rambling: on being fat
NOTE: Going into some sensitive topics on this one, predominantly in the realm of fatphobia, sexual topics and fetishes, abuse, self harm and suicide.
Ever since I was a kid, I was always fat. Among my half-dozen siblings and I, I'm the biggest by a wide margin - most of my siblings, save my younger sister who appears to be almost the textbook definition of 2000's runway model (of no fault of her own - predisposition for thinness from our father's side + high needs autism + sensory issue hell makes for a not fun combo) range from slim to pretty solidly midsized.
There was something my mom would say fairly frequently - she'd say that once I hit puberty, I'd look more like a "real woman" like her, with wide hips and tits and a narrower waist. Well, a solid decade later and I found her prediction to be pretty off: if I wear a sports bra and keep my hair short, people will mistaken me for a very short fat man. And I actually have been! Nowadays, that's a compliment for me as someone with more fluid interests in gender expression, but 12-year-old me was less than thrilled at the prospect of looking like a dude, and these affirmations ending up not exactly hitting that target dealt quite a bit of damage on me as a then-teen.
And those "uplifting" expressions from her were skin deep - she'd still attempt and fail to stick the myriad of diets she tried over the years, and would often try to force me into them as well. She frequently commented on her own weight, and on mine as well. She'd complain that finding clothes for me was difficult - I started wearing adult clothes by the time I was around 11 or 12, getting clothes from the same stores my mom did - typically Goodwill, though sometimes Lands’ End or Fashion Bug if my mom felt like being a little more spendy. Being in middle of nowhere, Ohio, we obviously weren't the most fashion forward folks, but dressing like my 60 y.o. teachers wasn't exactly the most supporting for my self esteem either.
At around the time of my early teens, there was still definitely an emphasis on being skinny, but the concept of "curvy" started to appear - being fat, but being the right kind of fat, where you had big titties and a fat ass and a curvaceous hourglass figure (or at the very least, always having a bigger hip than waist) and not being too fat lest you teeter into "ugly hog" territory - a similar idea to the one my mom would insist I'd transform into a few years after I started bleeding profusely outta the pussy.
But seeing that I wasn't developing like my mom said I would, teen me was led to believe that I was somehow born wrong. Like, I liked being a girl, and I wanted to be a girl, but I wasn't a "real girl", so to speak. A "real girl" would've been a sexy curvy babe by now. Why are my hips so narrow? Why are my boobs so small, and why is one so much smaller than the other? I developed this almost vitriolic hatred for my midsection especially - because "real girls" didn't have big fat guts, as far as my teen self could tell.
While I wouldn't consider my body dysmorphia to be the sole purpose for my suicidal ideation in my teens, it was a large part of it. I believed that I was born as a mistake, and that mistakes shouldn't exist. Therefore, I shouldn't exist. I was public enemy number 1 to myself, for simply being what I was.
At my lowest points, I would have these reoccurring dreams of taking a knife or even my own nails to the "undesirable" parts of my body and carving or ripping it out, and stitching myself back together. They were horrible, bloody, visceral. I could see the lumps of fat drenched in my own blood in my hands, I could taste the overwhelming copper in my mouth. And in the mirror in my bedroom, I'd finally see myself as the "real girl" I was "meant" to be. And I'd always cry myself awake, still in my "not real girl" body.
That's fucked, man.
To contrast in an almost backwards kinda way: I've always had this almost exclusive interest for people like me, fat people - it's my type, I guess. I've had struggles with it, even long after after recognizing and coming to terms with my bisexuality. Cause like, there's this persistent belief that fat people aren't real people, merely people-in-progress waiting for or trying to force that glow up where they "finally slim down" to happen. You're not supposed to be into fat people. Because fat people are gross. Being fat is bad. You're not allowed to like it. And because it's a taboo sort of thing, it obviously comes with all the shame and discomfort of partaking in a taboo thing. You're not supposed to find fat people attractive.
It's strange, to me, looking back. And even now. I still get anxious over it, in a pearl-clutching, don't-you-dare-show-your-ankles kind of way. My girlfriend has lampshaded this anxiety, in that I get so scared of my own sexuality that I'll try and hide that sexuality from literally the very person I have sex with (who also happens to be a very queer transfemme furry woman - like, she considers the things I find hot practically vanilla to the kinds of shit buried in her Twitter likes, this shit's chump change for her). I see something I find attractive, I think "wow, that's hot", the anxiety creeps, I close the tab, and the guilt sets. I can't be seen with this. It's bad. I'm terrible. Wow. I hope whatever God thing out there forgives me for my fuckup, because I sure as shit can't forgive myself.
