This is Your Brain on Grad School

drst:

tashafierce:

So I decided to do a search for my name here on ye old Tumblrs, because I am that bored, and sometimes that vain. One of the things it pulled up was a person’s post about an article I wrote two years ago for Clutch Magazine. The article was about dating as a fat, black chick and apparently in it I had said some things that made this person feel like I was saying to fat women “if you just work on your confidence and take care of your appearance, you’ll be ok”. Said person expressed that they had at first accepted that advice wholesale because I was an “uber confident fat activist” and all “uber confident fat activists” and “fashionistas” were giving this kind of advice so since we were so confident we must know what we were talking about (okay, i’m really paraphrasing here, but yeah). But the person later realized that you could “take care” of your appearance and still not get a date and still feel like shit and that kind of advice was blaming fat people for their own situation, which they rightfully felt was bullshit.

I look back on that article and I have to say, you could definitely interpret some of the things I said in that way. To be honest, in order to write for Clutch (which was a paying gig), I couldn’t be super revolutionary about what I was saying, because at the time many of their readers were not even to the point where they felt fat people were worthy of respect at all (as evidenced by some of the comments on the article). That was a decision I made that I have to own, because I wanted to get paid. A lot of the time as a writer if you want to get paid, you have to fit a mold and write for the publication’s target audience, and I willingly did that. At the time I felt like I was still acknowledging that beauty standards for fat, black women were fucked up. It definitely wasn’t my intention to make other fat people feel bad because they weren’t confident enough, but as I say about white people all the time, intentions ain’t shit. In the 2 years that have gone by since I wrote that, and since I’ve written many other things about confidence, I have observed and felt things that were contrary to the ideas I’ve previously expressed. So, I have changed my tune somewhat, especially of late, and I would like to say something about this since I just came across this person’s post.

I recently wrote this blog entry, which addresses my experience with and observation of “meta low self-esteem”, basically feeling bad about feeling bad. But I didn’t really talk about the externals of it, namely feeling like you have to look a certain way to be deemed a “hot fat person”, or to be viewed as loving yourself or feeling confident. From my observations, particularly on Tumblr, there is definitely a certain aesthetic that gets most of the attention. I mean, many people have already pointed that out. I kind of feel that while we can say that you should love yourself as a fat person even if your appearance outside of being fat would not be deemed “conventionally attractive”, saying that and then BEING “conventionally attractive” outside of being fat probably doesn’t make some people feel that great, because it’s easier to take that position when you have the backup of being validated as “hot”. I don’t necessarily put myself in the category of “conventionally attractive”, but for sake of argument and accountability, I will here. I have written in the past (post Clutch article) about the problems with not challenging beauty as a viable concept and trying to shoehorn fat women into the “beautiful” category. I know other people have written about the problems with “beauty” too, in more detail and probably more eloquently. By sharing images of ourselves “fatting it up”, we intend to challenge the dominant beauty paradigm, but we often end up reinforcing it, just in different ways.

There is often a lot of vitriol directed at “self-hating fats” and I think it is important to remember that we have pretty much all been there, and the way to get someone out of that place is not to bombard them with images of conventionally attractive fat people and then berate them for not feeling “hot”, or isolate them.
Being at a point in my life where I would consider being “uber confident” as pretty low on my list of characteristics, it was eye-opening to read that I was once (and could still be) part of the problem of making other fat people with already low self-esteem feel like shit because they don’t feel sexy or beautiful. I want to be part of the solution of moving fat acceptance away from just proving that fat can be sexy and beautiful and towards affirming that fat people deserve respect and love regardless of appearance, health, or level of confidence.

I have a lot of problems with the “Just be confident!” advice, which really is the same kind of magical thinking as “just eat less and exercise more!” so I’m glad to see someone who was a purveyor of that kind of advice discussing why it’s not that simple.