I'm always intrigued about these Fat Rants and blogs and videos and books stating how wonderful it is to be ravishing and rotund, how empowering it is to embrace your true substantial self, and how much confidence you can gain if you could only love your own portly personage. Alliteration apart, acceptance seems to be the key issue. Acceptance of yourself by yourself. Allegedly you'll only be loved if you love yourself, which seems a perverse rule to begin with. But if you accept yourself then others will accept you, too. Or will they only accept your acceptance of yourself, and continue to ridicule you behind their hands as you walk off?
oh my GAWD Frank, did you see her THIGHS? But she does walk with a confident wobble, so I should really admire her sass.
And what if you don't accept yourself? And why should you care? (I know - you shouldn't, but we're not all made of strong revolutionary stuff.)
My point of view is from the sidelines in a way, where acceptance seems to be a one-way street, going in the opposite direction, no matter which way it is traversed.
I've always been ridiculed by the general public's sense of what is 'right' and 'wrong', and I am fat, therefore I am wrong. I was a chunky child, and born with stocky legs and a set of shoulders that would have made a full-back jealous. My mother certainly mentions them still, cough-ty years later. It would certainly make me weep, but for different reasons, as soon as my body shape became an issue with other people. For my peers, it was around aged eight or nine when that happened, and by my teens it was worse, thanks to a knee disease stopping nearly all athletic activities and consigning me to a sport-less decade. It was aged eight, at least when I started getting teased for being chunkier than my fellow pupils at school, and this teasing, in its myriad forms, has not yet ceased. They say children can be cruel, but they can't hold a candle to the grown-ups. And the grown-ups who think they're helping you by pointing out your wobbly bits and ridiculing you to your face are by far the worst of the worst.
Oh, by you'd be so pretty if you only lost some weight. You'd get a boyfriend if you weren't so hefty. You'd be able to get some nice clothes if you were a smaller size. Don't you think so, Frank?
Best not to answer, Frank, because I'm sure you and your lady wife are also on the opinion that all fat people are fat by choice. By laziness. By stuffing their faces with pizza and pop day-in, day-out, lying on a couch festooned with the dead and empty wrappers of countless bars of chocolate. But of course, yes, I choose to be ridiculed. Yes, I choose to only be able to wear frumpy, unfashionable clothes. Yes, I choose to have people like you casting aspersions on my lifestyle and deriding my looks.
Had the fat acceptance movement existed when I was younger, would it have made a difference? To be honest, I doubt that it would have made even the tiniest dent in the fat-hating machine of my era. By that time I was already dipping in and out of black times, and reading a (perceived) forced-positive view on voluptuousness or watching a video extolling the rights of the round would have made not a jot of difference to my general state of mind, or, to be honest, the state of mind of the people around me. This may also be a reflection on where I'm from; a no-nonsense, rather straight-laced part of the world where feelings are, to a great extent, internalised and not discussed.
Even now I'm almost put off by the (mostly American) tracts on loving the inner self and videos of, on the whole, pretty-faced, chubby girls telling us how you can change the world to accept the large if you're confident in yourself and your largeness at the same time. It seems terrible cliquey. Somewhat akin to one religion telling the other they're going to hell for belonging to the wrong religion. Pff. We're all doomed, if that's the case. Only fat chicks who accept their own fat beauty will be allowed happiness on earth and have the goodwill of men? (Or whoever's goodwill of which you'd like to partake.) You don't love your largeness? Sorry, zaftig-fail, but you're doomed to everlasting loneliness and evenings spent with only the Wii Fit for company.
It seems rather unfair to those of us stuck with bodies we don't want to celebrate: bodies that don't conform to the current norms, whether fat or thin, no matter how much we try to change them. Where's the love for those of us left behind in the aftermath of the Fat Rant Revolution?
