FAT ADMIRATION: CONSTRUCTING FAT-POSITIVE IDENTIFICATIONS By

RATULA DASGUPTA

Integrated Studies Project

submitted to Dr. Gloria Filax in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Athabasca, Alberta

June, 2008

Acknowledgements

I could not have completed this project without the guidance and support of a few very important people.

I owe a special thanks to Dr. Gloria Filax, my advisor on this project. Our coffee meetings, your mentorship, wisdom, and availability whenever I had concerns about the project were invaluable to me.

I owe much love and gratitude to my mother, Sikha, and older sister, Piali. Thank you for your unconditional love and belief in my ability to always do better.

Thank you to my husband Ron for encouraging me to complete this project when I didn’t think I had the strength.

And finally, I would like to dedicate this project to the memory of my late father, Dr. Debabrata Dasgupta. I never would have pursued the MAIS program if it hadn’t been for you.

As proud as I am for reaching this goal by my own efforts, I know I couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Contents

Introduction...... 1

Historical and Cross Cultural Acceptance of Fat Bodies...... 3

The Initial Turn to Thinness ...... 9

The Obsession with Thinness ...... 15

Contemporary Interpretations of the Fat Body ...... 25

Fat Admiration: A Brief Introduction ...... 30

Methodology...... 35

Methods...... 39

Typological Classification...... 40

The Attractiveness of Fat Bodies...... 47

Sexual Practices...... 58

Body Type Discrimination ...... 67

Conclusion...... 73

Bibliography...... 76

Appendix 1- List of Abbreviations ...... 79

Introduction

It has been over century since mainstream Euro-American society has experienced a meaningful celebration of the fat body as a sexual and aesthetic ideal.

Social, political, and economic changes since the turn of the century have brought about abhorrence towards corpulence that has seized public consciousness. The fat body no longer inhabits the status of health and beauty it once did, and thinness has become the norm to which most now aspire. In the last fifty years, in particular, this aspiration towards thinness has consumed the time, energy, and financial resources of the masses.

The drive of males and females towards attaining a physical ideal based on the eradication of fat has engendered fatal physical and psychological consequences. So indoctrinated are individuals by a culture of thinness that many have lost the ability to ever achieve a sustained satisfaction with their bodies. The hatred people have of corpulence also manifests in stereotypes of fat people as being physically unattractive, sexless, unhealthy, immoral, gluttonous, lazy, unintelligent, dirty, and out of control. The attitudes that individuals have towards fat are not part of an innate belief system about the world, but rather are shaped by larger societal forces that construct “truths” about the fat body. The diet industry, medical community, mass media, academic and religious institutions produce anti-fat rhetoric through pseudo-science and subjective value systems as legitimate fact. With their guidance, the thin body has been accepted as being naturally and universally most attractive and healthy. The creation of thinness as a norm has rendered fatness as deviant.

Although fat is described as a feminist issue by Susie Orbach (1988), evidence has mounted in recent years that suggests fat is an issue that needs to addressed by researchers in the field of men’s studies. It is well known that females are preoccupied with their appearance. After all, society constructs femininity to be appearance centered.

It is well known the types of unhealthy behaviors in which females engage in order to discipline their bodies and attain the Body Beautiful. What is not well known is that popular culture and cultural norms have as well facilitated a male preoccupation with the appearance of the body. There is a universe of anxieties men have about fat and their bodies arising from culture norms that each confronts in private. Further, what is not as well known is that a significant portion of the male population engages in similar behaviors. With that preoccupation comes a host of deleterious effects. No longer can anxieties about the fat body be considered solely the domain of females.

This project is a qualitative study that investigates and analyzes the ways in which fat-positive identifications are constructed by a sexual fringe culture called Fat

Admiration. The Fat Admiration subculture challenges dominant assumptions underpinning normalizing beliefs and sexual practices about fat as aesthetically displeasing and sexless by redefining the meaning of fatness and thereby creating new subject positions. I first consider the historical development of the slenderness ideal, addressing the cultural factors that influenced the turn away from fatness as a norm. This section of the paper shows how the fat body was once considered inhabitable and desirable by the masses, and therefore reveals historically recent, contemporary popular notions of the thin body as that which is naturally most attractive. A transition is made into a brief theoretical discussion of the Fat Admiration subculture, touching on its 2

history, beliefs, and practices. The final and largest portion of my paper is the presentation of the analysis of data I collected from two Internet discussion forums from two popular Fat Admiration websites, Dimensions and Biggercity.com. I reveal my discoveries about the typological classification system used by members in these cyber communities, the reasons why fat bodies are considered to be desirable, and the unique sexual practices of individuals in these communities. I also address whether or not norms of beauty and sexuality in Fat Admiration communities serve to exclude certain types of bodies, in order to understand how existing structures of power/knowledge (Foucault

1980) have the capability to reproduce in new ways. My project is informed by feminist, men’s studies, cultural studies, sociological and anthropological literature and is guided by post-structuralist schools of thought. This investigation is a contribution to a larger field of enquiry about the lived experiences of fat people.

Historical and Cross Cultural Acceptance of Fat Bodies

The meaning of the fat body has undergone an evolution in Euro-American society, yet the thin body as a natural and universal construct of physical beauty is a notion ingrained in the consciousness of contemporary society. Mitter writes “in the

West, such a canon of beauty is so internalized that it is perceived to be based in common sense.” (2000:30) The value system of Euro-American societies deems the fat body as aesthetically and morally undesirable. The cultural meaning associated with fat and thin bodies in the West is a topic discussed later in this paper. I would like to first consider historical and cross-cultural representations of fat as a beauty ideal. This examination

disputes the notion that the fat body as a grotesque and immoral formation has always and everywhere been embraced.

Art is a reflection of the culture in which it is produced, and ancient sculptures and statues represent a cultural appreciation for fat bodies. Stone age and Hellenistic

Greek statues are two such examples. Found in caves in Germany and Italy and from

France to Siberia, Stone Age statues --- termed by archeologists as Venuses --- are female

“… with erotic zones (tits, belly, ass) that protrude abundantly.” (Klein 2001:21) The

Venus of Willendorf is one of the most famous statues of the Stone Age era. “Twenty thousand years ago, more or less, this magnificently abundant woman was carved out of soapstone, her enormous proportions compressed within a tiny compass. Projected to a life size scale, she’s about the fattest woman one can imagine.” (Klein 2001:21)

Archeologists generally accept Stone Age figurines like the Venus of Willendorf as fertility symbols endowed with ritualistic powers, and the curve of their belly taken to represent pregnancy. An alternate perspective of the Stone-Age Venuses has been put forth, that the curviness of the Venuses may simply represent admiration for the voluptuous female form. “Nothing prevents us from assuming that these statues were absolutely useless, were simply beautiful --- like more recent Venuses, mere representations of ideal feminine beauty.” (Klein 2001:22) Body fat, in the Stone Age period, was appreciated for its rarity and viewed as a fortunate acquisition due to the economics of the time. LeBesco argues “body fat was seen as a luxury that permitted the otherwise endangered possibility of human production…in an age when survival of the species depended on nutrition and fertility, fat statues were seen as good luck charms ---

as representations (even if exaggerated) of an aesthetic ideal that served a practical function.” (2004:18)

The amply-bodied statues of the Hellenistic period of Greece illustrate a very different meaning about the fat body then what exists in contemporary Euro-American societies. Goddesses and philosophers were sculpted to massive proportions, bodies considered overweight by today’s mainstream Western standards. (LeBesco 2004) In the

Greek approach to sculpture, “beauty in physical bodies is manifested largely via mass, volume, and proportion…there is a preference for a positive form, for volumes that, even though cut into a marble block or scooped out of a lump of clay, grow from the core of the statue and swell organically towards the spectator.” (Lebesco 2004:19) A notable example of Hellenistic art that portrayed Greek admiration for the fat body was that of an

Epicurean philosopher. This statue of what was considered to be the ideal man has all the qualities that contradict the mainstream West’s emphasis on attaining a masculine, tightly managed body: large, flaccid breasts, expansive stomach, loose flesh. (LeBesco 2004:20)

Goddesses such as Aphroditite were similarly portrayed with a full body and considered beautiful. What is unique about the images of beauty disseminated by the

Greeks versus the images of beauty disseminated in modern Euro-American societies is the Hellenistic idea that what is common is beautiful. Images of beauty in the modern

West are idealized views of the body, made possible by technologies that correct natural flaws. “Greek artists sought not to construct utopian images, but inquired after the universal and general, the mean which we all mirror and which to a greater or lesser extent can be seen through us. This [is] the beautiful.” (LeBesco 2004:20) The aesthetic

value placed on fat bodies in these eras is seldom recognized. (LeBesco 2004:21) The marginalization of this reading of the fat body is likely due to the West’s contemporary bias against bodies that are not seen as tightly controlled.

Many non-Western and Western cultures have embraced, and continue to embrace, full figured females. Dr. Paul Ernsberger, an American biomedical researcher, recently conducted a study “which found 81 percent of the world’s cultures consider overall plumpness or moderate fatness to be desirable for females, and [that] fat hips and thighs are considered attractive in 90 percent of all cultures.” (Bovey 1999:92)

Traditionally, many African cultures celebrate the voluptuous form, with the ideal woman being “… large, big busted, [and] big bottomed.” (Bovey 1999:94) Before

Nigerian culture fell prey to the normalization of the Western slenderness ideal, the fat body was a form to which women aspired. The voluptuous form is worthy of indigenous celebration in Central Africa, with farms devoted to fattening brides in preparation for their wedding night. (Bordo 2003:xiv) Natives of Western Samoa, an island located in the South Pacific, place no stigma on fat women. Seen as deserving of admiration and desire, large middle-aged women perform dances for tourists without any shame about their size. (Bovey 1999:92) Arguably, prior to the introduction of Western media in Fiji, girls and women possessed a similar ease with their own bodies, regardless of their size.

Both eating and voluptuous bodies were valued among Fijians, values that eventually became vulnerable to the powerful influence of Western media. (Bordo 2003:xvi) Asian women in China at one time were found to be free of the body preoccupations of Western females. “In China, for example, where revolutionary ideals once condemned any focus on appearance and there have been disastrous famines, ‘little fatty’ was a term of 6

endearment for children.” (Bordo 2003:xv) In Latino communities, large buttocks on females are embraced as “the site of much pleasure, affection, and attention.” (Barrera

2002:409) Sadly, it should be noted that many traditionally fat admiring ethnicities cited in Ernsberger’s study, such as American Indians, Jews, the Polish, other Eastern

Europeans, Africans, African-Americans, and Hispanics, have been unable to withstand, to varying degrees, the tyranny of slenderness that terrorizes men and women in Euro-

American society. But the examples above challenge ideas that the value placed on the thin body as most aesthetically pleasing is an innate or even historically persistent human value. These examples challenge the notion of the fat body as being a historically and culturally abnormal body and instead point to the cultural specificity and recentness of this body norm.

As well, up to the early twentieth century in the West, the fat body was an acceptable form of embodiment. (Huff 2001) Art is again a reflection of this cultural sense. The 17th century artist Paul Reubens and the 16th century artist Michelangelo di

Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, among the most famous Western European artists, were renowned for their portraits of nude subjects who were full bodied. Their paintings portrayed the classical model of Western beauty that glorified the fleshiness of the body.

“Reubens did for the female nude what Michealangelo had already done for the male.

Both great artists discovered whole new levels of expressivity in the form of the human body by imagining it thick or plump.” (Klein 2001:32) The West has even more recent evidence of an appreciation for a voluptuous body through its art, found in the print images of Lillian Russell. Bordo writes “Russell, [the] most photographed woman in [ the

United States ] in 1890, was known and admired for her hearty appetite, ample body 7

(over two hundred pounds at the height of her popularity), and ‘challenging, fleshly arresting’ beauty.” (2003:102)

Before the cultural turn to thinness, corpulence was something in which individuals delighted. To some degree, fat even had its place in Victorian society in

England, a society known to openly revile fat. “Victorian conduct manuals [the

Victorian’s version of mass media] frequently advised one on how to cultivate plumpness.” (Huff 2001:40) To the Victorians, fat, as long as it was in the right places, was viewed positively. In the United States, “… plumpness remained quite fashionable, particularly after the 1830s.” (Stearns 1997:8) Plumpness was correlated with successful motherhood, and was an expected quality of mature women. (Stearns 1997) The fat body was celebrated on the stage, as well as “actresses of all levels of [it] illustrated and promoted fashionable plumpness, adding bustles to a corseting designed to stress ample bosoms and derrieres.” (Stearns 1997:9) While today’s actress’ body management practices generate awe and envy among the masses, European actresses’ slender figures and discipline of their bodies rarely evoked similar reactions if awe and envy from the

[Euro-American] public throughout much of the 19th century. Instead “touring European actresses who had begun to control their weight through dieting were greeted with some aesthetic skepticism.” (Stearns 1997:9) Voluptuousness became an asset to men as well as women in this era. Between the 1860s and 1880s, a rotund figure on a man became symbolic of his virtues: prosperity, good health, masculine strength, and sexuality.

(Stearns, 9) Indeed, it was believed about men that “a little paunch above the belt was something to be proud of.” (Stearns 1997:9) In general, dieting and exercise to control fatness was not a preoccupation of individuals up to the 1890s. A full figure and a hearty 8

appetite were the standards. Food was rich and abundant in the United States, and “actual eating habits and recommended standards amply supported the approval of a certain girth in both male and female bodies. (Stearns 1997) The accommodating attitude of Euro-

Americans towards fat and fat bodies would take a turn in the late nineteenth century and would evolve into a full-blown obsession with slenderness beginning in the late twentieth century. A number of significant factors fell into place that facilitated this cultural turn to thinness to happen.

The Initial Turn to Thinness

The culture of obsessive dieting in Euro-American society has its roots in some fundamental changes that occurred in the late nineteenth century. The history of this turn is complex, and though this project does not account for all of it, I highlight some key changes. One important transformation was the way in which the English dieting phenomenon of “Bantingism” took hold of Euro-American consciousness in the 1890s.

