Fat People.

The subject has been well pondered before -- it’s just so obvious -- but I’m still intrigued by the complicated connection between the rise of “bear culture” and the recent so-called obesity epidemic. I’m skeptical about the “epidemic” thing. Though anyone who’s been around for a while can see that the average American body size is increasing, I think most of the hysteria about food and fat people is just moral panic and scapegoating. Fat people are lazy and greedy.

And hot. Is there a subculture of heterosexual people fetishizing excess body fat, or is it just gay men? As soon as I ask that question, I realize it’s not hard to find times and places where fat women have been and are seen as more desirable (look at an art history book, or a shelf of porn), but men? The Judd Apatow movies, Seth Rogan, etc., must be somehow analogous, but how so? Those films seem to be less about the attitude of heterosexual women toward fat men than they are about fat men’s fantasies of their own desirability.