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.
Lawrence, who sometimes fantasizes about a 550-pound wife, thinks the smallest he could go would be 180 pounds, though that veers into bisizualism. “Ideally, no. But you’d want to meet the girl’s mother. If she’s in her early 20s, and she’s 180 pounds, check out where it’s going. You might be pleasantly surprised. You walk in, and see her [mom] and she’s like, really big, and you’re like, ‘YES!’ You’re stoked. The genes don’t lie.” But she shouldn’t be sloppy. “If the mom is in the muumuu, and just given up in life, you’re like, ‘Oh, shit.’ You don’t want that.
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This Village Voice article that everyone is talking about.
i don’t have the emotional energy to dissect this right now so imma just leave it right here.
(via riotsnotdiets)
I feel like I have a lot to say about the Village Voice article, but also that I’m not quite sure what to say. I’ve been plotting a series of articles for a while now on the stupid things fat admirers do and this article has its share of examples.
On the other hand, this article quotes me. Not that you’d know it because my turn of phrase has obviously been subsumed into the community’s collective lexicon. The comeback to the “You can’t do any better” with “I can’t. I just don’t mean it differently than you” is a line I’ve been saying for years and here its treated as communal property. Which feels weird to me. Like, if something I said about fat acceptance became a common catch phrase, I’d just be thrilled, but when fat admirers do it, I’m a bit annoyed. The thing is, I still identify primarily as a fat admirer in relation to fat acceptance, not as a fat person. I was, after all, a fat admirer before I was a fat person. But, I’ve been shunned and ostracized from fat admirer communities for most of the last 15 years. I’ve repeatedly been bullied and silenced for being a fat activist and a feminist in these communities, so seeing so much of what I was saying all along treated as an inherent part of the fat admirer identity feels very hallow to me.
I’d like to think change is happening among the fat admirer community, but after getting shouted down constantly for calling on my fellow fat admirers to treat fat people with respect… I don’t know. Like, where were these guys then? At the same time, I bothered by some of the same stupid BS being expressed. Like the beauty shaming in the above quote and elsewhere. And I know these are probably the same people (literally in some cases) who stood on the sidelines while I was driven off a site for confronting people who said celebrating fat beauty was a bad thing since it would make fat women feel less beholden to the attention of fat admirers.
I’m not making that up. That’s an actual argument I got into online about 12-13 years ago. Disagreeing with that line of thinking earned me such an aggressive backlash that I had to leave the site. It started a pattern of me walking away from sites only to come back a year or so later and even less willing to put up with that BS. Things got better, but whenever I would incur an especially hostile wrath, there were never any fellow fat admirers backing me up. Some fat people always did, but never a fellow fat admirer.
It disappoints me because I really love my sexuality and I would love to feel a part of a community for it. For me, being a fat admirer is my sexuality and I know I’m not the only one, but I always feel so alone. I can identify a host of structural reasons for this, but its just frustrating. Especially reading articles like this that make me wonder if I actually had a really big impact on pushing fat admirers this far. Maybe I made more of a difference than I gave myself credit for. In the last 15 years, the public persona of fat admirers sounds a lot more like me than it did even 10 years ago when I was just about the only person willing to say anything progressive or political. Then other things, like this quote, are part of the same exact script that was recited when I was first joining those communities. Clearly, a lot has changed, but it often throws into sharp relief the stuff that hasn’t changed at all.
Well, like I said, I feel like I have a lot to say. Just not sure any of it was meaningful or useful.
(via red3blog)
reblogging for awesome commentary. thank you!!!
(via riotsnotdiets)
“I’ve been plotting a series of articles for a while now on the stupid things fat admirers do and this article has its share of examples.”
Ha, same here. My personal favorite is when they whine about how they can’t find any “confident” girls on FA dating websites.
(via riotsnotdiets)