Reblogged from devilsdandruff-deactivated20110
So, a friend of mine sent me a link last night to a gorgeous wedding photo of a cute couple. Both members of the couple happened to be fat. I went to find the source to check out something else about the picture, but when I found it, I stumbled across the comments, which was probably a bad thing….
I do believe there is an element of construction here, though. We’re taught what to like. I hate to use a food example, but bear with me for a moment. We’ve all got individual tastes. Things we love and things we loathe. And we’ve also got culturally constructed ideas of “the norm” - things we classify as food simply because we are told they are food and things we classify as “gross” because they aren’t part of our cultural conceptualization of food.
Your own personal tastes do not play into whether or not you think beetles are a food source - that’s cultural construction. Beetles may hit every zinger on your tongue, but you (hypothetical you) may never know because “ew, bugs, those aren’t food.”
When we look at bodies that deviate from the mainstream, a lot of our responses are learned responses. Because just as fat people (and other people who deviate from “the norm”) are constantly barraged with messages about what is attractive and what is not… so is everyone else.
When I stopped viewing fat as an automatically terrible thing on my own body, fat people in general got a lot more attractive - I was ALLOWED to view not only myself but everyone else as attractive and so my own tastes broadened - or, not even broadened. I realized what my own tastes were as opposed to what my culturally constructed tastes were.
I’m totally feeling this and the comment by therotund.
OMG I MUST HAVE THIS!
This is beautiful…. I wonder if I can have one made of my body….
Seeking position as a full time cherub
Please let me know if I can send you my resume’. Will pay headhunter’s fee in dry humping and reassuring cooing
I need one of these…. I’d pay union wages as well as lots of fresh strawberries and pretty hand made outfits….
The hubs and I at a BBW bash after party. The theme was Rockstar so who better to go as than Ziggy and Joan.
AMAZING.
This picture is wicked.
For me, femme is about healing
it is about the rituals of adornment that I use to calm my anxiety, and quell my tears after days where transphobia slips under my skin like stubborn splinters
it is about reaching across time, bridging the distance between the man I am and the girl I was.
it is about finding that girl in the recesses of my heart, holding him in my arms, and saying “it will be okay, we made it out alive.”
it is about finding a way to be a boy that doesn’t hurt.
it is about nurturing all the femme parts of myself that I suffocated, just so the boy part of myself might be visible to other people.
For me, femme is about resistance
it is about refusing to believe that there is a right way to be a man
it is about glitter armor and gestural fierceness coating my spirit so that I might just be strong enough to survive
it is about reclaiming and flaunting all of the parts of my femininity that have been used to say that the sexual assaults were my fault
For me, femme is about healing, resistance, survival.
Somedays, femme is all I have.
“For me, femme is about resistance”
“it is about refusing to believe that there is a right way to be a man”
“it is about reclaiming and flaunting all of the parts of my femininity that have been used to say that the sexual assaults were my fault”
For real. I mean, everything you said. but those things in particular. UNF.
(via glitterpolitic)
