Porous People

Here's why men complain about fatness "feminizing" them. It can share the archetypal trait usually attributed to femaleness, porous if not non-existent boundaries;

Albert sees nothing wrong with his size. He feels no need to pin the blame on his genes or an overactive thyroid.

[The character's played by the late James Gandolfini.]

He's not going to change; why should he? It's Marianne who's got to learn that what really matters is the man inside the bloat.

That's his love interest played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who's increasingly attracted to that man inside, but increasingly irked by his bigger body. Opinion/physique, comparable right? She's a slender masseuse who therefore has a body that is actually her;

Insofar as the pair of them sort it out, it's on his terms. 

In other words he no more changes than he (presumably) asks her to. Yet that's still a loss to the whiny hater writing. "Sort it out", should mean, she gets over herself and that's a good phrase to invoke, because his fat body seems to be more malleable than the insistence on making his body an issue. Rather like a woman's often is;

He's no more going to alter his eating habits than his unlovely bedroom furniture. Fortunately..... a bigger feller can after all be "kinda sexy", so long as his perfectly proper shape isn't held against him. 

Well, the character has the tedious history of weight loss dieting. And that observations kind of obvious. If you want to enjoy someone, cultivating disgust for them isn't the best way. Not to forget another fat dis-embodiment trope-the elision of food eating and weight. The body as food and food as your body waiting to be;

While the story is unfolding, this approach seems perfectly in order. After all, we've been educated to understand that it's wrong to question the life-choices of the generously proportioned.

I think this's probably the one that renders me almost speechless. I should know better, but I'm thinking, is this really how you see totally erasing someone's body? "Questioning their life-choices?" What the hell is wrong with people? It's at times like this when I feel I just can't stand much more exposure to this kind of mindset.

This plank actually invokes comments about Keira Knightley as if that must somehow be from fat people. Though there's a long tradition of slim women using that hook to dump their own resentment about not being even slimmer on thin women.

Putting aside the presumptuous sense of ownership about someone else's body, its the invasiveness that's so creeptastic. How does someone allow themselves to get such a sense of entitlement over other people? I've spoken before about the way fat bodies are put up for nonsensical "debates" by all and sundry, pitted against the opinion that they're a problem, as if there's parity. Goodness forbid anyone should question the mechanical acquisition of desire for a body that doesn't actually exist.

People are asked to do "body maintenance", but mind maintenance for those picking up society's detritus is some kind of heavy imposition. Everything must run around their opinion, that a lot of the time is barely even theirs. Just part of an impersonal drone of a campaign that has attacked the mental health of millions, for their health. Including those who allow themselves to be its bitter tools. Yeah, why the bitterness?

The author then goes on to mention the death of JG this year at 51, using him as a 20 stone (280 lbs/125 kg) morality play for "the obese".

He did put on weight at an accelerated rate during his latter years. At the time of his death, he looked to me, not just fatter but bloated, especially around the face. We are taught to see weight as the product of indiscreet conscious acts, but it seems to me that gain and it's type and speed, may well have been signalling a body under duress.

Fat people are people, we're individuals, we have lives. Whilst I'm not interested in judging he was said to participate in habits that may well have damaged his heart. It may have been some weakness that meant an intervention would have been necessary anyway. He never had the chance to find out.

My suspicion as in other cases is that if weight was seen in a level headed and objective manner, the sense that not all gain is the same, even in one person, might be more obvious by now. An investigation may have brought an intervention that could have prolonged his life.

As it was, he was just a man who had too big a middle aged spread caused by his pasta consumption, who knows, that could have been a side issue. Hunger and appetite are functions of metabolism, not character or personality. Changes in them could well be warning signs too. But how much of that observation is being done? Fatsphere denizens have spoken much about how this strange de-materialisation of a fat person's existence renders things that could be observed, imperceptible and overlooked.

That's a genuinely valuable lesson.