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To be overweight is, thus, to be considered simultaneously weak and feminine, so much so that the Grindr commandment against “fats and femmes” is almost always a package deal. “Fatphobia in so many ways is about hating and policing women and our bodies, but what I’ve realized recently is that in some ways, the fatphobia that fat men experience is also a result of misogyny,” she writes. If this fat shame is so pervasive, where does it come from?Īccording to blogger Virgie Tovar, it’s both a product of the larger cultural hang-ups around body image and masculinity itself. “Some people were just shocked we had identified them as one of us, and they didn’t want to be.” One member describes inviting attendees at a pride parade to march with the group. This phenomenon proved such an issue for Girth & Mirth that expanding membership has been difficult. Whitesel writes, “Some big men confessed that they want to dissociate themselves from other people who are fat, as if fatness were contagious.” This included a respondent who explained that his fat positivity had limits: He “drew the line at ‘super-chubs,’” despite the fact that he himself weighed 300 pounds.
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Whitesel interviewed the members of Girth & Mirth, an international organization dedicated to celebrating “big men and their admirers,” and found that they had internalized a great deal of the bias that they’d experienced from outside the community. Jason Whitesel writes in his 2014 book, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma, queer men even have trouble finding community in gay subcultures that should act as informal support groups (e.g., bears or otters). Why would anybody be interested in you when you obviously don’t give a crap about yourself? Instead of trying to drum up conversations with me and other guys, you should spend more time losing the fat.Īs Pace University professor Dr. The worst part is that the men you seem to check out are way out of your league. Yeah, you show up to workout but I’ve watched you and most of the time, all you do is cruise other guys. Just looking at you, I can tell you don’t. It’s just that I take care of my body and spend a lot of time focusing on my health. I’m not trying to judge you or anything, really.
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There’s really no kind way to say this so I’ll just come right out with it. It’s because I have a hard time respecting you. It’s not because I have a boyfriend or anything like that.
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I didn’t have the guts to tell you this at the gym but I won’t be going with you to see the Cubs. Bruce asked the gentleman out on a date, and after exchanging contact information, he received this message in his inbox: In an extreme example, Bruce, a 35-year-old man living in Chicago, was called a “fat pig” by another member of his gym. While Peitzman says that the majority of these incidents amounted to concern trolling-hurtful comments disguised as life advice-others lacked even the veneer of friendliness. “I can tell you that one person I tried to date helpfully offered, ‘You could be really attractive if you lost some weight.’” “I can tell you that when I lost 15 pounds due to depression, a well-meaning older gay man told me I had done the right thing,” he writes. In a BuzzFeed article from 2013, Louis Peitzman argued while the LGBT community might preach to its youth that “It Gets Better,” the message for plus-size queers isn’t so hopeful. These politics of exclusion leave many feeling left out of a community that, after coming out, they hoped would embrace them. Gay men face enormous pressure to fit into a very narrow view of beauty-often defined on hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff by the groups they leave out: “No Fats, No Femmes.” Because it’s hard to speak with accuracy about the habits and preferences of an entire community, this is a generalization, but it’s one that is often true. In the ’90s sitcom Will and Grace, there’s an old joke that men could be considered skinny by straight standards but labeled fat among their gay peers. These forms of everyday discrimination most commonly included “rejection by potential romantic partners on the basis of weight.”įor instance, were a “fat” gay man to approach someone in a bar, Foster-Gimbel and Engeln found that there was a “greater likelihood that the overweight man would be blatantly ignored, treated rudely, or mocked behind his back” than a heterosexual male of the same size. Have you ever been told you’re too fat for Grindr? A recent study from the Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity shows you’re not alone.Īccording to researchers Olivia Foster-Gimbel and Renee Engeln, one-third of the gay men they surveyed reported experiencing “anti-fat bias”-even among those who weren’t classified as overweight by the Body Mass Index.