Good and Evil —

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I’ve always been hyper-self-conscious. I was a bit of a doofus growing up and simultaneously vigilant about not wanting others to think I was a doofus, which only hastens the downward spiral of doofiness. Personalitywise, I was a spaz wearing an oversized suit and clown shoes trying to play James Bond. If I’ve had one disadvantage in my life, it’s having been socially incompetent to the point of parody.

Everybody’s got something to hide, except for me and my monkey.

As a result, I tended to glom onto a single, main friend who became a sort of social conduit for me. After my best friend moved to Georgia in third grade, I went without any social conduit until my sophomore year of high school. At that point, I made friends with two people who I met at rehearsals for a play taking place at one of the many all-girl Catholic schools in St. Louis.

After high school, I had just one person I’d call on to hang out with or rely on for emotional support. The only social events I ever attended were those my best friend went to, and those were the times I found most stressful, unless, of course, alcohol was involved.

But as close as those relationships were, they were nothing like the closeness I share with my wife Veronica. We know all the good, all the bad, and all the ugly about each other, intimately. So it wasn’t until I had that day-to-day closeness with her that I learned how many of the things I had taken for granted my entire life were socially spaztastic.

For example, Veronica informed me that it was in poor form to show up at someone’s house without first calling to ask if it was okay. Because I only had one main friend (and because cell phones were not ubiquitous), they grew accustomed to me showing up unannounced and asking for a glass of milk. I mean, some stuff was preplanned, but often I’d just be driving around and get bored, so I’d head over to Tim’s house or Angie’s house and we’d hang out. Since they never said anything, I never even considered that it was flat-out rude.

So when I suggested that V and I go visit a mutual friend unannounced, I was pretty surprised by her reaction. All these years, I’d been stepping on people’s toes with my big ol’ clown shoes and I didn’t realize it. If you had to give it a name, you could call it the privilege of social cluelessness. I had to be informed that I was fucking up before I understood why and how I could stop being such an obnoxious dick.

When I started writing about Fat Acceptance in 2009, I had to contend with all the real, actual privilege that I had never even considered. I mean, I’m King Privilege: cis, het, able-bodied, middle-class white male. So I’ve spent the past five years going through a very public, very obnoxious education on power and privilege. And that education continues.

Early in the formation of Fierce Fatties, when I seemed to piss someone off on a monthly basis, I wrote a post that I felt pretty nervous about. I wanted to discuss a popular mantra of Fat Acceptance spaces: health is not a moral imperative. So I did. Four years later, I would not have written the exact same post, but I still agree with much of it. In the end, the post sparked a great discussion on the morality of health choices that I followed up on in a personal post.

For a while now, I’ve been sitting with discomfiting thoughts over another concept that is prevalent in Fat Acceptance circles: the Good Fatty/Bad Fatty dynamic. For a great rundown of what I mean, check out this great comic on the 12 Good Fatty Archetypes by Stacy Bias. It’s quite thorough and gives a fascinating categorization of the ways people attempt to seek legitimacy as part of a stigmatized group.

And I certainly recognized myself in several of the archetypes presented, such as Fat Unicorn, The Big Man, and maybe even The Rad Fatty. But the one I probably blog about most is The (f)Athlete (aka the Exceptional Fatty).

In the past year or so, I’ve written repeatedly about training for and performing a 40-flight stairclimb for the American Lung Association. I also enjoy writing about the science of fitness quite a bit, emphasizing the importance of exercise and a balanced diet from a Health at Every Size^® (HAES) perspective. Frequently, I frame these discussions from an “if you want to be healthy” perspective because I am a fierce advocate of bodily autonomy and agency. I don’t believe anyone should be judged for the choices they make, as outlined in my “moral imperative” post. Put everyone else’s choices under a microscope and you can easily fall into a “that’s not how I would live my life” mentality that is toxic and self-defeating.

Because of my perpetual, hyper-self-consciousness (aka narcissism), when I read about the Good Fatty conundrum, I wonder how often I am throwing fatties under a bus with my writing and how I should continue with this particular aspect of my activism. In other words, at what point does education become evangelism?

This is where I feel like the “Good Fatty/Bad Fatty” concept begins to get muddy. I mean, I’ve been called a healthist before, despite five years of emphasis on bodily autonomy. Just because I love to learn about HAES and fitness doesn’t mean I expect anyone to actually believe what I say, let alone follow it. It’s a subject I find personally fascinating because of my own personal and family health history. Plus, the evidence is so complicated and I’ve only ever heard one side of the argument. Since I began digging into the research five years ago, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the breadth of dissent within the research community over things I had long since taken for granted.

Before Fierce Fatties, I explained my approach to Fat Acceptance and HAES as part self-education and part investigation. Right out of the gate, I published a series interviews with some of the unsung heroes of weight-related research, such as Steven Blair and Katherine Flegal and Rebecca Puhl, whose work has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of what modern science actually says about being fat.

