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mejomonster · 2 years

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u ever feel just a. little bit of rage. that to popular media sometimes the extent of being butch amounts to a short feminine haircut and wearing coverup and possibly more makeup and form fitting clothes like tight pants and sleeveless slim t-shirts and being skinny of course

like just. in real life i’ve met lots of curvy butches, lots of butches who wear baggy clothes. lots of butches who don’t wear makeup at all, lots of plus size butches, hell butches who just wear sportswear and have hair down to their waists in a ponytail strike me as more butch attitude wise than in a way what media often portrays as what the fuck they think butch amounts to. (its getting better in media - some specifically, and overwhelmingly at this point even a wlw who doesn’t wear lipstick sticks out in the sea of media we have wear usually wlw HAVE to have long hair full faces of makeup feminine clothes and high heels... to the point just having some fucking short hair is refreshing... agh) just like. in real life yeah i know a few people who look like media’s portrayal but goddamn do i know a LOT of people that like. queer culture is counterculture and we still aren’t visibly accepted as we are in all our forms and beauty when it doesn’t fit the mold ppl are still expecting everyone to fit neatly into.

and to popular media sometimes the extent of being androgynous also amounts to wearing coverup and possibly more makeup, a binder, having a skinny frame and not having curves. how like the idea of androgyny in popular media amounts to a ‘default lightly masculine’ especially in regard to body shape and clothing choice, but add makeup and often remove body hair, unless your body reads to popular media as so ‘default masculine’ then it may interpret you as androgynous if you a wear feminine clothing.

and like? while this depiction is VASTLY better in niche circles like online lgbt communities and creators and lgbt magazines and sites, thank fuck, if i did not get to be exposed to those more niche communities i’d never see a nonbinary person that looks like me. all through growing up at the MOST (or damn if you just look up androgyny on google right now) visuals i got of what i assumed ‘i needed to look like for strangers to even make the bare minimum to not read me automatically as a guy or girl’ was... skinny lightly masculine look. no chest, no curves no curves at ALL, no beard or mustache, short hair or very specific longer hair styles usually a bob of some type, attire mainly made up of masculine clothing types but perhaps with more variety in color/patterns than what’s marketed for ur typical straight man popular-market. as if... androgyny could never include a dress, a skirt, long hair - as if feminine could never be neutral, could never be androgynous, but masculine was neutral as default. when in reality like. androgyny is meant to be a ground in between, mixing masculine and feminine, and so like the bias of popular media to read one as more neutral than the other pisses me off. and being nonbinary does not correlate one-to-one - gender identity is not the same as fashion choices, one can choose aesthetically to present entirely masculine and be a woman. one can choose to present as extremely feminine and identify as nonbinary. one can present extremely feminine and identify as a man etc. anyone may decide they’d like to look asthetically more androgynous, and u know im one of those people. and it just. infuriates me. how much popular media tries to amount that to ‘masculine but not gruff.’ so like.. if i grow out my mustache? what im too hairy to fit the mold? if i have curves (which i do, which a binder doesn’t hide my hips, which means i get misgendered by strangers even when i presented at my most all around masculine in my life clothing and hair etc wise) then what i don’t get to read as androgynous? if im fat... period... i don’t see fat people with androgynous style in mainstream media fucking at all... (again if u fucking google androgyny it is so fucking apparent from the top images that society’s assumption of ‘gender neutral’ fashion and style is... lightly masculine default, low tolerance for femininity, low tolerance for ‘gruffer’ masculinity, very biased toward a skinny/boxy look and an upper class look). https://www.google.com/search?q=androgynous&rlz=1C1GCEB_enUS846US846&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTh-HTiof2AhWxKX0KHbGGAnYQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=1

That’s the kind of ‘androgyny’ popular media accepts the most willingly and that is the easiest for a stranger to grasp and it fucking Infuriates me because the actual range of androgynous fashion and expression is SO MUCH BIGGER and so much more varied and creative and explorative.

#rant #this is mejos daily 'bitching about society's outside expectations on what butch should be. androgyny is.#which....oh man.... god....#anyway no matter who you are i deeply encourage finding more independent creators and artists #and also just people in social media of a variety of backgrounds and in niche areas of things youre into #like? ur into fashion? follow some different fashion subtypes. follow some plus size ppl some people of different bgs and maybe even countri #follow different genders. like. the MOST popular voices getting repeatedly highlighted #may not be showing u the goddamn normal range of human expression and how many cool things that area can be

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rapeculturerealities · 5 years

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We all know that when the common white person was a poor farmer, being fat was attractive and being skinny was gross. When the industrial revolution hit the lower and middle classes then being thin was beautiful. This lasted until the recession all but removed the white middle class, leaving the vast majority on starvation wages, only then did we start selling white women on having an ass, being curvy, looking healthy. It was always about further emotionally abusing and guilt tripping the poor.

