Stuffies

My reactions to the Village Voice article on Fat Admirers:

Photo from the article in question, “Guys Who Who Like Fat Chicks”.

A lot of my immediate thoughts on this article have been better articulated already. It’s actually less horrible than many (usually self-published) articles about fat admiration that I’ve seen. (This inflammatory example made the rounds of Tumblr a while back). Still, activists of almost any stripe can find a pull quote to be particularly annoyed at in this article. All the old tropes about female beauty are still there: she has to be a pretty blonde fat girl with nice skin. Wearing a mumu when decent plus size clothing is still very hard to find is “giving up on life”.

This is the whole “one step forward, ten steps back” approach I’ve seen over and over while surfing crappy FA and feederism websites. It frustrates me because the fact that we exist challenges ideals of beauty and common truisms about attraction, but for now these communities seem pretty well insulated against any exposure to fat acceptance, sex positivity, or the wider world of attraction.

Of course, my particular beef with the article has to do with their use of the word “fetish”:

“Misconception #1: Loving fat women is a fetish.
“’Steve, over there, has a type,’ says Lawrence gesturing wanly at a stranger in a hockey jersey probably not named Steve. ‘I have a type, too. Mine’s just bigger. He may like skinny blondes with bangs and long legs. I like pear shapes with brown hair and green eyes. I have a type—it just happens to be fat.’ Besides, people aren’t fetish objects, they’re people. ‘It’s not like having a thing for leather.’”

I’ve seen this variations of this quote a lot of places, from BBW chatrooms to comments sections on fat acceptance blogs. What I hear is: “I don’t have a fetish, because fetishes are bad/creepy/weird/gross”, or “Having a fetish means you’re incapable of caring about people.”  I find this particularly ironic since many Fat Admirers have taken on the nomenclature of the LGBT community, which would argue that this goes far deeper than a “preference” or a “type”.

This in itself can be seen as problematic: Leslie Kinsel commented that this is “some straight-up co-opting of GLBT activism”, and I’d agree that a straight white FA dude doesn’t face anything like the amount of discrimination that a genderqueer person does on a daily basis. But I’d also be hard-pressed to find another cultural model based on an immutable attraction that often seems to be inborn and is resistant to change even when you’ve had the dominant culture’s beauty standards blaring in your ear since birth.

This lack of distinction between fetish/partialism/preference/type is so common that I’ve gotten the impression that no one—neither the onlookers, nor those in the FA and Feederism communities themselves—really knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the wide variety desires can take. Most of the studies I see circulated are junk science (“Chubby guys last longer!”), or that massive Internet study which has since proved to be crap. A lot of people simply shrug and say “I don’t know why I like X”, or quote Freud. Having read some Freud I’d say he has some good points, but he also died in 1939. Certainly there’s been some advances since then?

Unfortunately, all I have to offer right now is anecdote. I can blog about how my experiences have changed the way I view attraction from lust vs. love to a sliding scale of “I come from many things” to “I can only come to one thing” and how that may or may not affect your relationships with other people, but that’s not nearly enough to illuminate all the questions I have about desire. It’s probably time I went out and found these studies myself.