(Stearns 1997) Physician William Banting --- after who Bantingism was named --- supported the reducing diet in England in the mid nineteenth century. (Huff 2001) His pamphlet written in 1863 and entitled “A Letter on Corpulence” laid out a diet regime intended to reduce fat on a person’s body. The document helped to shape the popular revulsion towards fat that characterized the Victorian era. (Huff 2001) In addition to his recommendation that all fat people reduce their corpulence, the literature contained one significant idea that helped to lay the foundation for modern perceptions of fat: the construction of fat as a disease and a condition to be reviled. Huff writes “Banting

presents himself as a fellow sufferer… [and] thus demonstrates a recognition and an endorsement of the stigmatization and demonization of fat within his culture absent from most other Victorian works on the subject.” (2001:41) “A Letter on Corpulence” gained popularity in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Women heeded

Banting’s advice on fat reduction through nutrition and exercise. (Stearns 1997) Although

Bantingism did not possess the obsessive quality that the modern diet has taken on,

Bantingism was an important precursor to Euro-American society’s preoccupation with thinness.

Changes in fashion and the standardization of clothing sizes for the middle classes also facilitated the turn towards slenderness. First, the need for women to wear corsets was revised from the 1870s onwards and clothing was made tighter. These new fashions required women’s natural, uncorsetted bodies to become slimmer to ensure a good fit

(Stearns 1997) Eventually, corset-less fashion became established. The introduction of standardized sizes changed expectations for both men and women’s bodies. The

Industrial Revolution played an impetus for inventions to standardize clothing. “Mass- manufacturing required a mass-market and, when the process was eventually extended to encompass clothing, a new chapter in the story of women’s bodies began to be written. It wasn’t until the invention of dressmakers’ patterns, by Ellen Buttrick in 1863, that the need for standard sizes arose.” (Poulton 1996:45) Standardization of sizing created a body type norm that also served to highlight and exclude the abnormal or oddly shaped body. Clothes were no longer made to fit one’s body, but one’s body now had to be made to fit the clothing. Middle class men’s bodies were also affected by standardized clothing sizes, although this happened later. Through the 1930s, their clothing was still made to fit 10

individual men’s bodies with the aid of tailors. By the 1950s, sizes were difficult to find in their ready-to-wear market. (Stearns 1997) But today ready-to-wear men’s clothing is a mass-market norm.

The public’s increased attention to weight control and the new body aesthetic that was developing was shaped by a newly emerging commercialized diet industry, the medical community, and the birth of fad diets. Of the three, the medical community was the only aspect of the public sphere that originally did not promote the growing fat phobia of the early twentieth century. According to Stearns “the fact was that American doctors, not scientifically trained for the most part, long maintained traditional beliefs that a certain amount of weight was useful in combating the standard contagious diseases and that thinness was positively ill-advised.” (1997:28) When approached by the public about their weight, doctors tended to advise against dieting. The commercialized diet industry and the faddists, on the other hand, actively exploited Euro-America’s fear.

Magazines were increasingly commenting on weight loss and products were being invented and advertised to aid with fat reduction. “Advertisements for products that would help against weight began to be spread about a decade after fashion dictates had suggested a new concern.”(Stearns 1997:19) Meanwhile middle class newspapers in the early 1900s contained diet product advertisements that portrayed being overweight in an unfavorable light, exposing it as “humiliating” and overweight persons as “a disgusting fright”. (Stearns 1997:25) Ads were aimed at both females and males, with ads calling upon women to be slender and men to be more muscular. (Stearns 1997) The commercial diet industry was predominantly the work of diet faddists. Faddists used pseudoscientific information about nutrition (based on previous nutritional strategies) to promote the need 11

for weight loss, capitalizing on the already flourishing anxiety about fat. Horace Fletcher and Upton Sinclair were two of the most influential fad diet advocates at the turn of the century. Fletcher, after whom the movement Fletcherism was named, advocated the severe reduction of food intake, while Sinclair advocated long periods of abstinence from eating. (Stearns 1997) The mentalities of faddists towards food and weight loss would help crystallize modern approaches to the diet. Diet faddists also helped to change the minds of the medical community on the matters of healthy body weight and the attack on fat.

Up until 1905, views on obesity within the medical community were fragmented, without a general consensus as to how to professionally treat obesity. (Stearns 1997)

Using new knowledge about how to treat corpulence along with strategies that faddists had been advocating to reduce weight, “a common sense approach was beginning to be possible, along with a certain routine acceptance of the standard evaluation and treatment.” (Stearns 1997:20) Slenderness was now being justified by doctors with the use of standardized weight charts that advised an individual what a “normal” weight was for their height and age. (Stearns 1997) To help discipline their patients into maintaining low body weight, doctors cautioned them about the consequences of excess weight, such as the threat of disease and death. The connotations of the term obesity changed within the medical community once standardized tables were created. Instead, “in medical writing… extreme obesity was commonly used to illustrate the same term that was applied to people who were not drastically overweight.” (Stearns 1997:44) Although doctors’ recommendations for weight loss to their patients originally revolved around health concerns and disease prevention, middle class preoccupations with weight and a 12

perceived idea of the Body Beautiful began to seep into their motives. Stearns writes that

“doctor discussing the various reasons for treatment of overweight… started out with

‘personal appearance and comfort’.” (1997:45) The medicalization of what counts as a healthy weight and overweight or obesity, along with the work of the commercial diet industry and diet faddists (the latter eventually being replaced by the medical community) contributed to and shaped the anxieties of the American public about the body. Together they created a sustained rationale for the attack on fat through dieting.

The attack on fat was largely a reaction to the moral anxiety experienced over perceived consumer excess and new sexual freedoms, the latter disproportionately affecting women. At the end of the nineteenth century, consumer activity increased with middle class men, women, and children indulging in the purchase of a number of attractive commercial products. And up to the 1870s in the United States, church organizations formed a mechanism for creating moral anxiety about this perceived consumer excess. According to Stearns “well into the 1830s, traditionalist mainstream

Calvinist groups maintained dire warnings about life’s seriousness and the hollowness of worldly distractions, even as consumer activity picked up.” (1997:55) Religious criticism and sternness about capitalism created a fear in people that provided a balance to the excess. By the 1870s, however, the voice of the church had significantly weakened and middle class Euro-Americans found themselves in the face of another moral counterweight albeit a secular one. Discipline of the body, an active interest of the middle class by the beginning of the twentieth century, provided the perfect balance. “People could indulge their taste for fashion and other products with a realization that, if they disciplined their bodies through an attack on fat, they could preserve or even enhance 13

their health and also establish their moral credentials.” (Stearns 1997:59) Rather than balancing each other out, consumerism and the attack on fat entered into an antagonistic relationship with each other. Bordo writes “on the one hand, as producers of goods and services we must sublimate, delay, repress desires for immediate gratification… on the other hand, as consumers we must display a boundless capacity to capitulate desire and indulge in impulse; we must hunger for constant and immediate satisfaction.” (2003:199)

Discipline of the body was to form a defense against the total lack of control over one’s consumer desires.

The discipline of the body was also a reaction to new sexual freedoms the middle class, particularly women, were exploring.

The Mosher survey of the 1890s revealed a growing interest in sexual pleasure among upper middle class women, particularly those born after the 1870s. Birth control needs still required recurrent abstinence, but use of artificial devices undoubtedly gained ground. And the birthrate itself plummeted to new lows. (Stearns 1997:62-3) Women’s domestic roles were transforming under these developments, with old

Victorian standards of motherhood coming under attack.

Middle class family literature, which once praised pure, self-sacrificing mothers, began to discuss the problematic nature of Eighteenth century Victorian motherhood. The full figures that young women with new ideals were sporting could no longer be attributed to a respectable reason such as maternity but to an inability to maintain a proper shape. (Stearns 1997:63) The need to control the appetite served to discipline women who could not attribute their full figures to maternity. (Stearns 1997) Control of the appetite was a way to correct these women. Discipline of the appetite was also a reaction to the guilt or concern some women experienced over their lack of conformity to Victorian standards of sexuality and

motherhood. “For women concerned, however unconsciously, about an untraditional interest in sex and reluctance to imitate their own mother’s level of childbearing, injunctions to discipline the body by keeping slim even into middle age may have seemed a welcome form of compensatory discipline.” (Stearns 1997:64) The turn to thinness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came out of a need to regulate what was moralized as the consuming passions for goods and sex.

The Obsession with Thinness

The turn to thinness that seized Euro-American consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century assumed an obsessive nature in the late twentieth century, with one of its most severe manifestations being the increased emergence of eating disorders among women and men of all ages including Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, and Muscle

Dysmorphia. To be sure, eating disorders --- particularly Anorexia --- emerged in

Western civilization much earlier than the 1970s. Some of the earliest cases of Anorexia, a disorder in which the individual self starves, have been thought to occur during medieval Christianity. Bynum writes “self–starvation, the deliberate and extreme renunciation of food and drink, seemed to medieval people the most basic ascetism, requiring the kind of courage and holy foolishness that marked the saints.” (1988:2) It is common knowledge that religious men fasted to emulate the saints, but it has been discovered that a number of saintly women during the medieval era also participated in self–starvation for the same reasons. Many of these women abstained from ordinary food in their complete devotion to the Eucharist, the body of Jesus Christ, received during

mass. Fasting became obsessive for some religious women, but self-starvation was generally driven by aspirations towards spiritual perfection rather than the modern preoccupation with aesthetics. Eating disorders emerged as a Western cultural phenomenon in the nineteenth century among elite middle class women, as a reaction to social contradictions between strict gender ideology as manifest in Victorian sanctions against the female appetite and sexuality and bourgeois values. (Bordo 2003) This emerging norm helped form our perceptions of eating disorders as a young, white, middle class, female disease.

Women developed a boundless dissatisfaction with their bodies and many began to go to extreme lengths to attain unrealistic standards of thinness. Women, after returning to the domestic sphere from the factories in which they were employed during the second World War, began to be bombarded with advertising involving everything: advertising about food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the female body (Poulton

1996) Despite the celebration of voluptuous screen beauties such as Marilyn Monroe during the 1950s, women were fed a steady diet of fat phobic messages produced by the media. Women’s magazines were heavy with ads promoting the importance of weight loss to one’s desirability. (Poulton 1996) But it was the 1960s “… in which the ideal of the thin female body significantly increased its hold in contemporary Western culture.

(Malson 1998:93) The introduction of the supermodel Twiggy would help implement a standard of physical perfection that women in next four decades would try and fail to achieve. The 1960s also witnessed the growth of commercial weight loss organizations like Weight Watchers, diet foods and aids, and exercise equipment by companies wanting to profit from the developing diet mania. (Poulton 1996) By the 1970s, fat phobia 16

produced by media and the medical community was inescapable for women. The low calorie food trend, a staple of diet mania, gained solid footing in Euro-American society, with 70 percent of families in the United Stated eating such products. (Poulton 1996)

Besides consuming low calorie diets, Euro-Americans began indulging in the use of drugs to lose weight. Doctors began prescribing amphetamines to their patients, drugs that would prove to be lethal for many dieters. (Poulton 1996) Eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, also first garnered media attention in the 1970s and became a serious issue among young women.

By the 1980s, diet mania and hatred of the corpulent body in Euro-American society had created a lucrative market with giant conglomerate companies, including

Nestles, Stouffer, and H. J. Heinz (which bought Weight Watchers in 1980) trying to cash in on the mania through intense advertising. (Poulton 1996) Invasive surgery was added to the cultural repertoire of body management devices, also increasing the mortality rate of dieting. “Later in the decade, liposuction would be imported from France, despite having caused the deaths of nine women. During its first six years here, at least twenty deaths were reported.” (Poulton 1996:64) The frequency of eating disorders would explode in the 1980s, and continue to climb in the next two decades. But eating disorders is only an extreme manifestation of a general dissatisfaction that females in Euro-

American society have with their body image. “A study conducted by Glamour magazine and analyzed by Susan Wooley and Wayne Wooley revealed that 75 percent of the

33,000 women surveyed considered themselves ‘too fat’ despite the fact that only one quarter were deemed overweight by standard weight tables, and 30 percent were actually underweight.” (Bordo 2003:55-6) This study was conducted in 1984, but more than 17

likely is representative of women in the twenty first century. Aside from restricting fat and calories, using diet drugs and surgeries, women today, more than ever, abuse exercise as a mechanism of weight control.

Over-exercising was found to occur in 18 percent of the American population, and 30 percent of those aged 18 to 24 reported regular jogging. The level of jogging was found to be directly linked to involvement with dieting. (Nasser 1997:5)

Despite their prevalence among females, males in Euro-American society have also internalized anxieties about fat and a preoccupation with attaining social standards of bodily perfection. Males internalize dissatisfaction with their bodies from a very young age. “Recent studies have shown that as early as elementary school, many boys are already dissatisfied with their bodies, and as a result may suffer loss of self esteem or depression.” (Pope 2000:xiii) Beginning in the 1950s, diet books for men emerged. It was general knowledge that, by the 1970s, men’s desire to lose weight was comparable to that of women. (Stearns 1997) Men’s preoccupation with weight seemed to take on a distinctive shape as the expressions of anxiety about their bodies was different from women’s. Male membership to weight loss organizations and open discussion about their fears was less common, and images of the Body Beautiful to which men wished to conform were different. (Stearns 1997) The concern with weight and appearance began to reach a level of crisis in the 1990s, and this crisis in men’s body image has informally been labeled as “The Adonis Complex”. Based on the Greek mythological figure Adonis whose perfect muscular body is thought to represent ideal masculinity, this complex refers to “an array of usually secret, but surprisingly common, body image concerns of boys and men.”(Pope 2000:6-7) Body image issues, specifically eating disorders, are still 18

considered to be the disease of white, middle class females, and this logic continues to force men with these issues into silence. Today, one common issue men have with their bodies is a preoccupation with body size and muscularity. Many of these men go on to develop a disorder called Muscle Dysmorphia, otherwise known as Bigorexia Nervosa or

“an excessive preoccupation with body size and muscularity.” (Pope 2000:10) It drives men to abuse exercise, food, and anabolic steroids and is a condition that tends to strike bodybuilders and weightlifters. In the eyes of a bigorexic or a male with some exaggerated concern with muscularity, he can never look big enough. Anorexia Nervosa is a condition that, surprisingly, has also afflicted a large population of males. While it is not as prevalent among males as it is females, 90 percent of anorexics are females (Bordo

2003), it is not as rare as one might think. After all, if 90 percent of anorexics are female, this suggests that one in ten anorexics are males, which is a substantial statistic. Anorexia is especially problematic among males in the gay community, who since the 1900s have become increasingly preoccupied with having a tightly managed, muscular body.

