You might be rejected for sex, but you aren’t oppressed.
Morbid obesity, Alphabet Soup scolds, Body Positivity, and the attempted shaming of Gay desire.
Introduction
I am going to go over some issues prior to discussing those who think they are oppressed because they aren’t getting laid. Also, the denial that morbid obesity is harmful. It is called “morbid” for a reason.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is desire.
If you think you are beautiful that is your own judgement and I think it would be a folly to dispute it. How you perceive yourself is something only you can truly know and self-perception is something only you can do. Beauty is subjective and hence the saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
However, each person perception of what is beautiful or what is ugly or what isn’t either is equally valid. You might think you are beautiful, someone else might have a different perception. Individuals have preferences and tastes.
However, this essay isn’t about beauty, but desire. Beauty is mentioned first since it is something everyone understands and beauty and desire are often linked together, but they aren’t always. Beauty is mentioned in this essay, since it makes it understandable to a person that desire is also in the eye of the beholder.
Desire varies
What one Gay person considers sexually desirable can vary considerably from what another Gay person considers sexually desirable. A common piece of advice given to a person who was rejected was that you just might not be that person’s type. It would be wrong to assume that because you weren’t desirable to this person, that you won’t be desirable to someone else.
If you are attracted to bodies that others generally aren’t attracted to, that isn’t a problem and no one should be stigmatizing you. Few people are attracted to all bodies and if they claim that they are it is likely some ideological position and not real.
Just because someone finds a specific type of body desirable doesn’t mean you have to find that same specific type of body desirable. The variety of desires is a good thing for the Gay community because it means the entire community isn’t sexually focused on one type of body.
You don’t owe anyone sex.
You might think you are the hottest sexually desirable person in existence, but if you are going to have sex with someone that you desire the issue is whether that person thinks you are desirable.
If the other person doesn’t feel you are desirable then they don’t, and if they don’t want to have sex with you because they don’t find you desirable that is their right. It is sexual harassment if you attempt to push yourself upon that person after that person has made it clear that they don’t want to have sex with you or any physical interactions.
Also, if you don’t find someone sexually desirable you don’t owe anyone an explanation. Explaining to someone why you don’t find them attractive will involve you running them down, and you finding them undesirable is only your perception, and giving a reason also opens up your preferences for discussion. “Not interested,” is all you have to say and should say.
Alphabet Soup manipulations
The regiment of lecturing social workers have several tactics to shame some Gay person’s desire.
One tactic used by the Alphabet Soup and other ideologues to obscure this is to confuse two different issues. The issue they attempt to conflate with the issue of desire is the issue of respect and rudeness. The regiment of scolding social workers will try to stereotype those who reject a certain type of body as rude people.
If you don’t find a person desirable it absolutely doesn’t give you the right to disparage or be rude to them, or subject them to ridicule. It does happen that you are at a bar and you have with body language and by moving away from someone made it clear that you aren’t interested and it can be annoying when they persist even though it should be very clear you aren’t interested. Or the case where you do talk to them and are polite but they think every politeness is leading to you hooking up with them. Or you have been polite and closed the conversation, not abruptly, but there is persistence when it should be clear that you aren’t interested. Some people do make pests of themselves, but it is important to be polite to the end however pestiferous they are. Though you might be frustrated how you might get your message to this person, you don’t want to be rude, otherwise, they will be broadcasting their victimhood. Rudeness isn’t necessary tends to indicate your lack of maturity. Usually, when there has been persistence that is unreasonable, a direct, but polite statement helps. It is a little rough on people, but that will encourage them to not be a pest in the future.
Another tactic is to conflate the issue of some individual going on some excessive diet or undertaking an excessive workout regime with bad consequences with those who work out sensibly and watch what they eat sensibly.
Another tactic is to push the idea that some desirable traits such as intelligence, creativity, or being a nice person is in opposition to being beautiful or desirable. It of course possible that being very popular an object of desire might make some people vain, but it isn’t inherent to being desirable nor a common problem. A person who is widely desired is just as likely to be intelligent as someone who isn’t widely desired and a person who is not generally considered attractive has just as much possibility of being unintelligent as someone who is generally considered attractive. The same goes with being a nice person. Gays generally do value other Gays even if that Gay individual isn’t an object of desire.
