"Fat People Art Week?" how about not.

Edit 1:30PM: now that it isn't 5:30 in the morning and I am a little more lucid, I am including some edits to this post as clarifications. Yeehaw.
Came across FPAW through an unrelated blog and it just really, really rubbed me the wrong way.


...
Did I just say that?
Did I just blow your minds?

The reason I think this is shit is the same reason I think any 'grant a token minority a week of celebration' collective-self-fuck-a-thon is shit, and for the same reason I think that most mainstream BBW-appreciation stuff is, at best, sexual fetishists giving themselves a pat on the back for being 'progressive'. Its the reason I fucking cringe when I see feeder-fetish accounts visiting my DA page with zeal and leaving me "I LOVE YOUR ART!" comment-thumbprints back to their terrible, terrible pages. I'm glad you like my stuff. I'm, however, not so glad that I'm going to have to rip the thought of you jerking off to it out of my poor brain.

Fat folk are not some magical race of wish-granting pixies to be adored for a week and forgotten about the next. Nor are they all trolls who wander the globe looking for fritos and the latest XBox 360 hack. Nor are they around purely to stimulate people's sexual whims. Fat people are just people. That's it. It begins and ends there; they aren't any better or worse than 'average weight' people, or hyper-obese people, or anorexic people. They are just regular shmucks like the rest of us regular shmucks. I don't think we should give them special recognition for a week for the same reason that I, an aligned feminist and female spiritualist, dont think that we should have "ladies week" or "pagans week." Every day should be fat art appreciation day, just like every day should be "womens day" or "tree-huggers day."

Every day should be everyone's day.

When you relegate the celebration of something to just a single day or a single week or a single month, what you're saying is essentially "it's totally cool to forget these people as autonomous, sentient, living people as long as you make a half-assed attempt to recognize their humanity one day a fucking year! Tap that keg, bro!" Every artist, every character designer should enjoy the myriad of body types to indulge in just like they should with race, gender, sexual identity, able-ism...

I'll be the first-one on the boat to grovel for Heiwa fanart¹, just like I'll actively seek out other artists who draw more than the staple comic-and-videogame-character illustrations (and aren't doing it purely to get their dicks hard). BUT: trying to be progressive -- in a really backhanded way at that -- by "granting the fats of the world a week of art" is like saying "lets have a 24-hour sexual-abuse-recognition day" or "lets have a yearly animal-rights awareness afternoon!" -- the good intent is certainly there, but it falls short in the category of longstanding effect.

I challenge people to include everyone, at least in their thoughts, in their art and ideals of what is beautiful. For me, one of my big fights is non-fetishized, non-stereotyped views of fat people in art. I come from a long line of short, squat people and have grown up my entire life embroiled in an internal/external bout of body fascism. I also personally find heavier people much more attractive than thin ones. And I've grown up in a big, fat, mid-western state (steak + potatoes, yo'.) There are lots of good flags to raise, and this is just mine. I apologize that I don't always have the time to hit every major cause out there, but I at least try to be as inclusive in my art as I can be without becoming a Benetton ad parody.

But seriously.

If you want to include everyone in your art, then do it of your own fruition year round.
Otherwise you're just half-assing lip-service to a group.

And in shared love (of at least the well-meaning sentiment) of FPAW, some famous folk who are overweight!
(and a link to the Health at Every Size movement!)






¹ - speaking of...