Hi there,

A lot of factors contributed to the way fat bodies have been viewed and valued (or devalued) in our society. Racism, wealth, social status and region have all played large roles in these changes and continue to impact and shape what we are told is conventionally attractive, healthy and acceptable.

As humans moved out of the hunter-gatherer status and into the stone age, we see depictions of larger bodies in art and religious iconography. As you mentioned, this was generally because a fat body was seen as proof of fertility and wealth/access to a reliable and plentiful food source.

This carried into the Renaissance, where social status, famine and disease helped further cement the difference in body size, right up through the industrial revolution, which slowly allowed food (and medical care) to be accessed by a larger percentage of the population. During this time, many cultures throughout the world still celebrated fat bodies as ideal including in China, Africa and Indigenous populations of the Americas.

In the 18th and middle to late 19th century a lot of racist “science” was being used to justify slavery and posit the “inferiority” of Black bodies and very tied to that was the concept of body size being analogous to morality. The belief that “civilized” (read “white”) people could control themselves around, among other things, food, served to help “other” Black and Brown bodies and cement them being portrayed as “wild” and weak-willed.

So in the early 20th century in North America and parts of Europe we start to see a trend that not only shifts the beauty standard toward thinner, but also more racially motivated ideals. Around this time a lot of media described beauty in veiled racism like “Nordic” or “European”. Of course, these parallels that were being drawn between morals and such weren’t only driven by bogus race science, but also the politics of the time.

Sabrina Strings has a phenomenal book out that details some of the ways that race and racism dovetail with the shift in how fat bodies are seen;

Fearing the Black Body; The Racial Origins of Fatphobia

You can hear her discuss it on the Food Psych podcast here and I’m going to quote below from the transcript of that episode:

So in the beginning a lot of the interest was on whether or not black people were "greedy eaters." And so there was this concern that, you know, black people had a very fond relationship to food and there were even prior to the rise of this particular type of race science which was in the 18th century as early as the 16th century there had been tales coming out of various colonial reports which suggested that if you went to Turkey or Egypt that you could see these women who had like a fondness for the art of feeding, right? And so that they would like, spend their entire day basically feeding themselves, right?

So it's not as if it began entirely in the 18th century only that it was formalized as a form of racialized logic by that time. What we find is that some of these reports that were being written, again, a lot of these were being written by French theorists were being read in places like England, and so that some of this race science would make its way into mainstream reports of well just pretty much day to day chronicling of events. So that you might find in something like The Spectator, which was like a men's magazine as it was in the 18th century that they would also talk about weight in these racialized ways which was kind of fascinating when I was reading this, I was like, "Oh, well here they're sort of reproducing the idea that there are certain places where you go and you will find certain types of beauty."

And in Europe or in England in particular, as they're talking about in the Spectator, this is where we find a beauty that's refined and refined beauties do not have, you know, they would say things like "rolls of fat," like if you want to go and find they would use terms like, "a beauty by the time," you know, here are some other places where you can go and find that. So this received wisdom from the race science was being reproduced in mainstream sources in England and the United States is the place where the slender aesthetic took off so it became the place par excellence for the thin ideal by the 19th century, because not only did they have the legacy of getting these reports from racial scientific theorists, but also of course Americans, you know, in the 19th century frequently imagined themselves to be the sisters or the kin of English people. And so they were taking on a lot of the ideas that were being produced in English popular media and simply republishing them.

So what we’re seeing now in terms of the devaluing of fat bodies and the way that morals are linked to fat bodies is heavily tied to racism, ableism and classicism.

Today, of course, this carries on, We see fat bodies being linked with laziness, poverty and lack of control. Whereas poverty used to be marked by a smaller body, now it’s linked to inability to access “good” food and inability to control oneself when eating.

The fat acceptance movement has been working to combat these notions and to highlight their racist, classist and ableist roots. And I want to note that the fat acceptance movement should be seen as separate from the BoPo (body positive) movement, and many fat activists have worked to distance themselves from BoPo as it is increasingly taken over by diet culture and fails to center anyone but cis white women who exist on the smaller side of plus size and still enjoy a lot of thin privilege.

So when we work toward fat acceptance, we need to acknowledge the ways that it’s necessary to include and center the experiences and voices of Black bodies, disabled bodies and other marginalized groups. This has particularly been an issue that’s overlooked in otherwise leftist groups:

#MarALard*ss and the Left’s Fat Problem

FAT PEOPLE MUST BECOME A PRIORITY TO THE LEFT

So yes, A lot to consider in rethinking the history of fatphobia and a good chance to reflect on the roots of fatphobia that tie into so many other issues we are working to address. But I think a deeper understanding of these things helps us to move forward more inclusively and better equips us for the struggles we all face.

-Spider

#fat #fatphobia #fat acceptance #racism #classism #Strings #Fearing the Black BOdy #Podcast #Foodpsych #bopo

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