Is that research integral to being a fatty? Nope. If you have no interest in research on fatties or health, that don’t make me no nevermind. But if you are curious, then I’m happy to be one of many resources on the subject. Does that make me a healthist? I guess in the eyes of some, it does. Likewise, whether I, or anyone else, is playing the role of the Good Fatty is totally subjective. Do my posts on the stairclimb make me one of the 12 archetypes? I have no idea. But that hyper-self-conscious part of me feels like sharing something fitness related may cross someone’s line for being a “Good Fatty.”

And I would imagine that this is partially the point of Stacy’s comic: to give pause. As a modest-sized blog, our writing reaches a fairly broad audience, so we have a responsibility to remain vigilant as to how our words affect our readers.

At the same time, for fatties who are just starting out on their journey to self-acceptance, I feel like those 12 Good Fatty archetypes offer just a few of the possible identities that they may never have considered are available to them. Perhaps they don’t believe a fat person can dance or walk a marathon or climb 40 flights or lift a bull over their heads — seeing real-life examples of those stereotype-smashing archetypes can open up a world of possibilities that they may never have considered possible.

To see a fat person wearing stylish clothes gives hope to the fat person who believes they always have to dress to conceal their bodies. But how does a fatshionista know if she’s serving as inspiration or serving as a Good Fatty? Stacy provides several questions to consider:

• How does the acceptability of fatness clad in fashionable clothing contribute to the mainstream beauty politic?
• What impact does the requirement for fashion for acceptability have on those who cannot afford, have limited access to, or are uninterested in fashionable clothing?
• Are problematic social hierarchies and exclusions outside activism mirrored here within it?

These are all great questions to consider if you promote fashion, but as Stacy points out, “It’s perfectly OK to love fashion, to be super fit and able-bodied, to be fierce. This blog isn’t meant to criticze, just to ask questions about how we might continue to seek quality without leaveing anyone behind.”

So from the perspective of a fatshionista blogger, I find myself asking questions: how can a blog best reflect a value-neutral approach to size and fashion? How do you contend with the privilege of being able to afford and have access to fashionable clothing, while at the same time sharing your passion for fashion? How does your day-to-day posts on fashion change if you want to avoid being a Good Fatty?

And obviously, I have similar questions for my own writing. I’m personally fascinated by fat health research and the radical possibilities of all bodies, so how do I continue that discussion without negatively impacting others within the community?

Stacy explains the difference: “Where the ‘Good Fatty’ becomes problematic is when it’s used as a justification for social legitimacy — when it says ‘I deserve to be seen as valuable because (insert ‘Good Fatty’ qualifier here).’”

Once again, I find myself in hyper-self-conscious territory. As a social misfit who clearly blows past personal boundaries with nary a care in the world, I wonder whether I have tied social legitimacy to fitness. It certainly isn’t my intention. When I wrote about the stairclimb, I mentioned how my training did not go as planned and that I feared humiliation:

[N]ow, with two weeks before event, there was no way I could finish in less than 20 minutes. I thought about just not saying anything, but there was always the chance that someone from reddit would remember what I wrote last year and ask if I did it, and then I’d have to eat a big plate of crow. I fucking hate eating crow.

In the end, I decided to go for it, damn the torpedoes:

Yeah, I might take 20 minutes to climb 40 flights and reddit might scoff and that might make me feel like shit, but dammit, I’m not going to stop doing what I want to do out of fear of how the haters will predictably respond. I’m not going to limit myself out of fear that my personal best isn’t good enough for the perpetually critical. Hell, if I hit the median of 10 minutes, there would STILL be haters dismissing my accomplishments and talking shit.

At that point in time, I felt hyper-self-conscious about how reddit would respond to me not hitting my goal because I hadn’t trained in the weeks leading up to it. Now I feel hyper-self-conscious about alienating readers by emphasizing fitness as a Good Fatty.

And in the end, this is what makes me wonder what will the focus on Good Fatties achieve. How do I distinguish between sharing that part of my experience and identity and exploiting it to draw closer to social legitimacy? It seems as though the only options in terms of awareness are that I’m either not exploiting it, I’m exploiting it and I know it, or I’m exploiting it and I don’t know it. So even if I believe I’m not consciously writing about it to gain social legitimacy (as I currently believe), there’s a chance that I could still be doing it subconsciously.

What then? Do I stop writing about it all together for fear of being a Good Fatty or do I just keep doing what I’m doing with the faith that I’m doing it for the right reasons? In other words, having been educated on the dangers of being a Good Fatty, what are the pragmatic steps I can take to avoid doing so in the future? Personally, I find the issue incredibly difficult to wrap my brain around because I tend to overthink things and skew toward a neurotic response.

I feel like the only thing I do is reinforce my beliefs by restating that I don’t believe anyone is obligated to behave in a way that is not of their choosing. As Bevin wrote recently about her struggle with Father’s Day, it’s okay to not be okay. Life is a constant assault on all of us, and we are all struggling to manage our own unique struggles. Obviously, I’ve got my own challenges to contend with, so who the fuck am I to judge anyone for the choices they make?

And if anyone, including myself, ever makes you feel as thought you aren’t living your life correctly, you can tell them what George RR Martin recently told an interviewer who concern trolled him on his health on behalf of fans: