Fat Rage?

This post comes on the heels of some rather well-publicized spats, disagreements, and general snark from a few of the gainer websites. Of course, conflict and disagreement exist everywhere -- and gainer forums are no exception. People can disagree on all sorts of issues, and sometimes the disagreements can be contentious and emotional. Whenever I see these public displays of ire, I find myself laughing to myself and saying, "wait, I thought fat people were supposed to be jolly."

Fat folks are no different than anyone else, prone to wide range of emotional expression (and expressiveness). But I started thinking about whether fat people, who are subject to wide range of discrimination and bias in our society, are more likely to suffer ill effects of said discrimination, and consequently be more likely to be angry (or at least have a shorter fuse). This is a phenomenon oft-studied in groups of people who are oppressed and marginalized by society. You can only get dirt kicked in your face so many times before you get pissed about it.

And in thinking about this phenomenon, I was reminded of the book Black Rage which came out in the late 1960s and referred to historical oppression of African Americans in this country. Over time, this oppression and marginalization led to an inner rage, at one's position in life, difficulties in getting ahead, and ultimately a form of self-hatred. A similar type of self-loathing has been proposed in the gay community, known as internalized homophobia, where we assimilate societal's bias against sexual minorities into our self-image. If society hates gays, therefore I must hate myself for being gay. These types of self-denigrating attitudes have existed as long as there has been marginalized groups. For an interesting read on social dominance and a history of societal oppression, check out Sidanius and Pratto (1999)'s book Social Dominance.

So therein lies my question: Do fat people suffer from Fat Rage?

Is being fat an oppressed and marginalized group in our society?

To start with, we need to consider whether being fat in our contemporary society would lead one to feel marginalized and/or oppressed. Notice I used the word "contemporary". As I have stated in past posts, our society's displeasure with fatness is a fairly recent phenomena. It was not long ago that being fat was a sign of wealth and prosperity, because so few people could actually eat enough food to gain weight. That luxury was bestowed on royalty and wealthy, while plebeians were stick thin, trying to gather enough sustenance to make it through long, harsh winters. Nowadays, the situation has reversed: those with wealth and status can afford high quality foods, especially organic foods, costly fruits and vegetables, expensive gym memberships, personal trainers, and the luxury of time to be able to work out regularly. Those with less disposable income are more likely to seek out cheap foods, like fast food, junk food, and highly processed (i.e., fattening) foods. They are also less likely to have income to afford a gym and trainer, and less likely to have free time to work out due to work demands. Thus, to be thin is now a status of wealth, diligence, and power; to be fat means you are, essentially, poor, lazy, and lack power and status.

Now here's the interesting part. When you think of people who are oppressed in society, you might also think about those who are a minority status. That is, if one is part of a majority class, they are priveleged (at least in terms of sheer numbers) to hold advantage over those who are minorities (who are fewer in size). Yet in our society, the very wealthy, a very small minority of people, have power and status over the majority, the middle class. It is an interesting power differential where the majority have accepted a position of reduced status and prestige and have not challenged it (except in extreme situations where the working class rise up and overthrow a government, for instance). The same is true for fat people in this country. Almost two-thirds of this country are now overweight or obese, yet this "majority" do not hold status or power over the minority. Similar to the wealth differential, fat people, like poor people, are made to feel inadequate, unattractive, and unappreciated. This message gets reinforced over time, and contributes to a sense of self-loathing in one's societal position.

In addition, there is ample evidence from the social psychology literature that fat people are subject to a variety of hostilities and micro-aggressions in terms of bias and harassment. People who are overweight or obese are more likely to suffer discrimination in all aspects of life, from employment to education to health care. In addition, unlike other oppressed groups, research has shown fat people and thin people show the same amount of displeasure with the "fat image", meaning that there isn't even a protective within-groups effect. In other words, if fat people also hate fat people, where does one go for in-group support and encouragement? There is clear evidence that bias and stigma against fat people persists in this country, and unlike other types of bias that now carry a negative societal perception (e.g., racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc), it is still perfectly acceptable to engage in fatism. As such, being fat in our society does place that individual into a unique marginalized and oppressed class.

How does gaining weight on purpose factor in?

