Although we were assigned to do a podcast this week as a posting, I did not want to simply write a post and then read it into a microphone. I thought that by doing an interview, I could take advantage of the fact that I had to record this week’s post. Including an interview into MBP as a written account is not particular interesting sounding but I’m hoping that a podcast recording serves as a more engaging way for you, my reader, to hear the perspective of another person on the issue.
Enjoy!
source: chubstr.com
When I came across “Chubstr – Big Men’s Style, Resources, Shopping, & Guides,” I was overjoyed to find a space online that catered specifically to plus-size men, regarding them as just as capable of being fashionable and trendy as men whose clothes are advertised on every other runway and in every other storefront window. It appeals to a growing niche community of fashion-minded dudes while creating an accepting-by-default community to discuss these resources. I was so happy to find such a body positivity blog that focused on men that I included the link on my blog’s header a few weeks ago but had yet to discuss it in a post because I wanted to explore Chubstr fully first.
I do not learn much about the movie Mansome from the trailer, except that it focuses mostly on masculinity and facial hair. As a part of my blogging course, I will be liveblogging through out the movie, offering my insights and opinions in an unaltered way, as if my reader could read my thoughts directly as I watched the movie. Here we go!
source: teamstroupe.tumblr.com
The next time someone tells me fat = unhealthy, I’m going to print this image on wallpaper and decorate their bedroom with it while they’re sleeping.
That’s it. That’s the post.
I was not in class when we discussed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but from my research, I’ve gathered it has to do with properly tagging and categorizing the content on your blog in order make yourself organically searchable on the web, without having to pay for advertisements or special attention. As I’ve talked about in the past, my blog on male body positivity is one of the few out there, so I don’t anticipate having trouble finding my work out there. I consulted a number of search engines to find just how “relevant” my topic is.
Body positivity is great. Like, I’m actually such a fan mostly because of my own personal body image liberation I’ve experienced at the hands of strong communities that could care less about what we ~should~ look like. It awesomely takes on the challenge that says “FAT BODIES ARE UNHEALTHY BODIES” and says “HA HA I DO WHAT I WANT” in its face. After all, there’s just as many ways to be unhealthy as there are ways to be healthy. I read an article on Jezebel that questioned the purpose of online spaces that promote body positivity and their relative significance to the actual cause.
We’re about to get up and personal so unless you’re prepared to read about my personal taste in men (by the way, I‘M GAY), don’t bother with this one because I’m going to expressly tell you some things that turn me one (and might just turn you on too…)
In addition to being forced to consume images of stick-thin men with perfect plastic smiles, men of all ages are confronted with “ideal” muscle-y bodytypes so often that even men who maintain a muscular build can feel unsatisfied with their results. After all, it’s essentially impossible to keep up with Photoshop.
Just like those with anorexia nervosa suffer from body dysmorphia (having an unrealistic perception of your own body, i.e. seeing yourself as much larger than you actually are), those suffering from muscle dysmorphia misperceive their muscular builds as being too flabby, not ripped enough, or not up to par of what’s expected or how they “should” look.
Last post concluded with some thoughts on pro-ana and thinspo-positive spaces. This post brings me to the point of all this: the topic of male anorexia.
20% of anorexics are men. Twenty percent. And rising. More and more men are starving themselves to death in a pathological pursuit of perfection. Male anorexics have much in common with women who suffer from the same debilitating illness, but there’s a striking difference: For the vast majority of men, help is not on the way.
Sorry for the hiatus. Hurricane Sandy, the death of a friend, and other life roadblocks.
When the world is telling you to look a certain way, it’s hard to not bend to that influence. When you see every depiction of human bodies as fit, able, and conventionally attractive, it’s not hard to find yourself looking into the mirror, finding all the things you don’t like about yourself. When popular entertainment and even popular opinions, as propagated by social media, about “health” and “acceptable weights” discredit and dehumanize fat people with fat jokes and claims about obesity, it’s not uncommon to find yourself associating body variance with ridicule, guilt, shame, and uneasiness. As a result, you can find perfectly healthy people claiming they wouldn’t mind “losing a few pounds.”
Sometimes I forget I maintain this blog for a class because I honestly have such a good time researching and writing about my topic. I consider myself legitimately concerned about the topic of male image and enjoy my bit of cultural analysis every week. This week we learned about curated blogs, which are simply collections of links, images, and resources about a certain topic that link out to other websites, much like the popular news site, the Drudge Report. They differ from a “normal” blog in that they sometimes do not contain original content (just links), though some curators do take it upon themselves to comment or elaborate on the stories they find through their own lens, making their curated space more like a blog that includes their own thoughts.
