Happy Pride month! (and some heavy thoughts) (Patreon)

It's June, a special month for me... it's my birthday and it's also Pride Month! Despite being old, this will be my first year attending a pride celebration, so this is a big month for me. I've been thinking a lot about what this means. I'm going to try and articulate some feelings that I really need to get out. This might get a bit heavy, so, if you don't want to hear my rambling thoughts on some of the parallels between the lives of queer people and the lives of fat admirers, please stop reading here!  

Gonna get a little political here and I'm old enough that I don't have the patience to coddle people who whine about it...

First, I know it's somewhat tacky to compare the problems of fat admirers to struggles of queer people or to even the struggles of actual fat people -- I've been mocked for being a fat admirer but I've never encountered any outright discrimination because of it. It's currently not dangerous to be a fat admirer in America and it won't be in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, I can't help but reflect how fat admirers should be natural allies in the struggles for both queer liberation and fat liberation. Too often we aren't because it's easier to only think about what gets us hot & bothered and not about these deeper issues. But we ought to, I suppose. 

We live in a world that has arbitrarily decided that attraction based on one particular characteristic (gender) should be policed. It's not hard to imagine an alternate history just  different enough to result in a world that picked another arbitrary characteristic of attraction, like size, to obsess over instead. If one "suspect" "deviant" sexuality can be banned, who is to say that any non-majority sexuality is safe? We already see actual fat people constantly denigrated and demonized, often with the exact same reasoning used to attack queer people. The same people who complain the loudest when they see queer people in public life also complain the loudest about seeing fat people, often using the exact same arguments  -- that they should be banned from sight to protect public decency, that they should be shamed into conforming or simply vanish. I've seen mounting hostility toward fat people in America in recent years as more and more fat people refuse to buy into the self-hatred that has always constituted "acceptable behavior" for previous generations -- it's very similar to the backlash faced by queer people as more and more LGBTQ people refuse to live in shame and secrecy. 

As hostility toward fat bodies mounts, it's not hard to imagine that so will hostility toward people who are attracted to fat bodies. We're mostly ignored now, thought of as weirdos good for the butt of a joke but mostly harmless... but, until only a couple years ago, that was how the general populace still thought of trans people. Only recently has US society suddenly reached a tipping point, seeing them as a moral threat to be eradicated. I do not think that it should be controversial to say that it's a frightening time for queer people in general and for trans women in particular. If anything, this just shows the knife's edge on which we live, that the eye of Sauron can fix on any identity and declare "These people are bad for reasons, they must be destroyed." Only a couple years ago, the machinery of fascism seemed to have selected "illegal immigrants" as its perennial bogeyman, before moving to "Antifa" and then most recently to queer people. It really shows that no one is safe. I could easily imagine fat admirers suddenly being seen as a similar moral threat -- America already hates fat people and fat admirers could be easily demonized as predators that encourage an immoral lifestyle. Just in my daily life, I've been so disappointed by friends who outright refuse to accept my proclivities because they cannot see past their own disgust at fat bodies, refusing to see fat people as fully human or fully capable of making decisions. They think that fat people need to be shamed and bullied "for their own good" and that any expression of love or adoration is only going to "encourage" them to "be unhealthy." How I loathe that naked concern trolling, the disgusting crocodile tears that non-FAs always cry for the "health" of fat people whenever they fail to self-flagellate enough for their liking. Just ridiculous!

I'm probably just being silly because the state of the world has me so on edge. I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to get at, other than to say that as FAs we should take an interest in the struggles of queer people and the struggles of fat people. They're our brothers & sisters in a fight against a reactionary world that wants everyone to fit into a very particular mold. We should all fight for a world where we're free to live as we want and where our bodies are our own. 

(Again, I apologize if I sound like I'm belittling the problems faced by queer or fat people by making this comparison. I'm not good at thinking XP I know there's an irony in me saying this, considering that I write a whole bunch of often kind of mean-spirited fat lesbian smut. XP But what I write is entertainment. It no more reflects reality than any porn does.  Whatever happens in my stories, I believe that actual fat people deserve to live with dignity and respect.)

Anyway, sorry for the heavy rambling! Sometimes I gotta blurt stuff out and, hey, it's my platform, why not XP Stay tuned, I have some hot new Alice action coming up in a couple days!!