as evidence of her personal instability rather than engaging with its central claim.

Change and Significance

West says she did not want an apology so much as a difference in behavior. When she revisited Savage’s response years later, she found it strikingly dated. By 2016, she saw him writing about fat people differently: seeking input from fat people, sometimes including West, when asked about body image, and declining to use fat people as an easy punch line. She does not claim certainty that her essay caused this change. Instead, she records the change itself and praises Savage for making it, even after responding defensively to criticism.

The account places his shift within a broader cultural change. West contrasts the vicious anti-fat rhetoric of the late 2000s and early 2010s with a growing recognition that people should not be spoken about in dehumanizing terms. Her portrait of Savage therefore holds two facts together: his writing helped reproduce a culture that harmed her, and he later altered how he wrote. The significance lies in that unresolved but consequential movement—from influence exercised without sufficient attention to its costs, through confrontation, toward a more responsible use of that influence.