I’d like to think I look a bit more invested right now than she does. credit: tumblr.com
I do not believe feminism is just about women anymore. Maybe first-wave feminism was mostly preoccupied with women’s rights and suffrage, but in this day and age of social justice and our own awareness of the workings of intersectionality, the movement has begun veer off into addressing many issues affected by any sort of oppressed peoples. This can include issues pertaining to gender, race, ethnicity, ability status, or sexual orientation, to name a few areas. As a result, I don’t believe that only the female-identified can consider them feminists because anyone can consider themselves invested in these issues if they properly check their privilege.
As I’m sure all of you know at this point, I’m doing this blog for a class and our next assignment was to use a random photo generator attached to Flickr’s Creative Commons and make a post out of it. We were allowed 5 refreshes before we had to settle and pick one to base our post off of. So I went to the site and found photo number one. No relevance so I pressed refresh.
Photo two. Refresh two. Photo three. Refresh three. Photo four. Refresh four. Photo five. Refresh five.
Photo six. (See? I didn’t cheat. I refreshed five times, like I was allotted. 
)
Here’s what I got.
I’ve talked about fat-shaming and body-shaming a bit in the past and thought it would help for me to elaborate what I meant by these terms. For the most part, I use them interchangeably but I guess there’s slight differences if you really think about it. Fat shaming would simply be the process of being rude to someone based on the size of their body. This can include a hatred for fat people, an assumption that they are inherently unhealthy because of their size, and a need to classify these bodies as abnormal, as if in this world we live in now, there is only one acceptable body for people to have. Body shaming goes a little further and strives to erase the value of all types of body that fall outside of the ideal look. There is certainly a large focus on overweight bodies (even that word overweight itself is involved in the process), but it can include all types of bodies that may be otherwise considered abnormal or disfigured.
The tagline for this blog is “much-needed body positivity for the male-identified.” Now you may ask, what does “male-identified” even mean? Well, basically the way we see it is that gender is something that is constructed inside of you and is considered part of your identity, the conglomeration of innumerous factors. Most people fall under the categories of man or woman when it comes to gender and these are probably the ones my readers are most familiar with so I will not stray far into the topics of third gender, agender, and genderqueer, to name only a few other less popular gender identities. Sex, on the other hand, is considered what biologically you are made up of, and for most, this is a distinction made a by a doctor after we are first born based on the appearance of our genitalia. This M.D. input is how we get popular phrases and identities like “coercively assigned female at birth (CAFAB)” or “male assigned at birth (MAAB),” etc. We now know that even sex isn’t as simple as the equipment between your legs but it can’t be argued that society largely views people as falling into two main categories: male and female.
Not too long ago, this article was going around my Facebook news feed. It was being discussed ruthlessly for about a week and I found, to my dismay, that many people seemed to be agreeing with the sentiment of the author. “Why The Gays Hate Their Bodies” took me by surprise because by the end of it, I felt so detached from the gay community that I wasn’t even sure if I had missed some poignant comment or sidelink that sparked all of the relating I saw happening amongst my friends.
If I had any doubters that body positivity is desperately needed in our society, watch the following video that the internet has recently been all abuzz about.
I don’t even think I want to put a tl;dr description because it is so integral that you watch this video to truly understand our society’s view of every body that doesn’t match our imagined ideal, regardless of the body type of the critic. 4 minutes and 21 seconds very well spent, I promise you.
When my Creative Blogging professor sprung the assignment on me that I would need to turn my comment into a blog post, I paused because I was in the middle of writing on Steph’s blog about how great I think she is. We met during the summer and I was immediately enraptured with the way she talks about her passions and inspired by the amount of work she puts into her blog. (23,124 views when I just checked!)
Laci Green is a pretty cool vlogger that does YouTube episodes about different topics related to sex positivity and of my favorite pieces she’s done is about “Tough Guys” and the social pressures men feel on their bodies. You simply must watch it to start to connect some of the dots of things concerning the male body image.
Watch it, for real.
credit: counterpolitik.wordpress.com/
One of the awesome things about my Creative Blogging class is that we’re encouraged to connect our topics with those of other blogs so go check out my guest post on No Blogs, No Masters normally run by Adam here!
Male Body Posi+ive 