In fact, some Gays prefer to have friends with which there isn’t an issue of mutual attraction since it can avoid complications. There is the old admonition in the Gay community of not having sex with friends since it leads to bad consequences. In the friendships among Gays there are often a great variety of physical types.
It is a false representation that Gays reject in all social situations those they wouldn’t want to have sex with.
Another tactic, and perhaps the worst, is to exploit fears and anxieties about finding a boyfriend to pressure a Gay person to accept someone who that person doesn’t find sexually desirable. You very likely can find someone who you consider both desirable and who also would make a good boyfriend in a Gay community with tens of thousands of people. It isn’t an unreasonable expectation. You might have too many unnecessary exclusions that you might want to re-examine, but they will be a personal issue that you will have to work on. However, your difficulties in finding a boyfriend are not because you aren’t attracted to obese individuals as some of these scolds assert.
One misleading tactic used in particular by one Facebook group is to find pictures of a group of Gays socializing and who are all physically fit and claim that the people in the group in the picture are hostile to those who don’t have gym bodies. If you were a sports team on a social outing, you probably are all physically fit. If you are persons who are in club seriously focused on running or bicycling chances are you are all in good shape and a social outing would be a group of people all in shape. This Facebook group is always seeking some photo of a group of Gay people at the beach who are in shape and accuse them of excluding others.
The jealous, the mentally disturbed, the self-entitled and complainers.
Most Gay men understand that they can be objects of sexual desire and also that they can be more desirable to many by having a healthy diet and getting some exercise to avoid being obese and to have toned muscles to be in shape. Further some Gay men will undertake more intensive exercise programs to shape their bodies to be very desirable to many.
Given the venues Gays have established to meet each other, there are abundant opportunities to have their body, which they have shaped to be strongly desired, engaged in sex with another body which they strongly desire. So, there are strong incentives to being in shape. Not being overweight and getting exercise is good for a person’s health as well and this is an additional benefit.
In contrast, generally, straight men are not likely to find being in good shape is going to afford the same amount opportunities to have sex, it will be a positive factor to some extent, but women are generally not really interest in frequent casual sex. The sex lives of straight football players and straight basketball players and the number of women they do sleep with is considered exceptional and extraordinary, but it is only exceptional for straight men.
As a whole, the Gay community compared to straight men, are less likely to be overweight and more likely to be exercising and in better physical shape. Stereotypes regarding masculinity and food won’t impact them as much. They can eat quiche. Given that others in the Gay community are exercising and eating healthy, there is a culture which supports this and exchanges information regarding exercise and healthy eating.
The author remembers an unintentionally hilarious San Francisco Chronicle article in the 1980s in which a reporter went to clothing stores in the Gay neighborhood and couldn’t find pants with his height and waistline and was shocked by it.
You would think that a community which is more likely to be in physical shape, eating healthy, and avoiding being overweight would be a good thing. However, not every Gay person gets exercise or eats healthy and as a consequence is overweight and flabby. There has been a drastic rise in the percentage of obese youth in America. Americans in generally are much more likely to be obese than other nations. In the Gay community the obese find that they are much less sexually desired then others in the Gay community, particularly at venues where sex is sought.
Given that the Gay community is composed of men who are conscious and careful of what they eat and generally are more involved with exercise they are generally not as overweight and more likely to be in shape than comparable age cohorts of straights. Gays who might fit within a distribution of weight heights or not be that far from such a distribution for straight people, when they come out into the Gay community find that they are very much overweight compared to other Gays and in particular to sub-communities of Gays focused on being sexually desirable and sexually active.
At the bar or some other venue, the overweight person who seeks the person who is in shape and not overweight finds out that the in-shape Gay isn’t interested in him. The overweight person finds that his having a good job and income, which might work in the straight community with women, doesn’t matter to the Gay man who is physically fit and might have his own good job and income. Gays complain that bars are a meat-market to stigmatize them, but their real complaint is that their credit in this meat market is no good.