I think as well, with nowadays especially as I age, I become more aware of the issues fat people like me, and those bigger than me, face - from limited clothing options to being underrepresented in media, to horrific medical malpractices that prioritize to a violent degree to shed one's weight over any other significantly more life-threatening issue they may have, to the diet industry relying on people's fear of being or becoming fat to exist, to the sheer discrimination and ire fat people face on a daily basis for simply existing and taking up space. Every day, we are constantly reminded that our wholly being is wrong, and that being fat is a moral failing that must be corrected, or that we shouldn't exist at all. There's this ever present bitter taste on my tongue, pulling up art or whatever for my own gratification and reminding myself of this. This is bad, I shouldn't feel this way. It's exploitative.
In truth, I feel it's a shade of grey - I think "being into fat people is no different from being into blondes or people wearing glasses or anything else people consider a 'type'" and "it's important to recognize the societal problems fat people face and not treat them as objects for self-gratification, because it further contributes to those problems" are two statements that can coexist and are both true.
Pulling this narrative back down to the personal level - it's rather strange, isn't it? That I can simultaneously be attracted to something on someone else that I find abhorrent on myself. Take for example, that girlfriend of mine, my beloved Annie - she's literally shaped like me, to a T, sans 50 pounds. And I find her wildly attractive. She's so cute! And there's things about her that are unique to her that I love - her crooked nose (she's very self-conscious about it because it was broken years ago and never was put back in place, but I find it adorable), she has a great butt, she has the prettiest brown puppy dog eyes I've ever seen in my life, among other things, to keep it SFW. I love her a lot. All of her. And she loves me for me. But I find it difficult to love me for me, despite having the same things as her.
To attack these thoughts: what does these anxieties I have towards my own body tell her, Bee?
//
I've been an artist for as long as I remember - I was one of those ex-gifted kids, you know my ass was doodling cringy uncanny valley drawings of anime girlies in my school notes since I could hold a pencil. I've been sharing art online since around 2011, when I made a DeviantART account and lied about my age like half the users on that website did. At that point, I knew that drawing fat people in earnest equaled being a degenerate freak (y'know, because the only art people ever really saw of fat characters was gainer fetish art online), so needless to say I avoided it like the plague. Over the years, I hopped from fandom to fandom, and eventually settled with some online MMO sometime in 2014. Some time after, I had also gotten in good favor with a very popular artist that was a few years older than me that I looked up to and joined their Skype group.
At some point, I wanted to start drawing chubbier people - not quite fat, because that's still in the realm of "cringe", but something a little more like me, even if it's a slimmer facsimile. I had made this fandom OC (looking back, I’m 95% certain it was literally a self insert - it was like, 2014, lay off me) that happened to also be plus sized that became a comfort character of mine. We (and several other artists) drew a lot of art for one another, though the art they drew for my main OC specifically was few and far between, and when they were drawn they were almost always downsized to being slightly larger than everyone else - but most of the time everyone just drew my other, straight sized characters. Sometime further down the road during the twilight years of the friendship, I asked this particular friend why they avoided my favorite one.
Turned out, they outright refused to draw fat people because they “didn't want fetishists seeing their art”. They were so disgusted by the mere thought of fat people existing that they simply didn't exist in their artistic vision. Because to them, fat people are nothing but fetish material.
I obviously don't hold what they said against them now because it’s been literal years since I had even last spoken with them. It would be silly and childish to hold a grudge. But I cannot deny that what they said, specifically coming from them, stuck to me. That you could only draw fat people if you were a) some cringe ass ess jay dubya that people will harass, suicide bait, and what have you, or b) a fat fetishist, because only a deviant would do something as daring as depicting fat people in fiction - because think really hard, why would you? And remember, this is fresh in the wake of GamerGate and the popularization of respectability politics and not-like-the-other-girls-ing your way into the favor of oppressors, so anything "politically correct" (i.e. portraying people's fatness as a neutral kind of thing) was literal heresy. And you didn't want to rock the boat with your friends, would you? You don't want to be seen as a freak, do you? You don't want to be alone, do you?
And it's like, being an almost-18-year-old at the time, I kinda just went: fuck dude, okay. Guess I'm a freak. Bye.
