Feminist ‘Comes Out’ and Nobody Cares

Posted on | September 16, 2017 | 2 Comments

Charlotte Morabito is a Women’s Studies major and a queer feminist, but I repeat myself. She got her degree — actually a double major in Journalism and Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies — last year from Rutgers University, and now works for MSNBC.

Did I mention Charlotte Morabito is fat? Because her fatness is a subject Ms. Morabito has written quite a lot about, for example:

I was explaining to a friend and coworker how I experience fatphobia. I can tell when people have cast me aside because of my weight, I said. I can tell when people have judged me immediately based on my fatness. . . .
I’m talking about that disdain that fat people learn to spot quickly. I’m talking about that sense of superiority a lot of thin people have when they are interacting with a fat person. It’s that feeling we get when we can hear the disgust between each word they speak to us. It’s microaggression, and fat people learn to spot it as a mechanism to survive our daily lives.

Am I the only one annoyed by the sense of entitlement here? Ms. Morabito presumes to sit in judgment of other people’s preferences, condemning them for “fatphobia” and “microaggressions” if they in any way convey the impression that they don’t like her. You are morally obligated not to notice her rotundity, and are required to treat her as though she were as svelte as a supermodel, or else be condemned for your “disdain” and “disgust.” And she can tell, because fat people know you don’t like them, you thin people with your “sense of superiority”:

There’s a specific type of person that is most likely to engage in fatphobic microaggressions. They are the twenty-something, cisgender, middle class, white person. The women refer to themselves as fit — not thin (there’s apparently a huge difference). The men are preoccupied with lifting weights and eating enough protein. They judge fat people instantly.
They have taken on fitness and “health” as a part of their identity so when they see a fat person, they are conditioned to believe that this person just isn’t trying hard enough to change their body. The fat person in front of them becomes an affront to their deeply held worldviews. The fat person is offensive to them. And as much as they try to hide it?–?and some are better than others at hiding it?–?the offense seeps into that interaction and it is, at the very least, uncomfortable. At the very worst, unsafe.
These microaggressions are real.

She’s either clairvoyant or paranoid. Ms. Morabito’s mind-reading act — “I know you’re judging me, you skinny white cisgender people!” — is more than just a psychological projection, however. The obsession with “health” among yuppies was something Tom Wolfe commented on in Bonfire of the Vanities, describing the “social X-ray” women whose thinness was a form of status display, a visible expression of virtue.

The quest to obtain and maintain the perfect body is about sex, obviously. Talk about “health” all you want, but you can’t expect intelligent people to believe that you’re going to the gym five days a week and running three miles a day just because you want to be “healthy.” It’s about competing for partners in the mating market and, with the decline of marriage, the competition is remorseless. All those twenty-somethings on the treadmill at the gym are single, of course, and if fat people are “an affront to their deeply held worldviews,” as Ms. Morabito says, it’s because they can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t try to be as sexually appealing as possible.

Beyond the value of an athletic body in the sexual marketplace, however, the “health” obsession functions as a marker of socioeconomic status. Like being vegan, for example. Dietary purity is virtue signalling, using food as a symbol of one’s social-justice “wokeness.” Whatever the actual health benefits of a meatless diet, the vegan is really showing her (and it’s almost always her) moral superiority to those slobs eating cheeseburgers from the drive-thru at McDonald’s. Being socially aware to the point of caring about “animal rights” is an elite attitude, almost exclusively found among college-educated liberals, in the same way that caring about “climate change” is typical of the elite class. But I digress . . .

 

 

Charlotte Morabito is a fat feminist and a queer feminist and, in an entirely predictable way, she’ll lecture us about the “intersectionality” of oppression between her fatness and her queerness:

I came out as fat to myself about five years ago. I also came out as bisexual to myself around the same time. Both were gradual and mutual processes.
“I think that there is a coming out process around being fat that is rarely discussed,” Dr. Carla Pfeffer, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, wrote in an interview conducted over email. Dr. Pfeffer has done extensive research on the sociological implications of fatness and sexuality.
“People assume that since fatness is so visible, there is no need for fat people to come out as fat,” Dr. Pfeffer added. “But some people view coming out as fat as a way of taking back and reclaiming the discourse around fatness.”
According to sociologists Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward, “coming out as fat involves a person who is easily recognized as fat affirming to herself and others her fatness as a non-negotiable aspect of self, rather than as a temporary state to be remedied through weight loss.” . . .

