MARCH | 2018 | FRONT PAGE
FAT ASS FEMS AND WHY WE HATE THEM
We’ve all heard it and some of us are even guilty of actually saying it. What is it? “No fats, no fems.” You’re not alive in this world if you haven’t scrolled past an online dating profile indicating that its owner wasn’t into fem guys- and you simply don’t exist if you haven’t heard the same thing said about our fat Beaux brothers as well. Issa trend and just like everything else in the world, it has a name: Homonormaty.
Homonormaty: adjective
Denoting or relating to a worldview that promotes fitness and masculinity as the normal or preferred standard among same gendered loving men of color and even among those who are not.
Homonormaty is disassociating yourself from the fat Beaux who is giving you the eye at the club, and where you, in your shallowness- dismiss him because he does not meet your weight requirements. The interesting part about this scenario is that he’s new in town and thought about approaching you because he’s interested in meeting new people and because he liked your shirt. What’s more interesting is that you’re not really his type sexually and because of your fat bias you’ve more than likely just missed out on a free drink and a new friend.
Homonormaty is ostracizing the effeminate Beaux because you peg him as being less than a man. In fact, you find him down right womanly. Also, while you’re not a hundred percent certain, you’re almost sure that he’s wearing foundation. What’s interesting here is that (1) he’s not wearing foundation, (2) he’s topped at least three of your “masculine” friends; and (4) he can tell the difference between a 302-4V, 230 horsepower engine and a 289 Challenger Special and, lastly, he does not own a single piece of music by Beyonce. He doesn’t even think she’s that great.
Homonormity is similar to white privilege in the ways that it grants “privilege” to those who are perceived as being masculine and in shape. The “masc for masc” Beauxs don’t share the same negative experiences of those who exist as fat and effeminate under the same social circumstances.
So why do we hate our fat and/or fem Beaux brother? Hate might be a strong word, so here’s some strong insight to accompany it. The negative ways in which we treat our fat Beaux brothers reveals our own self-loathing, desires to control others and our need to feel better about ourselves through body shaming.
Our attitudes towards the hefty Beaux result from not actually having any fat friends- this is what makes it so easy for us to dehumanize them and automatically equate them to being unattractive.
The science behind this is simple, as it’s far easier to say or think fucked up things about a group of people if we haven’t had intimate relationships or experiences with them. It’s easier to be an asshole towards the fat Beaux because you don’t know him, but it becomes more difficult to judge him when he’s the same size as your fat ass father or your fat ass brother.
Disinclination against the effeminate Beaux is nothing new and has actually become quite the norm in our little community of misogynists. Our hatred for and of the fem Beaux is stemmed in misogyny. Interestingly enough, even though we are a community of SGL men, we’ve somehow found a way to subject each other to a prejudice geared towards women.
The resentment we display towards the feminine Beaux comes from our associating femininity with inferiority. We revere our mothers and our sisters but at our core we view femininity as a step below manhood. We treasure masculinity and from adolescence onward we work to assert it as often as we can.
What irks us about the feminine man is his visibility. We’re annoyed by him because he is the problem- the stereotype that so many of us have fought against and he must, beyond anything else, be policed. We seek to restrict his behavior by denying him the same acceptance we give our masculine Beaux brothers and restrict his role within the community the same way heterosexual men restrict the role of women. We don’t want his opinion, we don’t want to hear his voice, but we will take his sex.
We trash the fem Beaux because we’re just as homophobic as the Black Church. Proof of this can be found in a word bank we put together after inquiring about what our fellow Beauxs found to be attractive in a feminine man. For those of you who are not familiar with how a word bank works, it’s a collection of words and phrases that are entered into a bank, the resulting words and phrases are sized in order of their frequency.
What we find from the example given is that word used most was “nothing”. Nothing, for the majority of those who participated in our conversation, was attractive about the feminine Beaux and the many of the only positives to be found were sexual in nature. We expected to find more words like “confident’ and "strong” but what we found was quite the opposite.
Here (again) we have a situation where attitudes are formed from lack of experiences. And that’s the solution.
The more we get to know our fat and fem Beaux brothers the more inclined we’ll be to defend and accept them. Yes, everyone isn’t for everybody (and we’ll talk more about that in April), but one thing that is for certain is that we’re all in this together. The sooner we realize that, the better off we’ll be as a community.
Many of us will never understand the emotional consequences our actions towards and against the fat and effeminate Beaux will have, and that’s what makes all of this even more important. Our hatred of these two population of men makes us no better than the racist, the sexist or the homophobe. The sooner we realize that the tearing down of the fat and effeminate Beaux is essentially doing their work for them, the sooner we can actually start building a community of inclusion.