Saturday, March 26, 2016
Why aren't there any fat superheros?
I have been struggling with my weight for, well, pretty much my whole life. I'm a fat guy but I'm not supposed to bothered by this apparently. Women feel self-concious about their bodies and they rally together to say Barbie is unrealistic as are the myriad of superheroines with large busts and tiny costumes. But when it comes to guys, well, we're lucky, it's okay to be a big guy, but fat girls get it hard because women are expected to be skinny and beautiful. At least, this is what I am told, and if it's true, damn I am sorry for all of you women, because being a big guy has not been easy. When I was in middle school, there were a few boys who would ask me every time they saw me "How's the baby?" implying that I looked pregnant. Of course, they weren't scared of me, because even if i was bigger and stronger, I would have to catch them first and I couldn't because I was fat. I learned not to mind the boys but what really hurt was that the girls didn't seem to find me attractive and I blamed it all on how fat I was. It has taken me a long time to realize that what they really found unattractive about me was how little confidence I had after others broke me. I was, and still am, afraid to talk to women because I am always afraid they won't like me because I'm fat. If you think about it, media doesn't help the fat guys anymore than the fat girls. Yeah Barbie has unrealistic proportions, but have you had a look at the male equivalent? Every superhero wore spandex and had washboard abs and muscles so ripped their veins popped out. They were plastic, but someone took the time to set the molds with veins popping out of their bulging muscles. And spandex, there was no way I was going to pull off spandex, it was clear I was too fat for this. Hw could I be so sure? The only fat guy with super powers was the Blob, and he was a villain. Yeah, that's encouraging, if I want to be among the superheroes, I get to be the bad guy too fat to feel when they are punching me, woo-hoo! Aside from him the next guys were Kingpin and the Penguin, also both villains, and not particularly impressive ones at that. One could argue that all of this was to promote physical fitness, boys were supposed to get into sports and be athletic, if you weren't motivated to get into shape, well then you were just a wuss, grow a pair or go back to the basement. As a boy, there was never any compassion for being fat, it was just a matter of exercising, playing sports and workign for that body, and that's what we're supposed to do, no crying, that's for girls. Grils could complain, femnists had no problem saying there was simply no way for every girl to have tiny waists and giant boobs and we needed to accept women in all of their shapes and sizes. Make no mistake, I feel for women, there are a lot of big girls that I find very attractive and it breaks my heart when they don't have the confidence to present themselves as sexy as they really are because people have told them they are ugly when they are in fact quite beautiful. Only recently has it come to my attention that I am in the same boat. There are women who tell me I am cute and handsome and sweet and they like me just the way I am, but I don't hear it enough. I'm not sure if it's that women aren't saying it, or that I'm just not hearing it because I am so used to hearing bad things that I don't know when a woman likes me. We need to be more vocal about this, there are people who are set on a road to self-destruction because we don't know that there are people who will accept us as we are. We need to stop over-glorifying skinny fit physiques, not that we should villainize them either, there are some people who just are that way naturally. God I hate them sometimes, but there are people with such metabolism that they remain skinny no matter how much they eat and they hate that they have no muscle mass. Of course, that's mostly guys, skinny girls always seem to find a place where they belong, but turning things all the way around isn't going to help if skinny girls are going to feel as awkward as fat girls do now. We need to stop acting like any body type is definitively better, we need more fat characters to balance out the skinny ones, we need diversity of shape as well as color. And for goodness sake, can we please get some decent characters to cosplay as? Spandex simply do not come in XXXL.
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