Fatty Fat Fat Fat

Over at All About Romance  Abi Bishop has written a post on fat heroes and heroines in romance.

Fat and love. Love and fat. The question, as far as fat in romance is concerned is this: Will the reader find a fat hero/heroine believable as a romantic lead? Or does being fat preclude having an erotic experience because fat is somehow a signifier for that total lack of sexual attractiveness? A recent survey (conducted by me, just minutes ago) of internet porn has concluded that there are a lot of fat, ugly, and fat n’ ugly people fucking a lot, in various positions all for the titallating enjoyment of viewers across the world. That said, if fat people can fuck in amateur porn and get a lot of viewers, why is it so unbelieve that fat people can fall in love and fuck both other fat people and thin people. Another survey, also conducted by me via observation of couples over the years and repeated viewings of the old TLC show A Wedding Story, has suggested that people pair off in the strangest manner. I postulate three kinds of pairngs off:

1. Looks Like It’s About Time I Got Married and Bred Terrifying in its simplicity, I believe that this video entitled “I Guess You’ll Do” really summarizes the heart of this sort of pairing, that being the title.  Of course, to be fair not just anyone will do. It has to be someone moderately attractive, of similar background, of a similar class.  Someone uncontroversial who meets the standards set by cultural (usually petit-bourgeosie) norms.  This person will be a fine, albeit boring companion who you will come to resent for not being truly compatible.  However, on the upside their very dullness will never discomfit you either with passion or misery. You will have a 50% chance of divorcing depending on how well you tolerate boredom. Arranged marriages also fall into this category. Literary examples of such couples include: Mr. and Mrs. Collins and most characters in sitcoms about married people.

2. Companions in Mind Boggling Dysfunction This pairing usually happens because both parties have deep unresolved Freudian issues.  Many of the rich and famous illustrate what happens when these sorts of the relationships occur. They can be identified by their manic-depressive nature. When they are good, they are really, really good. But when they’re bad, they’re horrid. The spectrum of fucked up swings from the mild mania of the Tommy Lee/Pam Anderson relationship to the murder/suicide “relationship” of Sid Vicious/Nancy Spungen. This relationship dies either metaphorically when one of the two parties gets their shits together or when it literally dies because one of the two parties commits a murder. Regardless, it never ends well.

3. The Companionate Marriage Which hardly ever happens and even when it does, it can look from the outside like either #1 or #2 depending on the day (see Revolutionary Road for a literary exploration).  However, there are some external indices that one might be able to use to determine whether a couple falls into this category. 

• Is one person a lot better looking than the other person? Is this person the man? Does he still look at the woman like she’s a minor deity?
• Is one person a lot better looking than the other person? Is this person the woman? Is the man poor? Does the woman still think he’s awesome?
• Do both parties seem to have a good time together no matter how lame the actual event is?
• Do both parties seem to have the same sense of humor?
• Do both parties agree that that guy over there is a douche? Do they communicate this fact only with their eyes?
• Do they fight well?
• Do they close ranks?
• Are they affectionate?
• Did they do one of the following: get married despite the fact that they belong to different religions/races/cultural backgrounds, against family expectations? Against social expectation? Against “God’s” expectations as defined by family/culture/fundies?
• Did one literally or metaphorically go to hell and back for the other and (here’s the kicker) expected nothing in return?

 What does this all have to do with being fat or fat and romance? Well, it all circles around pairing off #1. The thing about pairing off #1 is that in certain social circles marrying/dating/fucking a fat person is a revolutionary act tantamount to getting involved in an inter-racial dating in the 1960’s.  Yes, I’m serious. People would rather be with someone unexceptionable to their social circle than with someone they actually have an erotic (emotional, spiritual, physical) connection with because . . . what’s the word I’m looking for . . . oh, right! they’re bourgeosie.  Petty at that.

The discomfort people have when reading about love occuring between certain people stems from two problem areas:

1. The reader’s cultural expectations of what love looks like and does

2. The reader’s own ambiguous desires.

Let me tackle the first one first.