(LeBesco 2004) Although, on the surface, Muscle Dysmorphia and Anorexia Nervosa appear to be very different from each other, they are unified by an underlying anxiety about fat. “Many men who binge are not overweight, or are only a little overweight. But still, they usually tell us they’re constantly worrying about their body shape and their level of fat.” (Pope 2000:141) While the bigorexic is preoccupied with being as big as possible and the anorexic is preoccupied with being as thin as possible, “the two ideals are united in battle against a common enemy: the soft, the loose; unsolid, excess flesh.”

(Bordo 2003:191) The pursuits of thinness and muscularity are pursuits of a tightly-

managed body, one that precludes any hint of fat. It is clear then, that fat phobia is an issue that afflicts both males and females.

It is important to consider, though, why men and women have been differentially afflicted with body image issues in the way they have. There are significant reasons why body image issues and eating disorders are so much more prevalent among women than men. One of the reasons why women are historically more drastically appearance conscious is because culture teaches females that appearance is the dominant feature of their identity as women. Orbach quotes John Berger in her book Fat is a Feminist Issue, stating that

men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. (1988:7) Furthermore she asserts that this emphasis on appearance causes self-consciousness about one’s appearance and a motivation to create “a self image that others will find pleasing and attractive --- an image that will immediately convey what kind of woman she is.”

(1988:7) How a girl or woman pieces together what kind of self-image is attractive comes from the images her culture disseminates, and these are overwhelmingly images of a woman with a slender, tightly-controlled body. Extreme body image issues manifested through eating disorders are also thought to emerge out of the tensions of conflicting values females experience between new roles and possibilities as these have been ushered in through the work of feminism and ties to older expectations and values of femininity.

Women are expected to have successful careers, to be intelligent, competent and ambitious. Yet they are simultaneously expected to be

desirable and alluringly female… particularly if they are heterosexual. Adult women are expected to both be autonomous and compliant, independent and needful of security, sexual and androgynously neutral. (Malson 1998:94) The limited range of roles provided by traditional, domesticated femininity repels many female anorexics. Anorexia is largely a rebellion against this traditional femininity, which has been symbolized in a more voluptuous figure (Bordo 2003) Anorexia is also a reaction to new freedoms and broader choices the second wave feminism made possible.

Women may be enticed by the construct of the New Woman, represented by the thin aesthetic, but are at the same time, fearful of making the wrong choice. (Malson 1998)

Part of the fear of becoming the New Woman is the fear of becoming “too much” by giving in to the uncontrollable impulses of her own body, her hunger for food, sex, affection, and attention (Bordo 2003:161) Anorexia is a mode through which women can suppress these urges. Patriarchy in Euro-American society has allowed men access to unlimited freedom to pursue all choices within the domestic and private spheres and to indulge the impulses of their bodies, which helps to explain why men have not historically been afflicted in significant numbers by this disorder.

However, body image issues and eating disorders have become increasingly problematic for males for reasons specific to male gendering. “Society is telling them now, more than ever before, that their bodies define who they are as men.” (Pope 2000:4)

Gender theorists argue that social movements for equality have destabilized traditional parameters of masculinity for men since the second wave of feminism. “As women have advanced, men have gradually lost their traditional identities as breadwinners, fighters, and protectors.” (Pope 2000:51) Masculinity has traditionally been contingent on proof of

manhood, a pivotal proof being performance in the workplace. (Pope 2000) Once women penetrated this arena, as well as nearly every other male-dominated arena, confusion for males about traditional roles emerged. With the destabilization of masculinity, a fixation on another symbol of masculinity developed in a preoccupation with muscularity. Fat male bodies, perceived as soft and impotent, came to be associated with a loss of definition to the male body and by implication to masculinity. (Mosher 2001) A hyper masculine body, on the other hand, “symbolizes an attempt by men to restore feelings of masculine self-control and worth.” (Pope 2000:51) A preoccupation with building muscles is a proof of manhood that males must work vigilantly to attain and then maintain. Because masculinity is a vulnerable status, losing size can easily make a male feel less of a male in every way. (Pope 2000) Images of men since the rise of women’s power has not only become more muscular, but has also become less fat. “Our society increasingly extols the low fat look in men and it’s likely that some men develop eating disorders [in response to] to this pressure.” (Pope 2000:130) Many gay males are obsessed or preoccupied with having a muscular body but many are obsessed with looking as slender as possible. As in the case of females, there appears to be extreme pressure placed on gay males to be youthful and slim. (Gideon 1998) Gay men are exposed to the type of sexual objectification to which women have historically been subjected, and resemble “heterosexual women more than heterosexual men in the importance they place on their own physical attractiveness and overall body image.”

(Gideon 1998:1)

Idealized images of beauty promoted by the mass media are perhaps the strongest normalizing influence that impact men and women’s body images and act as a catalyst 22

for their dissatisfaction with their bodies. Images normalize in that “they function as models against which the self continually measures, judges, ‘disciplines’, and ‘corrects’ itself.” (Bordo 2003:25) Rules and images of femininity at one time were transmitted verbally and to an elite. Conduct manuals of the Victorian era served to teach middle and upper class women “intense etiquette standards focused heavily on [feminine] eating habits,…emphasizing proper implements along with avoiding slurping and gorging.”

(Stearns 1997:7) These manuals heavily encouraged restraint on food and sexual appetite.

Contemporary media has replaced the role of conduct manuals in the way it educates women about how to perceive their own bodies and appetite as well as doing this on a massive scale.

We … [are] surrounded by inescapable reinforcement for the proposition that all women must be thin. It flickers before our eyes every waking moment in the estimated 1500 images seen daily by North Americans in print ads, TV programs and commercials, posters, store windows, billboards, movies, sports, magazine features, books, greeting cards, cartoons, and even gag items. (Poulton 1996:74) The fashion and diet industries, in particular, use advertising to communicate to women that if they are to be acceptable to men, to other women, and to themselves, each must achieve a level of thinness that more often than not only dieting can achieve. (Poulton

1996 ) Twiggy helped set a new standard of thinness when she entered the public eye in the 1960s, but this standard as seen on television and in print has become substantially thinner since her departure. Unfortunately, many of today’s images of slenderness females are influenced by and aspire to be are neither real nor natural, thanks to sophisticated technologies that digitally modify images and to invasive cosmetic surgeries. The ability to alter the images of beauty to which women are exposed leaves

them unable to differentiate between what is real and what is fiction and causes them to chase an ideal that is truly unattainable by natural means.

Men are also seduced by a coercive beauty ideal captured in media images. There has been a “(re-) imaging of men in promotional culture, including the objectification and sometimes eroticization of men’s bodies and male/female and gay/straight interchangeability in advertising imagery.” (Monaghan 2005:84) While the normalizing images women have confronted over the last five decades have becoming increasingly thinner, the normalizing images men have confronted since the 1960s have become increasingly bigger and more muscular. The muscularity of Playgirl centerfolds and models, for example, has increased substantially since the 1970s, with the average

Playgirl centerfold “shedding twelve pounds of fat while putting on approximately 27 pounds of muscle over the last twenty–five years.” (Pope 2000:47) Toys and fitness magazines also present images of muscularity to which males aspire. Popular action figure toys, such as G.I. Joe, have hypermasculine physiques, and the vast array of men’s magazines promotes bodybuilding that link health and attractiveness to a chiseled physique. (Pope 2000) Movies and television have been particularly influential in fuelling the obsessions many males have with achieving a muscular physique, with the likes of

Rambo and Schwarzenegger action thrillers on the big screen and muscular stars of the

World Wrestling Federation on the small screen. But the subjects of these images seldom achieve their bodies by natural means; many of them abuse steroids and suffer from eating disorders and other disturbances. Yet the media represents them to the public as images of effortless beauty. In attempting to train their own bodies to conform to muscular ideals, ordinary males too are forced to engage in the same destructive 24

behaviors. Collectively, media images of slender [and muscular bodies] function to train

[people’s, especially men] perceptions of their bodies and teach them that their body is always in need of correcting (Bordo 2003)

Contemporary Interpretations of the Fat Body

Widespread anxieties about the body among males and females are a response to the various discourses in Euro-American society that construct the slender body as the ideal of beauty, health, and sexuality, and the fat body as the epitome of unattractiveness, illness, and asexual or deviant sexuality. Behind a veil of medical rhetoric, the health care community promotes fabrications about the superiority of slenderness. “Fat … has become a moralistic label that is disguised by concerns for health and used as a justification for less than human treatment of anyone given that label.” (Levan 2004:17)

Terms such as “obese”, “morbidly obese” and “overweight” medicalize obesity and imply its undesirability. (Kirkland 2007) The medical community also pathologizes fatness by expounding the health risks associated with being fat, frightening the public into policing their bodies. Despite compelling scientific evidence positing that the relationship between obesity and heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes as correlative only, the public continues to assume fat is a direct cause of these diseases. In fact, one of the biggest challenges that fat people in Euro-American society face is chronic ill-treatment by medical professionals. These professionals continually encourage a “false consciousness” (Heyes 2006:126) about fat and weight loss. This bias underlies the widespread undignified treatment and a neglect of fat patients. Abuse that

fat people may suffer at the hands of their nurses and physicians includes “withholding information, … use of silence as well as verbal castigation.” (Kirkland 2007:23)

Although discrimination and abuse by the health profession is frequent, it is not conduct that many fat people believe is punishable by the law. Ill-treatment by health care professionals is often left unchallenged by fat people, who feel powerless against the discrimination. As a result, preferential treatment for thin people is allowed to continue.

Fat phobia exists in nearly all arenas of Euro-American society and exists in many forms. “Viewed… as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and interpersonal interactions as revolting --- they are agents of abhorrence and disgust.” (LeBesco 2001:75) Societal disgust for fat people underlies our perceptions of them as unsuccessful, financially unstable, lazy, diseased, gluttonous, unproductiveness, and undisciplined. Other associations with fat people are that they are

“slow, stupid, ineffectual, incapable, inefficient, unintelligent, disabled,…deformed.”

(Bovey 1999:74) The distasteful nature of fat is reflected at the level of language as well.

Euphemisms are used in place of the word fat: overweight, obese, heavy, large, voluptuous, zaftig, big boned. (Wann 1998) The shame surrounding fat is so profound that the very word has the ability to offend like no other. Fat people have been rendered nearly invisible in television and film that usually depict a tightly controlled body as most attractive and visually appealing. When they do appear, “fat actors… are … relegated to playing clowns, grotesques, ‘heavies’, and minor character roles.” (Mosher 2001:166) Fat people represent an affront to cultural norms that govern aesthetics and acceptability and are thus rendered undeserving of ‘normal’, visible roles in entertainment. Their perceived unattractiveness and asexuality also excludes them from representation by the fashion 26

and modeling industries whose greatest financial gains are generated from appealing to mainstream notions of beauty and sexuality.

Fat stigmatization exists on more mundane levels, in everyday interactions. Public spaces are often constructed to accommodate thin people. This unwillingness to accommodate them demands that fat people conform their bodies to the size of these spaces. Workplace discrimination is an unfortunate reality for many fat people, as employers use the physical limitations of the workplace as a justification for not hiring people of large size. (Kirkland 2007) Fat people are subject to public ostracization for their weight in the form of physical and verbal abuse, traumatizing them. Stigma can be so traumatizing that it may render them housebound. Agoraphobia, an irrational fear of being in public places, is unusually high in fat people. Bovey writes “the stress caused by being lectured, called names and patronized often by total strangers can prove too much and they retreat to the safety of their homes. This can then turn into a phobic fear of going outside.” (1999:72) The law fails to protect fat people from the discrimination they confront in nearly every sphere. Fat ceases to be a protected trait because fat people are considered to violate the parameters that make an individual deserving of rights.

[The person deserving of legal rights] is a functional person, free of disease, excess, or disablement. This is a person who can work, who will not take more than her share from a collective enterprise, who can control herself, who is healthy, and whose body and movement in the world conform to normalized standard. (Kirkland 2007:5)

At the root of fat hatred in Euro-American society is a preoccupation with the discipline of the body’s uncontrollable impulses, particularly hunger. The corpulent body induces “anxiety about internal processes out of control --- uncontained desire,

unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse.” (Bordo 2003:189) Much of our consciousness about containing our impulses is based on a dichotomy between the body and the mind that exists in classical Western philosophy. The body is an entity separate from the mind and is “the home of the ‘slimy desires of the flesh’” (Bordo 2003:145) as in a voracious appetite for food and desire for sex and affection. The mind, on the other hand, is the centre of an individual’s control. The mind is one’s will or consciousness and is considered to be the nonbody. (Bordo 2003) These entities are constantly at war with each other. Thinness represents the victory of will over the body, a victory that is admired and congratulated in almost every sphere of daily life. The mind-body separation is a gendered concept as the body is traditionally associated with the female while the mind is associated with the male. (Bordo 2003) This gender association helps to explain why the mind and its control has a greater value than the body and its desires in a society that traditionally places greater value on masculinity over femininity. The fat body signals a weakening of the will and hunger spinning out of control. (Bordo 2003) So strong is the fear of losing control over the body that many individuals, particularly those suffering from eating disorders, attempt to kill the desires of the flesh completely. Many anorexics, in starving themselves, strive to attain the goal of not needing to eat at all, of making their bodies disappear in order to control the impulse of hunger. (Bordo 2003 )

Advertisers exploit people’s anxiety about losing control over their hunger and their lives by embedding themes of discipline in their ads. Terms like ‘control’, ‘mastery’ and ‘will power’ are now commonplace in ads about products ranging from cosmetics to household goods to diet food. (Bordo 2003) While the thin body is visible proof that one has used

his or her will to master his or her body and maintained external boundaries, fat “carries the taint of destabilization [and] undisciplined ‘difference’.” (Ulaby 2001:155)

The ability to discipline one’s weight is representative of one’s moral character, as well. “The slenderness idea embodies moral judgments of the proper management of impulse and desire, with body shape and size increasingly being read as a visible indicator of the inner moral self.” (Heyes2006:133) The struggle between the will and the body that takes place inside so many dieters and sufferers of eating disorders is a modern day struggle between good and evil, with the will representing the good and the body representing the evil. Associations between hunger and evil have roots in Judeo-

Christian teachings, where indulgence of the appetite (for food and for sex) was considered a sin.