So from when I turned 18, I drew fat fetish art for a couple years under a throwaway handle. Because at the time, I believed that it was just a natural part of my artistic progression. I was a fat person who was into fat people, and the only people that could ever be attracted to them are fetishists, therefore I must’ve been one. Looking back, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the entire experience. Like, I did have some positive experiences meeting and interacting with fellow fat queer folks in the space, and it also gave me a better understanding of my own sexuality - and was the beginning of what made me recognize the internalized fatphobia that held me by a death grip for my entire life. Cause as it turns out - fat people are hot! Goddamn. It was liberating, being able to see people like me in a light that's attractive, desirable. It felt good to see people like me feeling good.
And, well, it also exposed me to the uncomfortable and obvious presence of fetishists and chasers. I'm thankful that during my time that actual, genuine creeps were few and far between, but they were always still there, whether I liked it or not. And creeps and chasers are a prevalent occurrence for fat people on social media that present themselves publicly, whether it's sex workers plugging their OnlyFans or fat people doing their own thing and simply existing. And even as I enjoyed drawing the NSFW art (whodathunk, fat girl who likes fat girls likes drawing fat girls), there was dread crawling under my skin because it never felt right to me. And it's like, yeah, no shit Sherlock, the people fetishistic towards a particular marginalized group don't see them as actual people because they literally view them as a means to an end (that end being, splorting their gourd on their $300 keyboard). No amount of trying to curate the people that interact with you and your content and blocking literal creeps is going to change that fact. But it reinforces this inner conflict that still goes on in my to this day: is me, a fat person, being into fat people really okay? Is this okay?
Like, I was more aware of the issues fat people face at the time, and being a fat person myself, it's important for me to recognize those issues. But my peers didn't really give a shit, and that bothered me a lot - again, no shit Sherlock. Some in fat fetish circles even cite the idea of fat fetishism as a form of freedom, and like, is it really though? To be taken from being subject to being an object of humiliation and torment (derogatory) to an object of humiliation and torment (horny)? Like, enabling fat people the empowerment to feel attractive, to feel sexy, is an objectively good thing - but not when it also robs those very same fat people of their personal agency. I don't fucking know man, there's probably someone that's written this kind of thing in a more eloquent and well thought-out way than some autistic girlie staying up way too late on a work night to power her way through finishing this damn blog post a whole three people are gonna read and go "damn, that's rough, buddy".
Furthermore: these experiences also built a degree of otherness, of "not-like-the-other-girls"ing of my own. I'm not going up to random fat people in person or on the Internet and being a creep towards them. Any time I think about anything sexual, it's in the comfort and privacy of my own home. There's no harm, no foul. So why do I feel all this guilt and shame about literal fucking thoughts?
Well, because my brain still functionally associates being attracted to fat people as a fetish, an outlier, a deviance, something that is fundamentally wrong with me. But the fact is this: being fat is not a moral failing, nor a sexual deviance - it is simply something you are, it's neutral. That's why I took on Fatgrrlz as my current handle. It's important to me for me to draw art of fat people, not just being hot but just in general. It's fun, it's interesting, it's me. It helps me internalize being fat as a neutral state, that it's something I can simply be. And we can be anything.
I'm okay with being a fat person. Yeah, that limits me in some ways, but it's more healthy for me mentally to just accept it as it is and work towards making myself healthier for the sake of my actual health (i.e. taking vitamins so I can stop being a Vitamin D-deficient bitch, going on walks with my girlfriend more so that I don't ache as much, actually eating more than one small pittance of a meal a day so I can actually function) than shackle myself to the chains of the dieting industry chasing that siren call of a smaller size. But there's this struggle in me that still remains - that despite trying to adopt the idea of body neutrality towards myself and to others, I still have this reflexive shame. That sucks.
To tie this off - I spoke at length about it (and sexuality in general) with my girlfriend - she's significantly more well-acclimated to her own gender and sexuality than I am. I admire her for it. She made a point to compare my experiences being a fat person attracted to other fat people to that of her being trans and being attracted to other trans people. She emphasized that, while it's important for me to maintain awareness, I also shouldn't be so damn anxious over my own sexuality. She pointed out how it's almost like this Catholic guilt to me (a very not-Catholic person), that because this part of me sees my thoughts and desires as a theft of agency to someone my brain literally made up, a moral wrong I've committed, that I'm robbing myself of my own agency as a person with their own sexual needs and desires. It's breaching thought crime territory, and I'm getting ready to turn my ass in. It's not going to absolve my animosity, but it is something for me to think about.