The overweight Gay might survey some venues and see that he is very much out of the norm for being in shape for the people at the bar and feel out of place. Some bars are mostly people who are very much in shape.
It might be thought that a person who wasn’t desirable because of the lack of exercise and not eating healthy would seek to change living habits to be in better shape and lose excessive weight for both a health benefit and to be more sexually desired. In many cases that is the case and a person does change. Changing drastically your living habits to eat better food and to get exercise however can be challenging and so for others, instead of taking responsibility for oneself, whining or some other self-indulgence is preferred and the obese Gay person attacks the Gay community instead. In modern society whining about being oppressed is often preferred to being responsible for yourself.
The choice not to want to change eating habits or work out is a personal choice also. They might have issues or challenges or a situation we don’t know about. Or they just might not care. It is their choice. We can hardly complain about those who would deny Gays their individual choices of who they desire if we deny the right for Gays to make their choices regarding their own body. Again, the problem only arises when they find out that they aren’t generally and start whining that they are oppressed and they demand that someone should desire them.
The solution for this is to go to other bars, often called neighborhood Gay bars where a more representative sample of the Gay community exists and meet people there. Also, at clubs, instead of going after the Gay man with the prominent muscles, instead seek out to meet the Gay men at the bar who are like himself. There are of out of shape and obese Gay men at clubs, being not in high demand, and they aren’t occupied with people seeking out to have sex with them.
Further there are sub-cultures in the Gay community where being heavy is considered desirable. They are called “bears” and they think bears are desirable, though often they do work out and they have a developed musculature. They appear to be happy with their choices and desires and the author wishes them all well. The heavy person might consider this is their subculture. However, the heavy person often wants the guy with the abs.
The simple fact is that some obese Gays and flabby Gays, sometimes don’t want to meet Gays like themselves, nor meet bears, and want a system in which they don’t have to change and still get the Gay with the much-desired prominent abdominal muscles. The Gays who invest time and energy into being in shape and not overweight and generally aren’t doing it to attract the flabby and obese, but are pursuing their own physical desires for someone physically in shape like themselves. There might be few that do, but far less than those who might desire them. A lot of people feel entitled to whatever they want. However, usually they don’t have social workers indulging their sense of entitlement.
Jealousy is an issue. The guy with the gym body is getting guys with gym bodies and the obese guy isn’t. A lot of these complaints just seethe with jealousy.
The strategy to convince the Gay community that obese bodies and flabby bodies are beautiful and sexually desirable and to see if they might shame Gays into believing this, is the slogan is, “All bodies are beautiful,” not recognizing and refuting that, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and so the inherent idea underlying this slogan is that the person who doesn’t see a particular body as beautiful is a psychologically impaired person and if that person won’t recognize this, he is a morally deficient person. It denies individual autonomy in making choices. It is simple shaming.
There is no shortage of social worker type of professionals willing to indulge this wishful thinking and there is even a movement called body positivity to indulge this.
The idea behind this idea that Gays can be convinced that all bodies are beautiful is that what we consider beautiful is socially conditioned. In some ways standards of beauty do shift from one culture or another. However, the extent that these shifts could be is not really know and it appears that it largely lies within a given range among the widely diverse cultures of the world. How much individual control there is over one’s own physical desires it not known either.
Also, what is the obligation people have to shift their deeply felt desires to fit some ideological idea? People might be advised to be not shut out considering possibilities, and Gays do try different things to see if they like it. They do explore their sexual desires. Morally brow beating or shaming Gays, however, is not likely to change their sexual desires and is unproductive. The constant attacks on the Gay community over their desires is basically destructive to the Gay community in slandering the character of Gays. Also, a regiment of scolds can expect to be tuned out.