Scriptural writings Deuteronomy and Leviticus (specifically, the abominations of Leviticus) institute a number of dietary rules for religious believers... Following this, gluttons, or people who are undisciplined eaters, are in violation of Biblical edict and are considered evil. (LeBesco 2004:24) The popular association between fat and dirt has strong moral undertones that also have roots in Judeo-Christian religions. To be fat is to be unclean, and to be unclean is ungodly and a sin. (LeBesco 2004) Morality and the state of the physical body are inseparable in

Western consciousness. Fat people are typically maligned by the mainstream for their perceived immorality because it is believed that they have made a choice to be fat through the lack of will power, failure of motivation, greed and dependence. (LeBesco

2004) Some fat people are able to escape the stigma of moral inferiority, however, and are labeled the ‘fit’ fat. They are individuals who attempt to exercise discipline over their

bodies by controlling their diet and exercise regimes but are fat regardless. Society tends to be more lenient towards these people because, although they are fat, their exertion of

‘will’ makes them healthy and responsible. (LeBesco 2004) Their lack of success is likely attributed, without any medical or scientific evidence, to a genetic predisposition to fat, a factor that is beyond their control. Other fat people are able to escape the stigma of being morally inferior because it is believed that they have not been disciplined properly, that is educated about how to eat right and exercise. It is believed that even if they are knowledgeable, their low socio-economic status precludes them from being able to afford the necessary healthy provisions. (LeBesco 2004) However, in circumstances where being fat is considered completely under one’s control and the person/s in question chooses not to discipline their bodies to conform to mainstream health and aesthetics, as so often is the perception about fat people, the mainstream qualifies them as morally reprehensible.

Fat Admiration: A Brief Introduction

In the face of deep cultural anxieties about the corpulent body and the construction of norms of beauty that render the fat body deviant, a relatively unexplored sexual subculture has emerged that has resignified the fat body as a site of beauty and sexuality. Fat Admiration is a community of men and women who view fat bodies as desirable. (Gates 2000) Although Fat Admirers are predominantly males who have an erotic interest in fat women, there is a growing community of females who find fat men

sexually exciting. (LeBesco 2004) Both a political movement and a sexual preference, it subverts mainstream norms of health, beauty and sexuality.

Fat Admiration, also known as Fat Acceptance or Fat Pride, began at a grassroots level in the 1960s and 1970s. Fat activism in the era of the 1960s and the 1970s strived to identify and change, at the level of legislation and on a day-to-day basis, the fundamental social values that shaped the discrimination that fat people experience. (Fishman 1998)

Two pivotal fat activist groups emerged to help change the perception of fat and fat bodies, The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) and The Fat

Underground. The NAAFA was founded in 1969 and led the Fat Pride movement. It is a national grassroots organization “devoted to improving the quality of life for fat people through public education, research, advocacy, and member support … they re-appropriate fat as a term of worth and value, in an attempt to rescue it from its present pejorative status.” (LeBesco 2004:36) From its inception, the interests of the NAAFA have been primarily political. The organization has attempted to affect change through

“Washington-based protests for civil rights, lobbying health care professionals for tolerance and acceptance, organizing against health care/insurance discrimination, and bringing to light the political aspects of all ‘scientific’ weight loss programs.”

(LeBesco 2004:37) The NAAFA was a precursor to the Fat Underground. Feminist thinking and active in Los Angeles during the 1970s, this organization “asserted that

American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women, particularly their sensuality and their sexuality.” (Fishman 1998:1) From its beginnings, its five core members, Sara

Fishman, Ariana Manow, Sheri Fram, Judy Freespirit, Gudrun Fonfa, Lynn McAfee,

targeted what they believed to be the mythical nature of mainstream health claims regarding fat and dieting.

From the start, our [organization] took a confrontational stance with regard to the health professions. We accused them-doctors, psychologists, and public health officials-of concealing and distorting the facts about fat that were contained in their own professional research journals. In doing so, they betrayed us and played into the hands of the multibillion dollar weight-loss industry, which exploits fear of fat and contempt toward fat people as a means to make more money. We asserted that most fat people are fat because of biology, not eating behavior, and that the "cure"-dieting- actually causes diseases, ranging from heart attack to eating disorders. We rejected weight loss as a solution to fat people's problems. (Fishman 1998: 1)

In order to advance its promotion of fat liberation with the health profession, diet industry and the collective, the group used scientific fat positive literature, presented themselves on radio and television, and harassed local weight loss institutions. (Fisherman 1998) The confrontational, feminist nature of The Fat Underground was not entirely well received by the NAAFA, however. “Although some of the leadership privately applauded us, officially we were told to tone down our delivery, and also to be more circumspect about our feminist ideology, which most NAAFA members were not yet ready for.”(Fisherman

1998:1) Although The Fat Underground ended as an organization in 1982, with the death of one of its founding members, it left a lasting impact on Fat Admiration as a political movement. The NAAFA and the Fat Underground paved the way for other activists to fight for the acceptance of fat people.

Although the NAAFA can be credited with making fat acceptance a social matter, it is the Fat Underground and other similar activists who have changed Fat Admiration into a politicized social movement. While the NAAFA advocates fair treatment and

tolerance for fat people, it fails “to celebrate fatness … it simply tries to make life in a fat

body more bearable.” (LeBesco 2004:45) Activists like the NAAFA who merely promote

the acceptance of the fat body instead of embracing its aesthetic qualities and sensuality

are ‘fat assimilationists’. (LeBesco 2004) The fat assimilationist, if given the choice

between being fat or thin, may even choose to be thin because they may still view fat as

being problematic. (LeBesco 2004) The Fat Underground and other similar activist

groups, on the other hand, subvert mainstream beauty norms by reconstituting the fat

body as a site of beauty and sexuality. They get enjoyment out of being fat and do not

find it problematic. This reconstruction of the meaning of the fat body qualifies these

activists as fat liberationists. For LeBesco “a fat ‘liberationist’ celebrates fatness and tries

to secure for the fat a positively valued experience of difference from the norm.” (2004:

42) The Fat Underground is considered to be liberatory in that it strives to show fat

women as not just beautiful faces, but also as possessing beautiful bodies. (Fisherman

1998) Susan Stinson, a Texas born novelist who has written a host of fat positive

literature, has been instrumental in redefining the fat body in the face of fat

discrimination. Her book, entitled Belly Songs: In Celebration of Fat Women (1993), is a compilation of writings that “[examine] fat oppression and celebrate the beauty, strength, and sensuality of fat women.” (LeBesco 2004:47) A group of fat lesbians created a Fat

Admiration magazine titled FaT GiRL: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want them. “FaT GiRL has steamy stories, great roundtable discussions on tough topics, interviews with famous women…” (Wann 1998:187), as well as “… photographic depictions of… generously fleshy thighs, big naked butts, big women with tattoos and multiple body piercings enmeshed in sadomasochistic leather-and-link ensembles being

fisted, and fat women erotically feeding each other forbidden foods.” (LeBesco 2004:49)

The message the women in this publication promote is that being fat is a choice they happily make, and that being thin is an unappealing prospect. Marilyn Wann and

Katherine Gates are also two notable fat liberationists who have produced literature that supports a fat admiring lifestyle. Wann’s book Fat!So?: Because you DON’T have to

APOLOGIZE for your Size! (1998) mixes science and light hearted humor in discussing fat stigma and the myths surrounding fatness, including the pseudoscience behind claims that fat is unhealthy and causal links between fat and disease. More importantly, she discusses how one can embrace their fatness. She asserts in the introduction, “I’ve learned that you can absolutely be happy and healthy and successful --- and fat.” (Wann

1998:12) Katherine Gates wrote a chapter titled “Fat Admiration and Feeders” in her book Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex (2000) where she describes the subculture of Fat Admiration, both as a political movement and as a personal lifestyle choice. She describes the eroticism of fat from the perspective of her and other Fat Admirers. The Fat

Admiration movement has expanded in recent years, breeding online magazines like

Dimensions, weblogs by members of the Fat Admiration community, pornography catering to fat people, Fat Admiration novels, and social events for members of the community.

While Fat Admiration represents a political movement to many, it is simply a sexual lifestyle for others. Fat admirers delight in the nuances of the fat body. In the documentary Fat Girls and Feeders, one fat woman who is frequently the object of the desires of Fat Admirers asserts, “FAs love the curves, the cascading rolls of flesh… Some

of them sort of fantasy that the cellulite… They like the feel of it… I must feel like velvet to them because that’s the way they are touching me, like… like I’m made of some very plush material.” (Fat Girls and Feeders 2003:00:00 – 00:34) One Fat Admirer states about fat women, “I love everything about fat women, really: big asses, lots of wide double chins, um… a bit of wiggle and a wobble as she walks, um, huge stomachs… the bigger, the better really.” (Fat Girls and Feeders 2003:06:37) Heterosexual men and women who desire fat are referred to Fat Admirers, while homosexual males with this desire are referred to as Chubby Chasers. (Gates 2000) Fat induces a number of sexual fantasies and rituals deemed deviant by standards of mainstream sexuality. Some FAs take these rituals and fantasies to extremes, as is the case with a subgroup of Fat Admirers known as

Feeders. Feederism is a lifestyle that is controversial within the FA community because it treads the line between consent and coercion and can lead to conformity and death. (Fat

Girls and Feeders 2003) Feeders are typically men who want to make their partners, known as Feedees, as fat as possible. (Gates 2000) The goal of many Feeders is to make him or her fat to the point of immobility and therefore completely dependent on their

Feeder. Feederism can be sexually exciting for the individuals involved but it has been shown to also be physically hazardous to the Feedee’s life. It is the perception of many

FAs that Feeder behavior is “insidious and predatory. They presume that this activity is not fully consensual and that the [individual] is being taken advantage of in an area where

[they] may be somewhat weak.” (Gates 2000:194) The beliefs and practices of Fat

Admirers create fat positive discourses, subject positions, and the associated identities.

Methodology

Sociological research on the body in Western beauty culture has been shaped fundamentally by Michael Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity. “In the work of

Foucault… the body is treated as a primary site for investigating how power works.”

(Davis 1995:47) Power is not the possession of subjects, or something that one individual or groups of individuals use to oppress another party. Rather, “modern power… works at the micro – level of the body, through discipline … the body is a good place to explore how different subjectivities are constructed and authorized as truth through the disciplinary discourses of power.” (Davis 1995:47) The modern beauty culture that demands we discipline our bodies through diet and incites us to monitor every detail of our lifestyle is reflective of Foucault’s concept of the panopticon. In a panopticon, a process of subjectification, power individualizes, normalizes, and hierarchicalizes individuals under maximum visibility. (Mansfield 2000) Under a critical gaze that polices the smallest details of their lives, individuals are separated, their behavior judged against measures of acceptability. They are then placed in comparison to each other. Individuals become self-conscious under this critical gaze, in fear of being deemed abnormal should their behavior not conform. They turn in on themselves and self-monitor. In the dieting panopticon, those who manage to sufficiently discipline their bodies are rewarded with social power, belonging, and acceptance. Those who have not appropriately disciplined their bodies are deprived of these benefits. Self-surveillance produces docile bodies that is, “[a body] with uniform shape, comportment, and ornamentation ‘against the backdrop of a pervasive sense of bodily deficiency’.” (Heyes 2006:132) Power/knowledge is mobilized, in the form of discourses, in order to create and discipline subjects. In the

modern dieting culture, individuals are subjected to theories about the dangers of fat promoted by the medical health community, commercial dieting industry, educational institutions, organized religion, and even peers and family that coerce them to monitor their lifestyles closely. Individuals embrace these theories as truths, when in fact they represent “false consciousness.” (Heyes 2006:129) The power that constructs our identities continues to function in insidious ways because it is left unchallenged by its subjects. The key to building new identities is

to make [ourselves] aware of the sorts of selfhoods that are being constructed for [us]. Armed with this self-awareness, we can construct a fictional or hypothetical selfhood outside of, in pure hostility to, the conventions modern life seeks to normalize. (Mansfield 2000:63) Whether Fat Admiration is successful in constructing new selfhoods that transgress the norms of the mainstream beauty culture is a question I investigate in the next section of this project.

The possibility of completely subverting existing norms in the creation of new identities is an inquiry that Judith Butler considers. According to Butler, identity is established through performative actions (Asbill 2006) Resistant performances, like those carried out in the Fat Admiration community through new language and behavior that reinforces the positivity of fatness, theoretically makes it possible for new fat subjectivities to be produced. Lacy Asbill who, inspired by Butler’s model of performativity, studied the lives of American fat burlesque dancers to understand if they were able to successfully create and sustain positive fat identities explores Butler’s theory. Asbill’s findings show that given the proper social conditions the dancers were able to construct positive fat subjectivities. “The explicit sexuality of the burlesque stage,

the public nature of the performance, and the transgressive history of the art form all function to support a new, positive vision of fat sexual embodiment.” (Asbill 2006:17)

The admiration of the sexuality of the fat burlesque dancers’ bodies by their audience justifies Butler’s assertion that to establish one’s identity, there must be a reaffirmation of that identity by supportive others. (Asbill, 2006) Asbill revealed, however, that although the dancers were able to carry their positive body image into environments that were hostile to fat, some of them also continued to be vulnerable to fat negative discourses.

They were ambivalent about their body image, feeling both proud of their fatness and uncomfortable with it. This finding calls into question whether it is possible to fully resist traditional values through the production of new values. It remains to be seen if the subversive nature of the Fat Admiration subculture completely transforms existing body norms or if those norms are reproduced in new ways.