This is an interesting twist on fat bias. I think part of the assumption of fat bias is that the person is weak and gluttonous, gives in easily to temptation and therefore became this fat sloppy obese person. You can "sense" the blame in that assumption, whether spoken outright or not. Yet with gainers, there is a clear mission to gain weight purposefully, and therefore there is nothing weak-minded or powerless about it. Just the opposite, in fact. Its an outright middle-finger to society, saying that I like big and fat, and will become big and fat no matter what you say. To some degree, therefore, this position gleans power, because fat becomes something to be worshiped and celebrated, rather than hidden and humiliated. I am reminded of a recent gathering of gainers in NYC, and many of the photos taken of the event show the hefty group walking down the streets. I remarked on how many pictures were taken like this, because despite seeming to be an ordinary picture, what they convey is a group of big guys lumbering down the street, OVERwhelming the sidewalk and forcing other pedestrians to reroute to the street. When viewed that way, the ordinary is actually quite extraordinary, as fatness pride was clearly on display.

Now consider the opposite. What if the gainer decides to lose weight? When you consider other types of oppressed groups, you see a similar resentment of those who try to flee the oppression to join the protection of the higher status group. For example, people who hail from poor communities yet manage to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and move on to greater financial and social success are often chastised by their original community for being "too good for them" and "forgetting their roots". An interesting phenomenon in the Deaf community has developed around cochlear implants. Some deaf individuals are good candidates for the implants, which can produce a modest hearing response and therefore the individual can speak and hear. However, some deaf individuals are not good candidates, and will remain deaf -- therefore, they must rely on sign language and the Deaf Culture to provide the community not bestowed by our hearing society. Many in the Deaf community find cochlear implants to be an insult to their Deafness, and marginalize those individuals who choose to have the surgery.

The same phenomenon is observed in the gaining community. Unlike race or religion or sex which are fairly immutable (yes, one can change religion or sex, but generally these are consistent identities), one can fairly easily gain and lose weight if you put your mind to it. Therefore, members of gaining community are freer to move in and out of the marginalized group. And that leaves those members who are still fat and subject to society's stigma to resent those who are trying to leave the group. Its like turning your back on those who have embraced and accepted you.

Since most of my readers are also gay, you can also understand this phenomenon from that perspective. After coming out, you were embraced by your gay brethren, brought into Gay culture, and felt you had an identity here. But if you had a good friend who wanted to leave his "gayness" for a relationship with a woman, you might feel betrayed or hurt. Why? Because your friend is leaving the minority "gay" class to join the safe, and ubiquitous, straight class. You feel abandoned, and to some degree, you feel angry because you didn't have a choice to join the gay class, while your friend brandishes his "choice" in your face. I think this is partly why bisexual individuals receive lukewarm support in the gay community. They have the ability to easily transverse the minority and majority pathway, thus avoiding much of the stigma faced by the gay community. That, in turn, brings resentment from the gay community.

More could be said on this issue in terms of gaining, as it is a complex issue with many facets to consider. Suffice it to say, our gaining community is sensitive to the issue of people entering and leaving the community through gaining and losing weight, and perhaps we should be sensitive to those who are unable or unwilling to leave the community and their daily struggles in an oppressive society.

Does the nature of our online gaining forums contribute to rage?

I think all types of online communication have significant limits, in terms of our respective psychological experiences. While they do facilitate meeting people, exchanging ideas, and stimulating our senses (and loins), online exchanges are limited in that there is only print. Think about a phone conversation you've had recently and how you could tell, through pauses and inflections and tonal changes, what your caller was thinking and feeling. And that didn't even include the visual cues that are obtained in face-to-face meetings. So, online, we are forced to artificially describe our emotions through emoticons, LOL's, j/k's, and other phrases as a means to convey what were thinking and feeling when we wrote it. Clearly there are limits to doing that.

In addition, relationship theory suggests that for all relationships to grow and mature, they almost always 1) have a conflict, and 2) successfully navigate the conflict. This is where online relationships often meet their demise. They are simply unable to overcome the conflict resolution in a satisfactory way. A big part of this is not being able to see or hear the person ..in person. So much is gleaned from all our senses, and seeing and hearing how a conflict is presented to us. When it is just something written on a wall or IM, we have to interpret what the writer was thinking and feeling -- and we often misinterpret. Therefore, relationships are unable to surpass the conflict stage to move toward deeper and greater intimacy that we have in our "real life" relationships.