People, depending upon multiple factors, have certain cultural expectations about love. What Romantic Comedy in film has taught us is that unattractive people end up together. Also, that their love story doesn’t warrant 175 minutes of our time rather only warrants an interlude, a relief from the intensity of the attractive main characters.  This is why RomCom best friends only fall into three categories quirky, fat, or ethnic/not-white.  These people and their refusal to fit into mainstream standards of beauty by being odd, racially different and/or fat . . . well, they don’t deserve love. If they really wanted to be loved, they would act normal/lose weight/be white.  Regard Queen Latifah. Queen Latifah falls into all three categories and therefore can never play a romantic leading lady. This is because she is fat, black and quirky (what with being a former rap star and all).  I heart Queen Latifah. Who wouldn’t want to get involved in a romance with Queen Latifah? Oh, apparently the focus group.

Or what about Judy Greer best known as the quirky best friend from 27 Dresses and 13 Going On 30 (also as Kitty on Arrested Development but that’s not really relevant to RomCom).  Ms. Greer is thin, funny and pretty. However, she is not pretty in a way that is symmetrically pleasing. She’s pretty, but odd looking forever excluding her from the role of Romantic Heroine. 

Unless you are the female lead in a John Waters’ movie, the chances of a female who deviates from the normative standard beauty ending up as the main character of a love story is slim (Ha!) to none.

Similarly, in real life people in pairing group #1 do not want to date/fuck/marry fat, quirky, non-white, ethinic people because then they would be embarassed in front of their friends, their family, their boss.  Fat, quirky, non-white, ethnic people can only marry other fat, quirky, non-white ethnic people because even if they aren’t really compatible they will be forced by circumstance to settle for the comfort of familiarity rather than the joy of compatibility.  Pairing #1 is not about love. Pairing #1 is about convenience, the convenience of not having to feel even slightly uncomfortable.  More than that, it is about maintaining a power structure with pretty, white people on top and everyone else in various stratified groupings beneath. If one is beautiful enough (mainly pertains to females) or rich enough (mainly pertains to males) then one may jump from your class of quirky, non-white, ethnic . . . as long as you aren’t too quirky, too unwhite, or too ethnic . . . into the higher stratifications.  I would also like to point out that true compatability is about balance and because the balance betwen one person and an other is a strange alchemical and specific process, true compatibility doesn’t necessarily occur where you’d think it should. Another way to say it is, sometimes you two look really good on paper together but something in the actually mixture fails the recipe.

Let’s be clear here, though.  In real life (not celebraty life) you can’t be too beautiful either.  If you actually look at people from pairing group #1 you will notice that everyone in there is merely reasonably attractive. Nobody in that group is ever truly, crazy beautiful.  Astoundingly beautiful, intelligent, charismatic people are also excluded from pairing group #1 (except in RomCom because its Hollywood but you will notice that in RomComs they nearly always dowd everyone down so they look like the boy/girl next door . . . this is why everyone’s hair suddenly gets browner)  because they too represent an extreme. And any extreme whether fat, quirky, non-white, ethnic or charismatic, gorgeous and brilliant or even a combination of these characteristics (say you are strangely beautiful Harvard grad, Hindustani woman with a PhD in neuro-linguistics.  You probably have a hard time finding a date.  Yes, hard to believe but true) is too uncomfortable to deal with and thus must be avoided, regardless of how strong a love attraction there is.

For the reader of the romance, this cultural expectation and terror of being remotely uncomfortable makes them unlikely to read romances that feature the first extreme much in the same way the RomCom doesn’t want to feature the fat, quirky, etc. extreme.  I would also say that the reason we see the physical beauty extreme more in romances and romantic comedy is because physical beauty, while rare, is not as subversive as charisma which is even rarer. So a heroine or hero can be extraordinary in their physical beauty and yet because they are not extraordinary in wit, charisma or intelligence, they do not constitute as much of a threat as someone who is.  Moreover, because the extraordinary physical beauty is manifested textually in romance novels, the reader is not actually confronted with the visual, observable impact of having to deal with such beauty. The beauty is contained in the language and the language is not overwhelming the way it would be if it were experienced directly.