Kathleen LeBesco also considers how resistant performances can build new identities, particularly through the use of language. She demonstrates “how language is used to carry out the revolution that replaces the spoiled identity … of fatness --- so powerful that even fat people abhor their own bodies --- with a more inhabitable subject position.” (LeBesco 2004:3) She investigates communities of people, including Fat

Admiration communities, that challenge traditional notions of fat bodies through their discourse in order to construct an alternate social reality. While some discourses disturb mainstream norms only on a surface level and serve to leave the dominant ideology intact

(LeBesco 2004), other discourses prove to liberate the fat body from fat-negative rhetoric. LeBesco celebrates this progress in the rights of fat people with caution however. She asserts, “I am aware, however, that the process of gaining the upper hand, 38

or redefining the fat body as palatable, will in turn produce its own subset of unthinkable, unliveable, and abject bodies.” (LeBesco 2004:5) The construction of a norm always necessitates the construction of the category of Other, whose members have differential access to power and acceptance. Although Fat Admiration communities provide environments for socially deviant people to find normalcy, it is possible for the existence in these communities of a hierarchy of desirability among fat bodies. As I go into my investigation of fat admiration communities, I try to understand what, if any, fat bodies are considered deviant.

Methods

Using discourse analysis, I investigate the ways in which fat-positive subjectivities are constructed in the Fat Admiration subculture. Discourse analysis studies “language and texts as sites in which social meanings are created and produced and social identities are formed.” (Tonkiss 1998:246) I drew my data from January 2, 2008 to May 2, 2008 from discussion forums associated with two popular Fat Admiration websites, Biggercity.com and Dimensions. Biggercity.com is a website targeted at fat gay males and their admirers.

In addition to providing a forum for the discussion of various topics relating to Fat

Admiration, the website allows members to create blogs, post videos and photos of themselves, and provides them with various social networking opportunities. Dimensions is a popular online Fat Admiration magazine that offers a discussion forum as well as a chat room, an online shop for purchasing Fat Admiration pornography, a forum for posting erotic fiction, and providing news columns about fashion and health. The

majority of its subscribers are heterosexual. I chose to analyze discussion forums for a couple of reasons. First of all, these discussion forums provided an excellent cross section of perspectives about the fat body and fat sexuality as seen through the eyes of Fat

Admirers and fat people. And finally, discussion forums provided me insight into a variety of matters relevant to Fat Admiration.

Data was derived from members’ posts to discussion threads. The discussion forum attached to Dimensions is the largest on the Internet, and the four-month period I designated myself to gather data --- from January 2, 2008 to May 2, 2008 --- would not have allowed me enough time to read every post. The search engine on the website, a mechanism that allows an individual to find a specific word, group of words, or topic, aided me greatly in the process of gathering data. I entered every theme I wanted to investigate into the search engine. This search drew up a group of posts that contained that theme. Themes I investigated related to typological classification, attractiveness of fat, sexual practices, and body type discrimination. The information I discovered in these posts did trigger new inquiries that I further investigated. Biggercity.com was a smaller discussion forum and did not have a search engine I could utilize. I initially limited my investigation of this forum by looking at thread titles that overtly contained one of the themes in which I was interested. I then widened my data search to threads that could possibly be connected to one of my themes. Analyzing the linguistic meanings in these texts provided me with a broader understanding of sociocultural themes concerning fat- positive identity formation and the production of new norms of beauty and sexuality.

Typological Classification 40

The creation of new subjectivities may begin at the level of language, because naming an entity brings it into existence. One way we create new identities is through the labels we use to describe ourselves. The Fat Admiration subculture has a unique typological classification system for categorizing its participants. Some of these labels involve the resignification of the word fat and its related terms to construct it as positive and aesthetically pleasing. Not all of these categories have stable parameters and there is debate in the community over membership criterion.

A Fat Admirer or FA is generally considered to be someone who has an attraction to fat. Anne Marie, a member of Dimensions, identified FAs as being “either a man or a woman who prefers a fat partner.” (Dimensions). She also points out that Female Fat

Admirers are uniquely classified as FFAs and that the label FA generally refers to a heterosexual male with a desire for fat females. (Dimensions) FFAs are heterosexual females with an interest in fat males. Many members of the Dimensions community seem acutely aware FFAs are in the minority on the Dimensions community blog. However, one member asserts “there are a lot more FFAs out there than we think...FFAs who don't know about the term FFA. FFAs who think they're alone [in] liking really fat men. FFAs who just need a little encouragement to follow their dreams...” (Wantabelly, Dimensions)

FA is an all encompassing term, and some females in the community use it to categorize themselves. For the purposes of simplicity, the abbreviation FA will be used to classify both female and male admirers, unless otherwise specified, throughout this paper.

The definition of a Chubby Chaser or CC is disputed among Fat Admiration communities. Sociological literature posits that a CC is a homosexual male with an attraction to a fat homosexual male. Although this definition was recognized a couple of times on the Dimensions forum, the term in this community is more commonly used synonymously with Fat Admirer. On Dimensions, male and female admirers alike are considered Chubby Chasers, and the term ‘chubby’ is used synonymously with the word fat. Despite extensive searching for more information on the term Chubby Chaser on the forum, I discovered that the term is generally not a popular one and is seldom used to identify members of the community. The website Biggercity.com has a forum that is devoted to Chubby Chasers whose members are primarily gay males attracted to fat gay males. The definition found in sociological literature is sustained through the evidence found on this forum. While FAs are not obligated to be of a particular weight in order to be considered an admirer, and weight gain will not compromise his or her status, it is a different situation for Chubby Chasers. Even if he has an attraction to homosexual fat males, it appears to be possible for him to be considered too fat to fit the label of a

Chubby Chaser by other people. BigBearLvrVA perceives himself as a Chubby Chaser, but was once told by another member that he was too large for this category.

(Biggercity.com) The border between Chaser and Chub appears to be the product of personal opinion. A male who is considered too fat to be a Chaser but has an attraction for Chubs may be considered a Chub4Chub.

A Feeder is an individual who fetishizes the fat body, eroticizing weight gain and feeding. (Anne Marie, Dimensions) Feeding his or her partner with the intention of making them larger produces sexual excitement for the Feeder. The Feeder category is 42

gender inclusive, though it is more common to find male feeders than female ones.

Some members in the Dimensions community argue that Feederism is purely sexual, carried out with the intention of inducing arousal in one or both partners. They argue that simply providing food to their partner does not categorize them as a Feeder, but rather enters them into another category, the Encourager. However, one member, Renaissance

Man, asserts that Encouragers represent one of several facets of Feederism, including

Forcers, Immobilizers, True Feeders, and Fantasy Feeders. (Dimensions) There is less discussion about Encouragers on both the Dimensions and Biggercity.com so there is less insight into the meaning of the term. Like the term Gainer, Encourager is a label that is rooted in Chubby Chaser communities, particularly among gay males. It is used in heterosexual FA communities to refer to both females and males.

Encouragers are those people who do not go out of their way to put food down the throat of their loved one or object of their feeding. They make sure that food is available and will try to make the Feedee feel at ease with their eating, as well as their body. (Renaissance Man, Dimensions) Unlike Feeders, it is thought that Encouragers do not assume the dominant role in their sexual relations with Gainers.

Sociological literature puts forth the idea that the categories of Big Beautiful

Woman (BBW) and Super Sized Big Beautiful Woman (SSBW) are defined by clear size and weight parameters, but in reality, these parameters are not so clear. BBW is the most encompassing term for a fat woman and is usually one whose clothing size is within conventional plus sizes from a 14/16 to a 26/28. (Anne Marie, Dimensions) Some believe the minimal weight parameter is 200 pounds. An SSBBW is usually someone who is over

350 – 400 pounds and beyond conventional clothing sizes over a size 28. (Anne Marie,

Dimensions) Many of the fat women on Dimensions classified themselves as a BBW or

SSBBW without stating their weight or clothing size. Some members showed confusion over which category they belonged to, stating they were either a BBW or SSBW depending on one’s interpretation of their weight. Still, some women did not classify themselves as a BBW or SSBBW at all, identifying themselves by weight, clothing size, or by another descriptor. One member, Lestamore, identified herself by her weight and went on to state that she “hadn’t decided if she approved of the BBW terminology.”

(Dimensions) This reluctance to categorize oneself is shared by many members of the discussion boards and may be why some fat women choose not to use labels.

A Big Handsome Man or BHM is typically the object of admiration and partner to an FFA. There was no mention of this term on Biggercity.com, as it is a website that caters to the interests of homosexual men. On Dimensions, BHMs share their own discussion room with FFAs. Many individuals feel a BHM should not weigh less than

250 pounds. Men in the mid 300s are considered to be extremely large. Other people use clothing size as a more accurate measure for classifying individuals. A BHM is thought to fit into clothing sizes one is unable to find in mainstream clothing stores. “If we're judging clothing sizes, I'd guess that big starts around 3XL, maybe 2XL. You can always find an XL in a store, and 2XLs are getting more common. But you've almost always got to go online for 3XL and bigger.” (Tcusbob, Dimensions) The term Super Sized Big

Handsome Man or SSBHM is infrequently used on Dimensions but refers to men over

350 pounds. Most people on the boards agree that the term big is relative and admit that the qualifying criterion they identify for the BHM category is subjective.

The terms Bear and Chub, in their most general senses, refer to a homosexual fat man. But there are some vital differences between the two terms. One of the most important features that distinguish a Bear from a Chub is hairiness of the body. “If one is smooth but stocky to obese then [he] is a chub but not a bear… heavy set/stock/obese with lots of hair on body is a bear. “(Bigman4yngrslim, Biggercity.com) A related term,

Cub, refers to a “ … young guy [usually under 30] who is bear or will in time grow to be a bear. “ (Bigman4yngrslim, Biggercity.com) Besides hairiness, body type is another distinguishing feature between the two categories. Some individuals on Biggercity.com thought a Bear’s body was stockier but also more solidly built than that of a Chub.

Californication, a member on Biggercity.com, thinks a Chub’s body is softer and not as compact as a Bear’s. (Biggercity.com) For some individuals, the difference between a

Bear and a Chub may have nothing to do with appearance at all, as is the case for

Computatoe. “I believe that neither weight nor hairiness has to do with being a Bear. I believe it is all in the attitude. What I mean by Attitude, is the way you carry yourself and the way you act.” (Biggercity.com) Attitude was mentioned several times on the board as a key distinguishing feature of Bears, though very few people defined what they meant by attitude. In terms of weight parameters, none are agreed upon except that most people would disqualify a man under 200 pounds from being a Bear or a Chub. There are a wide variety of differences among members as far as the weight a Bear or a Chub should be.

Some members prefer to use waist size as a more accurate measure of a Bear or Chub.

Cyrano from Biggercity.com believes that a man whose waist falls between 56 to 65 inches is a Chub, and 66 inches and above qualifies as a Super Chub. (Biggercity.com)

Definitions of a Bear and a Chub offered by members are based on their anecdotal

knowledge, and most feel their guidelines are not meant to encompass other people’s feelings about the categories.

The term Gainer is one used on both the Dimensions and Biggercity.com forums, while Feedee is a term used primarily by members of Dimensions. The term Feedee is often used interchangeably with Gainer on Dimensions because these terms share a common characteristic in that both types of individuals intentionally gain weight.

However, some members see a distinction between the two terms. One member posits that Feedees get an erotic thrill from the act of being fed by their partners and the submissive role they play in their sexual encounters, whereas Gainers get an erotic thrill from getting fatter. (Edx, Dimensions) On Dimensions, both females and males can be

Gainers. However, the term was originated to label homosexual males, which is acknowledged by members on the Dimensions forum. On the Biggercity.com, members also draw a distinction between Gainers and Feedees. Feedees are thought to engage in force-feeding and subjugation to their partners, whereas the Gainer does not engage in these activities. (Hotblkbear, Biggercity.com) Feedees and Gainers occupy controversial positions in the Fat Admiration subculture because of the physical and psychological consequences, such as immobility, dependency and loss of self-esteem that may befall them as a result of their activities.

To admire fat may be looked upon strangely by the mainstream beauty culture, for fat is certainly not considered something worthy of admiration. Mainstream beauty culture dedicates itself to eradicating fat completely. The label of Fat Admirer subverts this norm by redefining fat as something that garners appreciation and admiration. Under

this evolving classification system, fat is not a taboo term, but rather, is a term spoken into fat positive community as complimentary. Terms such as Feeder, Feedee, Gainer, and Encourager are identity forming words that take stigmatized notions like orality and weight gain and empower them. Terms such as Big Beautiful Woman, Super Sized

Beautiful Woman, Big Handsome Man, and Super Sized Handsome Man also transgress the values of the dominant beauty culture. Using the term big in conjunction with descriptors like beautiful and handsome defies fat-negative discourses. These classifications rescue fat from the connotations of unattractiveness that are so often associated with it in mainstream Euro-American culture. These labels help engender a form of human subjectivity that announces one is fat and that fatness is what makes an aesthetically pleasing and sexual subjectivity.

The Attractiveness of Fat Bodies

Discussion about the aesthetics and sexuality of the fat body on the discussion boards reveals the subversive nature of the Fat Admiration subculture. The forums provide a venue for individuals to share what it is about the fat body that they find desirable. Whereas the mainstream beauty culture finds the largeness of the fat body a natural abomination, FAs delight in the sheer size of the fat body. One member of

Dimensions, PrettySteve, expresses his admiration of this quality in a post he wrote about a BBW’s picture.

… OMG! You are definitely too massive for me to handle. I would definitely need my twin brother to help me handle all of those sexy massive huge curvy hips and massive buns…! I can hardly wait until you

hit the 800 lb mark you sexy massive chunk of love & phatness.... (Dimensions) PrettySteve’s description of “massive huge curves” as “sexy” redefines the fat body as a site of sexual pleasure and desirability. In addition, describing her as a “massive chunk of love and phatness” reveals his perception of her body as one that is worthy of love and as an object of beauty. Members on Biggercity.com also describe a sexual attraction to the sheer size of the fat body. “Big belly, big bum, big thighs, big tits and round cute face specially smooth or little haired guys, mmmm they drive me crazy.” (Kissme,

Biggercity.com)

Besides size, FAs enjoy other physical indicators of a body that is fat or is growing fatter. Cellulite and stretch marks are two of these indicators that are erotic for

FAs. Stretch marks, according to one Dimensions member, are the best marker of “… sudden and explosive growth.” (New Exposures, Dimensions) Moreover, in individuals who are trying to gain weight, they may be regarded as “badges of honor to be proud of.”

