Fetishism

Progressive straight guys like to brag about how fat and ugly their partners are. You see it a lot when a feminist discusses the cultural construction of beauty, and how men tend to buy into it to a greater or lesser extent. We do, really, anything from refusing outright to consider a relationship with someone who doesn't meet the criteria, to unconsciously paying less attention to women who are less conventionally attractive. As well as making the usual assumptions about the beautiful, the plain, and the ugly. I knew in college an occasional model who complained that people looked at her and expected her to be a stuck-up bitch.

Usually it's over fatness in particular. Richard Roeper, who works with Roger Ebert and can't bear to be around obese people, touched off a round last year. Part of the problem -- a consequence of the fact that men do buy into it, even when we try not to -- is that women can't really opt out of the whole fucking mess. Even women who are happy with how they look are constantly told they shouldn't be. And men who aren't interested in weighing someone as a means of judging her character or determining chemistry are told they should. That's what those fat ugly women's progressive husbands and boyfriends are reacting to.

Even in progressive circles, however, I've seen it referred to as a "fetish." You see, there's normal sexuality -- desiring the blonde, thin, hairless, silicone-enhanced ideal presented to us by the media -- and then there's fetishism, which is anyone else. Since it's clearly false to tell someone that if she differs from the ideal, she'll never get a man (like that's an important goal), we fall back on the next best thing, saying any man she does get will be sexually weird, if he lusts after an unappealing lump of flesh like her.

And a fetish, of course, is sexual. These women are supposedly unloveable from the first. The best they can hope for is the attentions of a sex-lunatic who dares deviate from the enforced ideal. Love is out of the question.

Just as gay men are told their desires aren't real, that they're simply going through a phase or expressing rebellion, men who like women not in Playboy are told that their desires aren't sincere. They're the products of a disturbed mind. It's an alternative sexuality, different from the center.

Only there is no center.

Comments

[tigtog]

Like Chris, Charles, my response to you quoting the first sentence of this piece at Pandagon was WTF?

Because I know what you've written in the past, I persevered past my initial sense of offence, and I can see the point you're trying to make. You're making it incredibly clumsily however. I'm having to battle hard not be offended by it, even though I truly don't think that is your intent.

Rethink your argument and rewrite it.

[Joseph Smith]

Uhhh....no. There may be a fairly broad distribution of preferences, but there is in fact a centre. Every society has norms of attractiveness, and a lot of people are around the norms. That's not normative: there's nothing inherently "good" about being near the norm, or "bad" about being a fetishist (since that's what people away from the norm get called). That these terms are used as forms of "good" and "bad" is a product of living under the yoke of agriculture for thousands of years, when individual differences were threats to the ability to get food.

I'm a left person, and if someone asked me, I'd say, "I loved my wife at first sight, but the fact that she's pretty helped me look at her long enough that first sight. I very quickly came to love her regardless, but I would still prefer that she be attractive to me to her not being so." The "my wife so fat and ugly" trope, which I haven't heard, sounds like a mid-60's "liberal" talking about his Negro Friend.

And I take issue with the claim that only men who lust after the Playboy Model Ideal are considered non-fetishists; it's essentially a straw-man argument that is really equivalent to saying "No, you're the fetishist The P.M.I. seems to change over the year, if the "New Yorker" is to be believed, and represents a calculation about exaggerations of trends---but I assure you that a man who said that he only "liked" Playboy model would get jeered much more than one who said he didn't like most of the models, especially if the latter added the words, "...because they don't look like real women," (thereby calling the other notional guy a homo).

Your point about a fat woman's being assumed absolutely unlovable a priori except to loonies is well-taken. However, their odds are in fact better with people who do have a particular kink in that direction than those who don't. Being able to see past the outward appearance of someone is usually the product of either familiarity or inclination toward the outward appearance---and familiartiy can be hard to get to if the initial desire to be around is absent....

[Joseph Smith]

My apologies: I meant to say that most persons are near the norms for _judging_ attractiveness, not that they themselves were near those norms---usually, by definition, "most attractive" is away from the norm in several ways.

[Errofsnok]

Make love, not war!