The exception to this, therefore, is in-person meetups. They are hugely important for our community. I mentioned the recent beefy gathering in NYC, which was tremendous. There were over 75 guys, gainers and encouragers and admirers, in the city for fun, food, conversation and brotherhood. I think its safe to say that everyone left that weekend feeling better about our membership in the community and in having met great people. I think some people worry that beefy meetups have to involve sex, but this gainer weekend was all about going out and having fun. I know I have met many beefy friends in a platonic way over the years, and our friendships flourished as a result.

Another amazing thing happens when you meet your beefy friends in person. The likelihood that you become angry or resentful or snarky with them diminishes greatly. In fact, the humor often is elevated to a whole new level of playful sarcasm because you know each other so much better and don't have to worry about the other person "taking it wrong."

Summary and recommendations 

A primer in cognitive behavioral therapy

I'm going to wrap up with a bit of a therapeutic lesson, one that I teach my clients in therapy. As a cognitive behavioral therapist, I am concerned with how thoughts and emotions interrelate and then impact behavior (see above model). A more simplistic way to examine this relationship is this:

Thoughts => Feelings => Behavior => Back to Thoughts.

In other words, we have a perpetual loop of self-examination, in which we interpret events (thoughts), perhaps have a feeling about those events, act on it, and then evaluate the consequence and the next action.

Its important to remember is that our feelings are embedded in this process. Between thoughts and behavior lie our emotional processing. Initially, our emotion center served a primitive yet vital function -- to evaluate events for threats as a means to keep us alive. This is why we often have a physical reaction to someone getting angry with us -- because anger can signal an impending threat to our body, and our nervous system reacts with an adrenaline boost. But we rarely need to worry about someone physically attacking and hurting us. Instead, we are reacting to the "perceived" threat, which might be the threat of a loss of a friendship, of being publicly embarrassed, humiliated, etc.

You, and only you, are in charge of your emotions. Your mind is making interpretations of things you are thinking and experiencing, and deciding whether to be happy, sad, angry, scared or completely unemotional about that event. Nobody... NOBODY... can make you feel any certain way. Even if you had somebody screaming obscenities in your ear, you can choose to ignore that person and think happy thoughts. That person is not a puppeteer, and cannot control how you think or feel. Its entirely up to you. And so when it comes to our online exchanges, think about how often you have personally interpreted a situation, and perhaps gotten emotional over that situation, when in fact it had nothing to do with the other person. It was simply how you chose to evaluate it. And now that you have perspective, would you have done anything differently?

I am going to wrap up with a few ideas and suggestions about anger and the gaining community.

1. I think fat people are no more angry or jolly than anyone else. However, I do think society places a heavy toll (pardon the pun) on being fat. I watch people make faces at fat people on the subway, that seem to be saying, "don't even think of squeezing that fat ass next to me." If you faced a whole day/week/month/year/life of this, how jolly do you think you'd want to be? So we do need to recognize that fatism exists and the toil it takes on members of our community.

2. Given the point above, if you have the freedom to lose weight and leave the gainer community (and all the oppression that goes with it), don't brag about it online. Nobody wants to hear it, and it can be seen as a smack in the face for those who are fat and dealing with that oppression. Just go ahead, lose the weight, and if you want to stick around, re-label yourself as an encourager/admirer and go from there.

3. Conversely, many of you are firmly put in the gainer community with no intentions to leave. You have accepted the societal fatisms that go with it, yet this is more important and worth fighting for. Your position is admirable and hopefully will bring you a life of happiness and contentment. However, you should be aware that not everyone shares your vision or your willingness to confront the heavy hand of stigmas that society doles out to fat people. Like coming out as gay, coming out as a gainer (permanently) takes time and patience. Don't harass or belittle those who are confused, unsure, or vacillate between gaining and losing. Providing support and light-handed encouragement is the best way to help those who are undecided chose to permanently gain.

4. Think carefully about how your relationships are unfolding online, and how you have met the challenge of building successful relationships despite the problems inherent in online communication. If you have found the community lacking, or people are flaky, or some other criticism, perhaps you need to look at whether everyone has made the effort to meet in person to solidify the friendship. Sometimes that's all it takes.

5. Finally, consider and reflect on your emotional state as you interact in the community. Remember that only you can choose to be angry... or sad... or happy. Even if someone does something that really irks you, you have a choice to ignore it. For example, when things heat up and I feel my temper rise, I will take a break from the community -- 24 to 48 hours -- and then return to the issue. In every case, I am much more level-headed then, and can respond in a rational manner rather than angry and irrational.

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As always, thoughtful comments and reactions are appreciated. :)