(HDAngel115, Dimension) And while many female consumers spend millions of dollars a year on products which promise (and fail) to banish cellulite from the body, FAs celebrate cellulite as an attractive aspect of the body of many FAs. One Dimensions member described a BBW’s cellulite as “rippling like water” (Ba216), an image which conjures the beauty of nature. Cellulite is not only beautiful, but is perceived by some

FAs as the ideal of sensuality. Redhotphatgirl describes cellulite as “the stuff butt lover's dreams are made of.” (Dimensions)

The majority of Fat Admirers are attracted to the fleshiness of the fat body, that is to fat in abundance. The double chin is one area of excess fat that is desirable to FAs and

CCs. Individuals believe double chins enhance the beauty of the face and in general describe them as being sexy. Some individuals encourage others to post pictures of themselves to show off their “double, triple, or more chins.” (Paul, Dimensions) Fat rolls, or folds of skin usually found on the abdomen region, generate much admiration and sexual desire among many FAs. One member’s post, Midnightcomet, in regards to a picture of a BBW, Chocolate, reveals the arousal he experiences at the sight of her rolls.

There are just so many gorgeous, thick rolls of fat on you, Chocolate. I'd say that I wouldn't know where to start...but I'd figure it out fast! You are making that lucky guy absolutely disappear under your mammoth figure, and the pic of you in the shower...water cascading off your magnificent curves. Picture quality be damned...your hotness is more than visible, and thank you!!! (Dimensions)

In describing her girth as “gorgeous”, “magnificent”, and “hot”, Midnightcomet’s discourse paints an image of Chocolate’s fat body as aesthetically pleasing and sexually desirable. Large breasts are an important attraction for FAs in both the heterosexual and homosexual communities. While large breasts on females are desirable in the mainstream beauty culture, they must be firm, uplifted, and on a body that is otherwise tightly- managed. Among FAs, however, “the heavenly set of breasts is big, soft, very low- hanging. Perfect when they rest on a big round belly.” (Harryjones, Dimensions) In the

Chubby Chaser community, males describe an attraction to ‘man-tits’, fatty pectorals that are similar to women’s breasts in appearance and texture. The appreciation for man-tits contradicts the ideals of the mainstream beauty culture, in which men desire to have a firm, muscular chest. Some members of the Chubby Chaser community report feeling embarrassed about their own chests in mainstream society but were pleasantly surprised

to find out there is a community of people that finds them attractive. LP1378 is one member who shared this experience on the forum.

I've always been very self-conscious about my man-tits. Let's just say I tend not to wear many white T-shirts in public. But, once I found the chub/bear scene I noticed that manboobs were an object of attraction for some men (And a surprising number of women too, go figure. My ex- girlfriend loved mine). Ironically, while I'm ambivalent about my own, I really love them on other guys. Especially like seeing a nice set of manboobs poking out of an oxford shirt. I'm still self-conscious about mine at times, but I like showing them off for guys who appreciate them. (Biggercity.com) While unable to relinquish all feelings of negativity towards his body, LP1378 has been able to develop an appreciation for them in the company of supportive others. And he reveals his attraction for other men’s man-tits. The fat stomach, otherwise known as the belly, is a favorite body part of both males and females on the discussion boards. For some, like Chubsonly from Biggercity.com, there is eroticism to the way the stomach moves.

I love bellies, they are the beauty in this world...When I see a chubby man walking in the street I cant have enough of looking at that nice belly shaking up and down, it so much turns me on. (Chubsonly, Biggercity.com) For other members, such as Mozart97 from Dimensions, it is the hang of the fat stomach that they find erotic. “I…find large hanging bellies to be very sexy, much like a very large breast!” (Mozart97, Dimensions) Topics revolving around member’s sexual attraction and admiration for voluptuous parts of the body shed light on preferences that run contradictory to the sensibilities of the dominant beauty culture, where a tightly- controlled body is the ideal. Fat Admirers reconstruct the meaning of the fat body by revering stigmatized aspects of the fat body. What repulses the mainstream about the fat

body --- its size, its fleshiness --- is what Fat Admirers find aesthetically pleasing and erotic.

The creation of new norms of beauty and sexuality are not only evidenced in the attitudes that FAs exhibit towards the fat body. The perception people on the social networking sites have of their own fat bodies as well as the fat bodies of others confirms the construction of new norms. The Fat Admiration subculture has the ability to transform a fat person’s body image, allowing them to develop a new appreciation for parts of their body they would have liked to eliminate.

I was once a huge f'n kid. Then I lost lotsa weight in my late teens/early 20s, but the skin stuck with me. Even when I was hittin' the gym, and running everyday the man boobs still hung on.

Now that I've found out that there's a "market" for big guys I started to like em' in a kinky sort of way. Now that I've seen big older men with a set of honkers (who I'd love to cream on) I feel alright with the prospect of my own hairy knockers becoming a sex object. (Mtron, Biggercity.com)

Mtron, a gay fat male, harbored shame for his ‘man boobs’ or man-tits, but since discovering a supportive environment that finds them attractive, has come to embrace them as an object of sexual desire. The Dimensions forum similarly is filled with individuals who not only accept their fat bodies but as well, openly flaunt them in front of

FAs. To attract the attention of FAs, BBWs, SSBBWs, BHMs, and SSBHMs all post revealing, provocative photos and videos of themselves. The photos, videos and corresponding captions reveal the pride that these fat individuals feel in relation to their bodies. The following is a typical post of a BBW on the Dimensions board. It is a post that includes photos of the BBW scantily clad.

My tight sheer lingerie is too small to stay down over my big belly, my boobs kept falling out, and the tiny thong doesn't cover much at all... you're sure to get a pleasing eyeful of all my delicious bulging curves while I put on a little show from my bed! (Ayracelis, Dimensions) Ayracelis’s words contextualize her fat body as a site of eroticism, one she takes pleasure in revealing. She uses her fat body to sexually arouse her audience. Her explicit descriptions of the expansiveness of her body and its nudity show that she interprets herself as worthy of sexual desire and as a sexual subject because of her fat. While fat may be considered to be a hindrance to an individual’s sensuality and physical attractiveness in mainstream society, individuals on the forums feel that their fat facilitates their desirability.

There are a variety of reasons why FAs are attracted to fat. Many FAs are unable to qualify their attraction to fat. They simply feel that fat is attractive and choose not to dissect this preference. Other FAs go into detail about the reasons behind their attraction to fat. Some FAs felt that the vastness of the fat body gives an individual more to enjoy.

As one member asserted, “for me it's a more to cuddle, more to love, and more to touch, kinda thing.” (Missaf, Dimensions) The perceived powerfulness of the fat body is another attraction for FAs. They perceive strength in fat bodies that they feel is lacking in thin people. “Skinny women are like pencils. Fragile, weak and uptight.”

(CurvaceousBBWLover, Dimensions) One FA cited that his attraction to a fat stomach on a BBW was that it resembled a large breast, which he found erotic. (Mozart97,

Dimensions) A few members stated they enjoyed the way fat moves when a person moves. They thought that fat people have a “good ole wiggle jiggle” (Free2beme04,

Dimensions) when they walk. Among the variety of reasons why FAs are attracted to fat,

there are five that emerged with great frequency on the discussion forums and these are femininity, masculinity, softness, aesthetics, and sensuality/eroticism.

Many FAs revere the fat body as being feminine, and consider its womanliness to be its most attractive feature. They see fat as the quality that divides the feminine from the masculine. “What separates men and women in body is the curves, which fat enhances.” (Moonchild, Dimensions) Many FAs define the masculine form by the hardness of muscle. The feminine form, by contrast, is defined by the softness of the body, a softness that only fat can provide. Some BBWs also link their fat to their ability to bring new life into the world, another feminine trait.

Like it or not, I've got life-giving fat by design. No matter what, I have proportionally large breasts and legs and hips…

What's more important than asking WHY, oh WHY, was I cursed with these legs, is that I can look at my body and see its potential for offering comfort, sexuality, life. And that's amazing and admirable. If someone else doesn't like it, screw them. (TheSadeianLinguist, Dimensions)

TheSadieanLinguist does not understand her “large breasts and legs and hips” as unattractive, but rather as potential towards having children. Her recognition of the connection between fat and the ability to birth is a connection that has been recognized and admired since the Stone Age, manifested by fertility figures that depict voluptuous women. It is this appreciation for the birthing potential of her fat body that allows her to mentally move past its presumed unattractiveness. She is unable to feel ‘cursed’ once she sees her body’s capacity for something more meaningful. Because of its curviness and life giving potential, the fat woman’s body is considered to be “the embodiment of femininity in its most perfect form.” (Jack Skellington, Dimensions)

The fat body may also be considered the embodiment of masculinity, which makes fatness attractive to many FAs and CCs. Fat male bodies have increasingly come to be considered symbolic of spoiled masculinity by the mainstream because individuals see the fat male body as resembling the female form. However, it is the girth or size of the fat male body that makes it masculine for some FAs.

Some would argue that fat FEMINIZES the male body by making the tits bigger, hips wider, ass bigger, body softer. A beer belly can look like a pregnancy. But I agree with you that big guys do seem more masculine, probably because of the size factor, since we all observe growing up that men are bigger than women. (Nightowl147, Biggercity.com)

Traditional gender ideology underlies Nightowl147’s perception that size connotes masculinity. The shape and texture of the fat male body may remind him of a womanly form, with its “tits bigger, hips wider, ass bigger, body softer.” However, the largeness of the body is in keeping with cultural assumptions about men and women’s relative size to each other --- namely that a man should display physical dominance over a woman through his size. Many FFAs appreciate BHMs for their size because they feel

“enveloped when [being held] by [a fat man].” (Sandie Zitkus, Dimensions ) The fat male body is considered to be masculine for its hirsutism because “being fat can cause you to grow more body hair… having more body hair is considered masculine.” (ChaserKCMO,

Biggercity.com) Members of the discussion forums point out that figures considered to be masculine in culture, such as football players, sumo wrestlers, and weightlifters, have bodies that have large stomachs. The association between fat and masculinity in the Fat

Admiration subculture creates a male aesthetic that challenges mainstream expectations that male bodies must be tight and muscular.

Many FAs enjoy fat bodies because they feel it is soft to the touch. Softness was a popular reason given by FAs regarding their attraction to fat. What makes the softness of fat appealing is the associated qualities that make it enjoyable to touch.

I can't speak for anyone else of course, but I can tell you what I find attractive about chubbies. I love the softness and warmth. Yes, it may sound a bit corny, but I do find the softness of a chubby very comforting. The only thing I like hard and solid on a chubby is his cock; everything else must be soft. (Jmel42, Biggercity.com)

I guess the feel of someone fat snuggling you [is what makes it appealing]. You feel all warm and soft and cozy and you just want to fall asleep. (Coop, Dimensions)

As Jmel42’s post reveals, there is a correlation between softness and security or

‘comfort’. And both Jmel42 and Coop are drawn to the warmth fat bodies give off. Coop enjoys this warmth when in intimate contact with a fat person, when ‘snuggling’ with them. Snuggling or ‘cuddling’ was a big attraction for CCs on Biggercity.com, in particular. The warmth and comfort of the fat body may remind FAs of the motherly comfort and warmth they may have received in their childhood. (Gates 2000) More than likely, however, this warmth and comfort, encapsulated by fat, may simply appeal to our base human needs for love, protection, and home. The endorsements of Jmel42 and Coop recreate the fat body as one that is inhabitable and provides feelings of comfort and security.

Many FAs feel that fat bodies are more aesthetically pleasing than thin bodies, a rebellion against mainstream notions of beauty. Many of these FAs think fat and fat people are beautiful. Typical posts remarked that “fat… is so beautiful to look at”

(Ssbbwlover2, Dimensions), “fat women, in general, look aesthetically more pleasing to

me than thin ones” (Webmaster, Dimensions), and fat on the body “just looks better.”

(Tina, Dimensions) Many individuals did not describe what it was exactly about the look of fat that they found most appealing. They simply felt it was aesthetically pleasing.

Some individuals did elaborate on their attraction. One member of Dimensions, Sweet &

Fat, likened the look of the fat body to “carved marble.” (Dimensions) Blk2blk404 from

Biggercity.com asserted,

I like the beauty of the thick thighs and calves and big chest or even big titties, lol. I like it all. Another thing for me is big men are just more cute as a whole than the thin hard cut face of smaller men. One member on Dimensions, Waikikkian, was passionate about his admiration for fat and its’ visual appeal.

For me personally, I find fat on both females & males to be very sensual, enticing & erotic. I love the way it ripples & rolls with body motion… I also love the look of it..the vastness, the softness, & in general I just find it beautiful…. For me I just feel like fat people are more attractive & appealing. If only I could find some others in southeast Va who feel the same way. Waikikkian’s enjoyment of watching how fat moves in “the way it ripples and rolls with body motion” can be considered one facet of the aesthetic appeal of the fat body. Its vastness or size, as well as the soft texture of fat, also contributes to its visual appeal.

Posts such as Waikikkian give us insight into how fat can be considered an aesthetic ideal.

There is an eroticism and sensuality in the fat body that makes it attractive to FAs.

The sexual attractiveness of fat is described in a variety of ways. It is commonly described by FAs as a ‘turn on’, a slang phrase denoting sexual arousal. Others describe it as sexy, exciting, enticing, and alluring. The fat body sexually arouses FAs for all the 56

reasons stated above including its femininity, masculinity, softness, and aesthetic appeal.

But for some FAs, fat is most erotic because it has the potential to stimulate the sexual imagination.

Another exciting aspect [of fat] is the endless possibility of fantasies. For someone who has "normal" preferences (Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, etc) they're fantasies can only really consist of "Meet (so-and-so) at a (random location). Then, we go off and have sex.)