(There’s a “discourse around fatness,” you see, and feminists are “reclaiming” it, one quart of Häagen-Dazs butter pecan at a time.)

A fat person admitting to themselves and others that their fatness is a part of their identity rather than something they have to change about themselves can be a radical act of self-love and acceptance. . . .

(Fatness is a “radical act” requiring “self-love and acceptance” and, of course, a steady supply of Häagen-Dazs butter pecan.)

Living in a fat body frequently complicates how a person experiences their sexuality and gender expression. “Because of the hateful and pervasive social messaging around fatness — that it is ugly, unhealthy, disgusting, unclean, and unattractive — many fat people often find it challenging to fully embrace sex and their sexuality,” Dr. Pfeffer said. . . .

(The thing about “sexuality” is that it proverbially takes two to tango. While it is possible to “fully embrace sex” alone, a life of masturbation is really rather pathetic, isn’t it? But just have another quart of Häagen-Dazs butter pecan, and try not to think about how sad your life is.)

Sexual erasure of fat people occurs whether the person in question is heterosexual or homosexual. The erasure becomes more difficult to navigate as the fat person’s sexuality or gender identity becomes more “deviant.” . . . Lesbian fat cis women must deal with the narrative that they chose lesbianism because their fat bodies make it impossible for any man to ever be attracted to them. . . .

(Gosh, where do these hateful stereotypes come from? Logic, perhaps?)

Like being publicly queer or trans, to be publicly and unapologetically fat is a political act. When a person is out as both unapologetically fat and unapologetically queer and/or trans, it requires an enormous amount of emotional labor that many thin, straight, and cis people take for granted. . . .

(In much the same way, sane people take their sanity for granted, and leave all the “emotional labor” to crazy Gender Studies majors.)

Bisexuality is frequently erased with the narrative that bisexual women are straight women who are “just experimenting.” . . .

(And the “experiment” proves bisexuals are crazy and desperate.)

Coming out as queer or trans is a political act. To come out means that a trans or queer person is insisting on being visible in a heteronormative society that wishes to erase their sexuality and gender identity. . . .
Having to defend oneself and one’s identity constantly is exhausting to the point that I wonder if coming out (as either fat or queer) to everyone I meet is really worth it. Does this mean I’m ashamed of who I am? No. It means I value my self-care.

To which America answers: “Who cares?”

Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s know that dramatic notions about the importance of “coming out” gained urgency from the AIDS crisis. Rock Hudson had been one of the greatest leading men in Hollywood history, and when he appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer, gaunt and emaciated, this was startling to many people who never in a million years would have guessed he was gay.

Rock Hudson with Elizabeth Taylor in 1956 (left) and in 1985 (right).

It is absurdly insulting for Charlotte Morabito to suppose that a college girl “coming out” as bisexual is a “political act” as significant as gay men coming out during the height of the AIDS epidemic 30 years ago. And as for her “coming out” as fat — well, this is just a bad joke.

Bisexuality has become so trendy among college girls that it seems almost de rigueur, as if “college girl” is just a slang synonym for queer.

As LGBT identities have become commonplace, and normalized in the culture, this has had the ironic effect of making perversion boring.

What was once taboo is now utterly ordinary. No one is shocked at a young feminist’s declaration of queer identity, because we assume that feminists are all queer to some extent, even the ones who aren’t fat.

Seriously — Feminism Is Queer is the title of a Women’s Studies textbook by Professor Mimi Marinucci of Eastern Washington University. Feminism in the 21st century is as contemptuous of heterosexuality as it is of capitalism, Christianity and the Republican Party. Heterosexual women are simply not welcome in the feminist movement anymore, and far be it from me to argue with Professor Marinucci about this.

 

Also, because beauty standards are “toxic,” as another queer feminist has argued, good-looking women don’t belong in feminism, either.

Fat women, ugly women, queer women — this is who feminism is for.

And they wonder why Hillary lost the election . . .

 

Comments