This leads me to the second part, that the reader’s desires are ambiguous. 

Desire is a fluid, bubbling mess of contradicitons, paradoxes, and perversions stemming from all the unmapped Cthonic and Dionysian places in the soul.  Most people do not even want to experience their regular everyday emotions, let alone the ones that make up their most profound and fundamental desires.  So when we are confronted with literature or art that forces us to peel off the scabs and poke directly into that place, many people become so uncomfortable they flee.  Others really dig this sort of experience of art (I’m one of them) because to them the painful stripping into the uneasy parts of the soul as a means to explore their desires is an enlivening experience.  It may be because they are the sort of people who don’t necessarily want to be comfortable or it may be because that art is “safe” in a way that life is not.  That these desires can be expressed outside normal life in the catharsis of the theater. 

However, some people do not believe that art is any more ”safe” than lived experience.  That art is perhaps more dangerous or equally as dangerous as life.  For these people, encountering Others in their art who disturb the status quo and their expectations and preconceptions of love; who cause an upheaval of the fantasy are not welcome characters but ”unrealistic” or “too real”; in short, discomfiting.

On top of which, people have absolutely no idea what they want.  Let’s talk about porn again. In porn we see this more easily because there’s nothing like kinky sex to let us know where everyone really is on the crazy desire spectrum.  If one’s desires, regardless of those desires, are not “mainstream” then they are automatically a kink.  For example, say you are dude and you are really turned on by fat, asian women.  Not just sexually turned on but attracted as in “I would date her” which is not that the same as “I would jerk off to a video of her.” But because you cannot express this desire as a normal attraction, it becomes fetishized.  So you only watch porn of fat, asian women instead of hitting on them at the bar when you are with your buddies.  Instead, you hit on the girls in the bar that are just pretty enough to be unexceptionable to the greatest number of people. Or to put it another way, to be pretty enough to cause a semi-state of arousal in the  greatest number of men.  It’s like  the Utilitarianist’s guide to attraction.

My point is that because desire, that nebulous, amorphous, androgynous rogue, both encapsulates cultural norms and subjective tastes that when a reader (or anyone else) encounters a text with a heroine/hero who embodies the contradiction and conflict between status quo and personal preference, the reader will avoid dealing with the uncomfortable and almost painful sight of that desire and instead choose the normal by either criticizing the text as being “unrealistic” or “unbelievable” or somehow distasteful. Similarly, when dating peope will avoid the raw encounter with desire either by subsuming it via fetishization or total denial. Thus producing mass instances of pairing off #1.

The strength and power of love, as the force behind desire, is the power of subversion.  First because love is not based on the worthiness or even the appropriateness of the beloved. It is just as true to say that no one deserves  to be loved as it is to say that everyone deserves to be loved.  Love is not based on merit. It seems easy to love beauty but it is not. It seems hard to love ugliness but it is not.  The truth is that because love requires an upheaval both of social norms and personal comfort, that to love anyone, whether beloved or friend, mother or child, neighbor or enemy, is an act so difficult that the cynical are justified in questioning if love is even possible.

As a reader, I prefer my heroes and heroines to be in some manner profoundly flawed because what I chiefly like about romance is when it is able to dramatize how love is not about merit but grace. That it is a gift given for no reason.  That it is an irrational and lawless act contained neither by the morality of the beloved nor by your own morality and that the power of love is in the power to make all other powers helpless.

Fat heroines and heroes are unlikely as believable romantic leads because the audience cannot accept the idea that this person who is cultural unacceptable as a sexually attractive object could then be found sexually attractive.  We believe that fat men date fat women because they learn to desire that which is available to them. And we believe that when a slender, attractive man is dating a fat woman is that either he has a kink (pervert!) or that he sees beyond the fat and is attempting to help her to her true thin self (the fixer upper!).  When a fat man dates a thin woman, we just think he must have money.  That someone could love someone who is cultural unacceptable for the mere reason that they are themselves is beyond us.  But why? we ask.  Why, because he is himself. True love is tautological “I love him because he is himself” is an absurd statement and yet the most true. Despite this, it is a truth we consider unrealistic.

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