But for an FA, we can incorporate massive meals, potions that allow for growth, giant bbws that terrorize the city in search of food, etc. Or we can even use the basic fantasy, only replace the thin, "hot" chick with a fat, "hot" chick. Our fantasies are certainly more entertaining. (Coyote Wild, Dimensions)

For Coyote Wild, there are no limits to the ways in which one can interact with the fat body inside the bounds of the imagination. Sexual fantasies about thin people are one- dimensional, in her opinion. Fat produces an excitement or entertainment for her that the thin body fails to provoke. There is also a unique sexual excitement that comes from being in intimate contact with the fat body. The feeling of the fat body can indeed produce a sense of warmth and comfort for individuals, but it also produces an erotic charge.

I like the purely physical sensation of having my embrace totally filled with an attractive, large man. The curves and folds of a chubby guy's body seem to invite caressing, kissing, sucking, licking and exploration. It's also quite erotic to feel the warm mass of a big guy under me when engaging in intimate activities. (Canuckdaddy, Biggercity.com)

While the “curves”, “folds”, and “mass” of the fat body might repel an individual indoctrinated by the anti–fat rhetoric of the dominant beauty culture, it is these idiosyncrasies that draw FAs such as Cannuckdaddy towards sexual intimacy with a fat 57

person. Certainly, viewing the fat body as capable of heightening one’s erotic imagination and appetite reconstitutes the fat body as a site of sexuality and sensuality.

In the next section, I discuss other types of erotic practices that construct the fat body as a site of sexuality.

Sexual Practices

FAs, CCs, and their counterparts enjoy engaging in sexual activities that revolve around the fat body, whether it is to play with fat in sexual ways or to enable the individual to become fatter. Common sexual practices in the Fat Admiration subculture can be classified under three broad categories: Fat play (including Fat sex), Squashing, and Feeding for the purposes of erotic weight gain. These practices resignify the fat body as erotic and subvert mainstream assumptions that the fat body lacks sexuality and sensuality. In Fat Admiration communities, a fat person is not sexy despite their fat --- a common perception of in individuals in the mainstream --- but because of it. Sexual intimacy with fat bodies is one of the most direct ways to celebrate fat and create fat positive identifications. Sexual practices in Fat Admiration communities afford fat individuals the opportunity to express themselves as sexual beings, an opportunity seldom given to them in mainstream society. For most individuals in the communities I investigated, engaging in a sexual activity with a fat person was the most exciting, sensual experience they could have.

Fat play involves a general manipulation of the fat body for sexual pleasure. Fat play is carried out in two different ways. One way is for the FA or CC to explore the

fleshiest parts of fat person’s body, such as the breasts and stomach. Tit play, for example, is a gratifying experience for CCs and Bears alike, whereby the man-tits are fondled, licked, sucked, and rubbed. Many Bears believe their tits are their biggest erogenous zones, like Californication, who asserts

I love my tits. They are a source of great pleasure for me, and they are my main hot spot. I can't get enough of feeling a man's tongue, mouth, and hands on them, amongst other things lol. If there are any guys that would like to play with a nice pair, hit me up. (Biggercity.com)

Tit play is also a very erotic experience for CCs, who enjoy the feeling and taste of the fat and get aroused from the Bear’s enjoyment. The stomach or ‘belly’ is another erogenous zone that FAs and CCs enjoy manipulating, and a source of erotic pleasure for BBWs,

BHMs, and Chubs, and Bears. Admirers enjoy squeezing, fondling, shaking, licking, rubbing, and lying on top of the fat person’s belly.

Fat sex is a form of Fat play whereby the narrow definition of what counts as sexual intercourse, penis in vagina, is questioned, because the penis is instead being inserted into the fatty formations of the body. Not only is this exciting for FAs and their partners, sometimes it is the only way for couples to engage in intercourse. The abundance of fat on the female body makes it difficult for a man to locate the woman’s vagina, so the navel and crevices formed by fatty rolls become a substitute. FAs and CCs enjoy the softness that envelops their penises when they insert them into a navel or body roll. One member described it as “… sinking into softness.” (Russ2D, Dimensions) He further clarifies through his statement below.

The penis responds to 3 stimuli: softness, pressure and wetness. Softness is the primary one, as any guy who is healthy (not lacking sensitivity due to poor health/poor circulation) will tell you, a hard penis doesn't like

another hard object, and since fat women are really really soft in so many areas the possibilities are endless… (Dimensions)

Belly sex and Navel sex, whereby the male has intercourse with the person’s belly rolls and belly button respectively, are two common experiences that are pleasurable for many fat people. It is, in fact, orgasmic for many women and men because belly fat and the navel can be two sensitive areas on the fat body. Men and women in the communities I investigated also discussed the pleasure of Breast sex, where the penis is inserted between the breasts on males and females. The softness and malleability of breasts makes them very exciting to use during sex. Breast sex is exciting for men and women in mainstream society. However, this excitement is heightened for FAs by the fact that the fat body contains multiple breast-like formations. Therefore “a fat [person’s] body … provides opportunities for pleasure that a thin [person’s] body cannot.” (RussD2, Dimensions)

RussD2, like other FAs, provides an alternative perspective on the thin body. It is a body that is sexually unfulfilling.

Squashing is a sexual practice that involves the fat person lying all or most of their body weight on the FA or CCs body. Without boundaries of safety, it is a practice that can have fatal consequences, as the weight can smother a person to the point of death. Fortunately, most people’s experiences on the discussion boards with Squashing were positive. There is a variety of Squashing activities in which FAs, CCs, and their partners engage: Full Body Squashing, Bellycrushing, Lapsitting, and Facesitting. Full

Body Squashing occurs when the fat person typically lays their entire body on top of their partner’s body. The individual may lie on his or her partner frontwards (stomach to stomach) or backwards (rear to stomach). Many FAs find Full Body Squashing most

erotic when it involves aggression. There are several videos posted on the Dimensions website, for example, where a BBW is shown jumping or hopping on the body of an FA.

Veronica, a BBW who has posted several sexual videos to the board, posts a video of her aggressive squashing session with an FA.

Come with me for a excoriating 8 minutes as I sit hope and jump on this little mans… tiny body I put my full weight on him on the hard floor… what he has for padding is nothing but a floor that’s not so soft for him I got to lay on him for 8 minutes on the hard floor that right guys no comfy bed under him this time ….I will say I was quite comfy on top of him he he he he I do hope you enjoy this clips come watch me hope and land on him mmmm I had some much fun making him gasp for air …… (Veronica, Dimensions) Based on her post, the sexual thrill Veronica enjoys from Squashing her partner is derived from the power dynamic between her and the FA, whereby he is submissive to her dominance. His “tiny body” under her full weight, her power to bring him to the point of gasping for air, her comfort at the sake of his discomfort from being pinned against a hard surface, these are all qualities of their encounter that are indicative of their dominance–submission dynamic. It is this dynamic that underlies the eroticism of the other Squashing activities. In fact, many FAs believe that Facesitting, whereby the fat person positions his or height just on the face of the FA, revolves around dominance. One

BBW on Dimensions, Biggirllover, made this observation in a post, asserting

Facesitting is purely about dominance. There is famous BBW art with facesitting, I’m sorry the artists name escapes me. But, when you take a look the guy is either tied up or just totally dominated…” ( Dimensions ) But the enjoyment of Squashing activities is not solely about power dynamics. FAs on the boards who engage in Lapsitting and Bellycrushing respectively, whereby a fat persons positions their weight on the FA’s lap and stomach, enjoy Squashing because

they enjoy feeling the person’s heaviness against them. The weight of the body becomes erotic. Cublover86 from Biggercity.com enjoys being Belly crushed because he “[enjoys] the feeling of his weight pushing unto me.” (Biggercity.com) Squashing is an example of how the heaviness of the fat body, ordinarily considered repulsive, can be turned into something sexual.

Sex and food are intimately connected in the Fat Admiration subculture, manifested in practices of Feeding both in and of itself as well as for the purposes of erotic weight gain. Feeding typically takes on two forms. One form of feeding is

Forcefeeding. The FA usually physically restrains his or her partner and forces him or her to consume large amounts of food. A common scenario in a Forcefeeding session is the fat person being tied up while food is stuffed into his or her mouth or fed to them through a funnel or tube. The other form of Feeding entails the FA to encourage his or her partner to eat as much as they desire without the use of restraints or force. The FA may take his or her partner to a restaurant, cook them meals, or simply provide them with the food in some way. Eating, and especially eating foods that a fat person finds sensuous, can be a sexually exciting act in itself for a fat person in Fat Admiration communities. Many

BBWs, SSBBWs, BHMs, SSBHMs, Chubs and Bears report the arousal they experience simply from eating their favorite foods or from the thought of eating. Jeepers, a Chub from Biggercity.com, remarked “when all 28 sweet teeth are being tickled, I can feel myself getting hornier.” (Jeepers, Biggercity.com) But when this act of eating or feeding is interlaced with other erotic activities, a feeding session can produce a particularly

gratifying sexual experience for all involved. One BBW on Dimensions, Tummytubby, described in detail an exciting feeding session she had with her partner.

We started with a big plate of baked potatoes with lots of mayonnaise, meatballs and a large salad. Then a piece of creampie, a bag of potatoe chips, kisses (sweet eggwhite covered in chocolate), another piece of creampie, liquorice, crackers with French cheese. I felt really stuffed after eating all that, haven't stuffed myself in more than a year so my appetite is a lot smaller. During the eating we took pictures of me and in every picture I wear less clothes. My man played with my belly during the eating, it was really a turn on! I especially liked kissing while I was eating, two of the things I like most combined… We ended upstairs in bed where this evening ended with a lot of fireworks. (Dimensions)

Eating copius amounts of food, combined with other acts of foreplay such as kissing,

Belly play, and taking nude photos is what made this Feeding session exciting for

Tummytubby. Eating and Feeding are described as foreplay for many members of Fat

Admiration communities as it creates the arousal that may or may not lead to sex. For

Tummytubby, Feeding was part of the lead up to other sexual activity. But for other people, Feeding is the primary sexual act or is at least as exciting as sexual intercourse.

Blubberboy, from Biggercity.com, described an intense Feeding session in which his partner ties him to a recliner and proceeded to feed him a dozen Krispy Kremes, five eclairs, and a giant milkshake. He states, “I was a stuffed fatboy pig for the whole night!

Erotic in every sense of the word… It was awesome and every emotion/urge ran through my body for this hour. More intense than any sex I've ever had” (Biggercity.com)

Blubberboy’s reaction to the Feeding session as “being more intense than any sex I’ve ever had” is similar to the excitement that individuals, even outside the Fat Admiration subculture, experience when eating a good meal. Food is capable of stirring up feelings one experiences during intimacy, which is why some people use it as a substitute for sex.

And in fact, many people believe that fat people, because they are thought to be sexually undesirable, turn to food as a replacement for the sexual intimacy they cannot experience with another person. Feeding rituals turn this perception of fat people and their relationship to food on its head. Through Feeding, they turn the erotic nature of their orality into a component of the sexual intimacy they share with a partner.

Feeding is sexually exciting for FAs and fat people for four main reasons and these are the feeling of fullness, the subsequent weight gain, the dominant-submissive power dynamic, and the display of one’s orality. Many people derive sexual excitement from feelings of being full or the feeling that one has eaten to her or his stomach’s maximum capacity for holding food. As Weightymembers, a chub on Biggercity.com, asserts “I get incredibly horny when I stuff myself. The more my gut aches, the harder

[my penis] gets.” (WeightyMatters, Biggercity.com) Many BBWs enjoy the feeling of fullness. For Candygodiva, a member of the Dimensions board, the feeling of fullness in one encounter with an FA spurred her to want to eat more and produced an orgasmic experience. Although members did not delve deeper into why it is that being full is so erotic for them, I suspect it represents the fact they were able to able to eat with abandon or the feeling of fullness may be a manifestation of an unrestrained appetite.

Weight gain, erotic for FAs and fat people in the community, is a motivation for

Feeding sessions. Both parties find it sexually exciting when the BBW, SSBBW, BHM,

SSBHM, Chub, or Bear becomes heavier or fatter throughout or after the session. Some

Feeders and Feedees find it especially erotic for the Feedee to gain weight to the point of immobility, whereby the Feedee becomes completely dependent on the feeder for his or

her needs. However, members of Fat Admiration communities recognize the physical and psychological dangers of immobility, and often choose instead to simply fantasize about it. Apart from immobility, FAs and their partners enjoy watching the body “fill out”

(WMUChub, Biggercity.com). They enjoy watching the physical transformations to the body, such as the swelling of the stomach, breasts, or buttocks. Weight gain introduces other erotic activities to the sessions. LikesUSoft on Dimensions, enjoys engaging in sexual talk about the rolls on a BBW’s body and the way her body is filling out.

(Dimensions) Coloradobigbelly on Biggercity.com finds it exciting to watch his partner try on clothing that is too small for his body size. (Biggercity.com) Sometimes, the process of weight gain is more erotic for the people involved in the feeding session than the actual weight gain. LoveBHMs disclosed in a post that some FAs felt that

… seeing [her] intentionally put on 5 pounds would be hotter than having you just happen to be 20 pounds bigger. In other words, it was the getting fat more so than just being fat [that was sexually exciting]. (Dimensions) These attitudes towards weight gain represent a revolt against the values of the dominant beauty culture, in which dieting to lose weight increases one’s sensuality and attractiveness. These attitudes open up new possibilities for weight gain to become acceptable.

Feeding can be erotic when the Feeder assumes the dominant power position in the encounter and the Feedee assumes the submissive power position. With consent and within the bounds of personal safety, the Feeder may be aroused from being able to control the Feedee and the encounter, while the Feedee may be aroused from being overtaken. However, feeders are not always the dominant and Feedees are not always the

submissive. LoveBHMS, an FA on the Dimensions board, points out that there may be a reversal of roles.

It is not necessarily the feeder who is the dominant partner. There has been some discussion about this, but there are two possible models here. One is a dominant feeder who wants to make his feedee gain because the other person gaining gives the feeder pleasure. The other is a dominant feedee for whom gaining is pleasurable and the feeder is the submissive one who does the satisfying by engaging in the 'demanded for' behavior. (Dimensions) According to LoveBHMs, then, dominance and submission revolve around who is receiving the pleasure and who is working to provide that pleasure on demand to that person, regardless of who is actually doing the Feeding. In reality, however, both participants receive sexual pleasure from the activity. Moreover, the roles in the encounter are rarely static. Within Feeding sessions, there is an exchange of power, where the dominant becomes the submissive at times, and vice versa. The power in the

Feeding session is continually being negotiated.

