B & A

Did some cleaning out today of my membership in a buncha Yahoo Groups: it occurred to me that as I was clicking thru the newest batch of pics in one of the Very Fat Women groups, that a certain kinda picture no longer held any interest for me. Most FAs – when they’re young and in search of anything that’ll validate their sense of what’s truly attractive – go through a period where they spend a lotta time looking at weight loss “before” pics. For many of us in those misbegotten days before the Internet and the niche plus-sized model market, it was practically the only place where you could find photos of decent looking fat women. That many of these photos were intentionally poorly focused (good photographs were for that wonderful day when the fat subject actually lost weight!) did little to dissuade us FA seekers: what mattered was the hint of super-sized beauty behind the blurriness.

These days, with so many full and vibrant and self-assured fat women on the web, there’s no real reason for me to linger on such images anymore. For a time, as a writer of fiction that is focused on the physical form of my fat protagonists, I was of the mindset that I needed as many pictures as I could get. If you’re gonna fixate on descriptions of fatness, after all, you want to have a clear image of as many different angles as possible. But so many “before” weight loss pics are so stolid and monotonous, so consistently the same boring pose, that to see one is to see ‘em all.

Too, so many of these women are so clearly unhappy with their present selves, so focused on a person that they futilely hope to some day become, that the cumulative effect of clicking through ‘em is just plain depressing. Give me a photo of someone – no matter what their size – who’s learned to be comfortable with who they are in the present. (Like all of the BBWs in my blogroll.) That’s what I wanna see nowadays . . .