It needs to be considered if some actions in promoting body positivity is not destructive to the obese person. They might convince this person that they are beautiful, and the person might act on that and go to some Gay venue thinking they are objects of desire and not recognizing that beautify is in the eye of the beholder and then have an abrupt let down when the individual encounters reality. Also, it needs to be considered that the body positivity movement is dissuading this individual from changing their eating habits and long-term damaging their health and increasing their likelihood of becoming diabetic.
Interfering with Gay community venues in the name of representation can be an aggression. We wouldn’t consider insisting that an ad for an upcoming Bear event include really skinny guys, or a “Daddy” event include twinks for fair representation. Gays who are into what are called gym bods have a right to have ads and representation that fits their particular subculture.
This isn’t to say that some of Gay advertising is somewhat ridiculous as to body types. If you open Alphabet Soup publication you would think that those who are taking HIV medications are all young people who work out regularly at the gym. Though being major advertisers with full page color ads in the Alphabet Soup media, thus very prominent purveyors of a physical stereotype of who Gays are, they aren’t criticized in the media, perhaps because they are major revenue sources for the media.
Gays are mostly grown up and understand advertising culture isn’t reality. We don’t expect the people we meet will look like movie stars or actors in porn. If you feel that these ads in the Alphabet Soup media are reality and because you think this reality you feel you are failing to be part of the Gay community, and you feel left out, and evidently some Gays do, your problem isn’t the Gay community but a failure to be able to critically think at a minimal level about advertising in general.
Further most Gays understand that the Instagram accounts and other online sites with men who are exceptionally fit are just that exceptional. They just enjoy looking at these guys, knowing that it is a fantasy. They don’t expect to be that in reality or end up having sex with such a person. Surely there might be some that do, but there are always persons with bad judgement.
The Alphabet Soup media scolds like to assert that the Gay community is largely deluded and expecting to achieve these exceptional standards and thus is subject to a host of pathologies. The reality is that Gays know what reality is, and there is just a noisy set of complainers for reasons we have discussed.
Representation is important in depictions of the Gay community to show different races and ethnic backgrounds and ages because these are the groups that make up the Gay community. Obesity is a health issue; it isn’t a race or ethnic group.
A community culture, as long as it isn’t repressive or demeaning, of healthy eating and exercise, would be a significant advantage to the Gay community in regards to health. It would be a real material advantage to its physical well-being. One obvious incentive is to have sex with sexually desirable men. Rather than denouncing it or trying to block it, it might be considered how it could be managed for the positive benefits without endless denunciations of Gays and Gay community culture.
The issue is not allowing individual Gays the autonomy in choosing their desires.
Further underlying this idea that Gays who aren’t attracted to some body types are bad people, is an anti-sex attitude against physical sexual desire. We are supposed to be not looking at the physical body, but sexual activity should derive from some metaphysical spiritual source or romance, and physical sexual desire is positioned as being in opposition to spiritual values and romantic values. To have specific physical sexual wants is to be among the morally fallen for the self-righteous social-worker types.
This hostility to Gays who work out and watch what they eat to develop certain physiques is part of a larger anti-sex attitude in the Alphabet Soup which is against kink at Gay events and bathhouses and sex venues and expects Gays to get married and ascribe to heteronormativity or at least not embarrass the Respectability Gays.
This anti-Gay movement of social workers derives its strength from a generally anti-sex attitude among the Alphabet Soup in which a lot of the other letters in the initialism don’t have the same sexual cultural as Gays and so aren’t sympathetic to it, from the Respectability Gays who worry about what straight people think about the liberated sexual desires of Gays, and Gays who have issues with sexuality.
Gay culture is a culture of sexual liberation and one of the great benefits of being Gay. Those who criticize the Gay community because of its culture of sexual liberation which would include being liberated to make your own sexual choices need to be recognized as anti-sex and repressive.
Finally, moral absolutism isn’t going to serve the interests of the Gay community. There are multiple factors involved in different situations and there are competing interests. A Calvinist view of these issues, of there being an elect and the damned, a view in which things are seen in black and white, isn’t going to be of any good and is the policy of those who seek to morally self-aggrandize themselves. The moral scolds can shut up.