Displays of orality make Feeding sexually exciting for FAs. Just as fat people in the community enjoy eating without restraint, FAs, FFAs and CCs enjoy watching their wanton appetites and indulging them. Some FFAs find that a BHM’s unbridled appetite makes him manlier. BHMLover from Dimensions expressed this view in one of her posts.

I don't know, maybe it's the fact that it almost seems to make a man more masculine in my eyes for him to be able to really pack it away - especially since I'm not a very big eater. Maybe it's the sexiness of observing a man with an absolutely ravenous desire indulge it freely. (Dimensions) The correlation BHMLover has drawn between a man’s orality and his masculinity reflects a return to traditional masculinity that has been spoiled by fat phobic discourse. 66

Prior to the development of the Adonis Complex, men have been expected to harbor large appetites without consideration towards calories or fat. Not only has BHMLover re- masculinized that large appetite, she has also eroticized it by labeling it ‘sexy’. Orality is thus given a new meaning, one that connotes real masculinity and sensuality. Orality in females is also celebrated on the discussion boards, resisting notions of hegemonic femininity. The sight of a female displaying an unbridled appetite arouses many BHMs.

One FA on the Dimensions board, Rollhandler, is aroused simply by the thought, as he worded it, “of her making a total pig of herself.” (Dimensions) Traditional constructs of femininity are dominated by restrictions to the appetite. Just as society restricts a female’s appetite for sex, it restricts her ability to freely indulge her appetite for food. The dominant beauty culture dictates that she is expected to be conscious of what she puts in her body and how much of it, in order to maintain a tightly managed body. Fat

Admiration communities give fat women permission to indulge their appetites, eroticizing them, just as it does men’s appetites.

Body Type Discrimination

One of the themes I wanted to investigate on the online discussion forums is whether body type discrimination exists in Fat Admiration communities. My original intent was to investigate if there was discrimination against body weight in the community, until I discovered other types of discrimination that involved other qualities of the body. I assumed that when new norms are created, as they are in Fat Admiration

subculture, there is the possibility of the creation of the Other. To be certain, norms create solidarity and belonging, but they also exclude. My investigation did reveal that certain types of bodies in the communities are preferred to others. It was important to me examine any possible discrimination based on appearance that could be occurring within the communities when considering this movement as subversive of and resistant to dominant norms of beauty. I went into the investigation with the assumption that while new norms give off the appearance of being subversive, on a deeper level they may be guilty of reproducing new structures of power/knowledge.

Body type discrimination in the Fat Admiration community does not always involve weight, but may rather be against a type of body. I discovered three types of discrimination on the boards and these are discrimination within the gay community based on the hairiness of the body, discrimination because one is not big enough, and discrimination against women who possess an Apple-shaped body. Some Chubs on

Biggercity.com complain that they do not have enough hair on their bodies to be considered attractive to Chasers.

I am sooooooooooooo sick and tired of being told I'm not hairy enough, more than once I have had guys say to me that I'm not a chubby bear, and that’s what they're looking for… I have come to the conclusion that for the most part, they're the least desired chubs there are. Or at least I sure haven't found a very many chasers that like them. I've learned to expect this response from guys that label themselves as "cubs", I assume they're looking for bears and that just doesn't seem to apply for me. Anyways, I am happy the way I am, I myself prefer smooth guys, and I don't think I would want to be furrier than I am. (Wow that felt good to get off my smooth chest!) (BartmanLA, Biggercity.com)

BartmanLA is frustrated over what he perceives to be a preference for Bears, hirsute

Chubs. However, despite this preference, he is able to maintain a positive outlook on his body, claiming he has no desire to change the way his body looks. And while there is discrimination against smooth Chubs, some individuals are told by Chasers that they are too hairy to be desirable. Again, like BartmanLA, this rejection does not engender a hate of their bodies. These individuals appear to take their rejection in stride and continue to seek romantic connections with Chasers. Within the Dimensions community, there is some discrimination towards BBWs who have an Apple-shaped figure. There are three common body shapes: Pears, Hourglasses, and Apples. Pears and Hourglasses carry most of their weight in their breasts, buttocks, and legs, while Apples carry most of their weight in their stomachs. (Gates 2000) Some BBWs perceive a bias in favor of women with Pear and Hourglass shapes. They believe Pears and Hourglasses are considered to be the most attractive body shapes. Some FAs admit to not liking Apple shapes because of the prominence of the stomach over all other body parts, even though an overwhelming number of FAs do profess to find a large stomach very sexual. Some BBWs, like Elle

Camino, resent the fact that while Apples are accepted, they are not a preferred body shape by FAs. “It's just not fun to know that the best you're going to do (being the shape that you are) is to find someone who'd prefer something else, but likes your shape because it's yours.” (Dimensions)

There are individuals on the boards who express inadequacy about their weight. It is the experience of some people that they are not fat enough to be attractive to FAs and

Chasers within the community. Many FAs and Chasers seek individuals who are exceptionally large, leaving anyone who does not conform to that standard marginalized. 69

On the discussion boards, they may receive little interest or response to their pictures, and at social functions may be continually passed over by admirers in favor of larger men and women. BBWs such as ChunkyMonkey believe that there is an “invisible middle ground” (Dimensions) within the Fat Admiration subculture. While she does consider her body to be fat, it is rendered thin in comparison to other larger women and therefore no longer as sexually or aesthetically appealing. Other individuals feel completely displaced by both non-Fat Admiration and Fat Admiration communities because they do not feel desired by individuals in either community. One gay fat man on Biggercity.com,

Recman, clearly voiced his frustration over the rejection he has experienced both on mainstream gay websites and this forum.

I am around 250 to 260 lbs depending on how good or bad my month has been :) But I get very frustrated. I feel very much like I am stuck in the middle. I generally put it as this. I am too fat for gay.com and not fat enough for biggercity.com. That is pretty much how I feel. Most gay men find me repulsive, WAY too fat. But then I found biggercity and thought, score. Now, I am VERY often told that I am just not fat enough. A few have even suggested I am more of a chaser size. WHAT?!?!? Are you friggin kidding me with this? I have no clue what the "boundaries" may or may not be. I can just say this has been my experience. (Biggercity.com) For individuals such as Recman, it is extremely difficult to construct a fat positive identity because they are treated with hostility at nearly every turn. It is even more disheartening to be treated with hostility by a community that is supposed to place a high premium on a body like his.

There are individuals who express a dislike for their partners gaining or losing weight. One issue that has been brought up numerous times on the boards is whether a fat person would leave his or her partner if they suddenly gained weight. The size

differential between FAs or Chasers and their fat partners, wherein the FA or Chaser is significantly smaller than his or her partner, is important to many BBWs, SSBWs,

BHMs, SSBHMs, Chubs and Bears. It plays a particularly significant role in the sexual attraction between partners. BignTall stated that

I would NOT find someone anywhere near my size attractive, bottom line If I were in a relationship and my significant other got to my size it would be a problem sexually. As James said --- the love would still be there, just not the sex. “ (Biggercity.com)

There are practical reasons as to why it is rare for a fat person to want to engage in sexual relations with a person of their own size. Sexual intercourse becomes a challenge physically because it is hard to access the fat person’s genitalia under the folds of their fat. (Gates 2000) But the waning sexual attraction to which BignTall is alluding may have more to do with psychological reasons. Part of the sexual payoff for many FAs and

CCs in being with a fat person is being enveloped in the flesh of his or her partner. If he or she is big or as large as his or partner, that payoff becomes absent. (Gates 200) As one

BHM on Dimensions, Chichubby3rd, put it

My attraction is generally an attraction (not learned but just here) to the opposite of me… I love the opposite of my fat melting over a firm body below me.

Some fat people on the boards believe it would be more problematic for a BBW, SSBW,

BHM, SSBHM, Chub, or Bear to lose weight than it would be for an FA, FFA, or CC to gain weight, however. They assert that weight gain in a Fat Admiration relationship may be somewhat infectious, where the FA or Chaser gradually gains weight over time.

WtrtwnGuy from Biggercity.com believes that while a Chaser gaining weight may be

somewhat acceptable, “…it seems like chasers are fairly set on a specific type, i.e. bearish, chunky, chubby, outright flabby, call it whatever you want. It can even be something like a fetish. So losing a ton of weight would probably be a problem.”

(Biggercity.com) In other words, a CC is typically sexually attracted to a fat person because of their fatness. It seems logical, as WtrtwnGuy points out, that this sexual attraction may be jeopardized by the loss of weight.

Many FAs, CCs and fat people in the Fat Admiration community consider sexual attraction to be uncontrollable and accept that not all body weights and types will be desirable to all people.

People are into what they're into. The economics of body type attractions don't make anyone responsible for liking a particular type just so that a [person] of that type can find someone (for whatever purpose). (Qweazdzxc, Biggercity.com)

Shaming occurs within the community when fat people are rejected because of their weight, shape, or hairiness, because they feel the FA community should be a haven from the discrimination experienced by mainstream society. But most individuals have adopted the perspective that “we like who we like and NO ONE should feel shame for that.”

(JustJeepers, Biggercity.com) Preferences for and the marginalization of certain types of bodies within the Fat Admiration community calls into question whether it is ever possible to completely subvert existing norms in favor of the construction of new ones that do not work on exclusion. When we understand that the ideology of the dominant beauty culture is that one’s attractiveness and desirability is reliant on the physical appearance of one’s body, through an examination of alternative community we also

come to see that a new beauty norm has not been completely abandoned in the Fat

Admiration community. Rather it is reproduced in a different way, by idealizing only extremely large bodies, thin bodies on FAs or Chasers, Pear and Hourglass shaped bodies, hairy and less hairy bodies. Any bodies not conforming to these ideals become

“the subset of unthinkable, unliveable, and abject bodies” that LeBesco discusses.

(2004:5) These become a different group of bodies that become deviant and/or invisible.

Conclusion

If history and a cross-cultural perspective reveal anything to us about the fat body, it is that the fat body has not always represented the abhorrence it does in contemporary

Euro-American society. Fat carried a high premium as far back as the Stone Age, admired for its health, aesthetics and sexuality. Up to the turn of the twentieth century, fatness embodied both feminine and masculine virtue in the West, and was an asset to the mature individual. Changes occurred in society to disturb the comfort individuals felt with corpulence. A dieting mentality was imported from overseas and developed domestically, a mentality based on the reduction of fat and weight. The introduction of standardized sizing caused people to start conforming their bodies to a new body norm.

Fat became medicalized, constructing it as a disease. Moral anxiety about increased consumerism towards the end of the nineteenth century and changing values for middle class women in the area of sexuality and motherhood also paved the way for the development of the slenderness ideal that would go on to become an obsession in Euro-

American society. Fat, going into the twentieth century, became the target of a full-blown attack by media, the diet industry, and the medical community, family, and religion, to

name a few sectors. The anxiety people felt about their bodies manifested in serious psychological and physical consequences, namely the rise of eating disorders such as

Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia and Muscle Dysmorphia. The slenderness ideal not only trained women how to view and manage their bodies, but also had a normalizing impact on men’s body image. Struggles with fat and the desire to maintain a tightly controlled body became an issue of epic proportions for both genders from the 1950s onwards. In

2008, we live in a society that considers fat people failed citizens, people who are immoral, diseased, out of control, lazy, unintelligent, sexless, dirty, and grotesque. The false-consciousness promoted by institutions of power in society keep this ideology about fat intact. It causes us to discipline our bodies so we are not punished by societal rejection.

On the sexual fringe of society, the Fat Admiration subculture subverts mainstream notions of beauty and sexuality through its beliefs and practices. Beginning at a grassroots level in the 1960s and 70s, Fat Admiration brought the Fat Acceptance movement to new level. Instead of simply preaching tolerance for fat people and their rights to equality as fat assimilationist groups like the NAAFA did, Fat Admiration groups like the Fat Underground took on a liberationist perspective for the fat body. They promoted the corpulent body as a site of beauty and sexuality. Not only was fat acceptable to them, but it was also aesthetically pleasing and erotic. Long after the Fat

Underground disbanded, the Fat Admiration subculture has continued to thrive with a growing membership. In this project, I studied the ways in which two Fat Admiration

Internet discussion forums, Dimensions and Biggercity.com, formed fat positive

identities. I investigated their typological classification system and discovered that the labels which members used to identify themselves --- Fat Admirer, Chubby Chaser, Big

Beautiful Woman, Super Sized Beautiful Woman, Big Handsome Man, Super Sized Big

Handsome Man, Gainer, Encourager, Feeder, Feedee, Bear, and Chub --- resignified the meaning of the fat body by associating fat and size with positive descriptors and empowering instead of stigmatizing labels. My examination shows that the fat body is revered by the Fat Admiration subculture for its femininity and masculinity linked to girth, fleshiness, and softness, aspects that the dominant beauty culture has made every effort to contain. Sexual practices that make the fat body central, such as Fat play,

Squashing, and Feeding further subvert mainstream notions by sexualizing orality, weight gain, and fat, dangers to the hegemonic ‘thin’ beauty culture. Through sexual intimacy making the fat body central to its activities, the fat body becomes a positive sex object, worthy of desire. While these new body norms clearly have subversive power, body type discrimination within the Fat Admiration subculture reveals that there is also a reproduction of social norms and therefore a new power structure that continues a politics of exclusion. In the dominant beauty culture, access to power, acceptance and desirability is contingent upon one’s appearance, namely a thin, tightly controlled body. The fat body, failing to be appropriately disciplined, is deviant. In the Fat Admiration subculture, deviant bodies exist, those not fat enough, Apple-shaped bodies, bodies not hairy enough, and sometimes, bodies that are too fat or too hairy. The Fat Admiration subculture, therefore, opens up new possibilities for the construction of fat-positive identities and discourse. In the construction of these new values, however, it has the power to exclude individuals who do not conform to its norms.

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Appendix 1- List of Abbreviations

BBW Big Beautiful Woman

BHM Big Handsome Man

CC Chubby Chaser

FA Fat Admirer

FFA Female Fat Admirer

SSBBW Super-Sized Big Beautiful Woman

SSBHM Super-Sized Big Handsome Man