I saw some tweets a little bit ago (which I am not quoting or screenshotting because they are not the point & this expression was super valid) in which a fat woman is talking about how men who comment on her pictures that they would "pass" on dating her never had a chance and...

That is such a true thing of that experience, but it got me thinking about how fat people's relationship to our aesthetic selves & to our own hotness winds up being constricted to something *super reactionary*, particularly when we date men

This is obviously not a unique, siloed experience. People with all kinds of marginalized bodies (and commodified bodies, which is everyone) get their experience & expression of their aesthetic selves really filtered through outsider perceptions

But one of the particularities of fatness is the combination of a lack of access to clothes in general and a very loud social positioning as "low value" partners

(fatness is actually not alone in that experience, but it’s what I'm most equipped to talk about so I'm just gonna talk about it)

So, anyway, our arguments against fatphobic bullshit AND the way we present ourselves often wind up wrapped back around the logic of what hotness is or who is a "high value" partner

Fat people (especially fat people who date men) wind up doing something I think of as aggressively performing hotness. We style ourselves in particular ways, talk about our hotness in particular ways, and remind men that they actually *couldn't* have us so, what does it matter...

And this is a valid response and useful in healing some of the bullshit society puts on us.

But it does still wind up centering men and reiterating the underlying logic of "worthiness" for sex/relationships (which is a thing! but also not!)

It also tends to create a very specific concept of "hot fatness" which really emphasizes things like an hourglass figure and "European" features, along side a very specific style of presentation

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is all of this winds up *still being about thin men* and just like...what happens if your concept of your own hotness or your best aesthetic self doesn't get filtered through some dude's eyes before you get to live it?

If you've been around for a while you will know that I did "aggressively hot" for a while. Like, my last identity as a woman was "hot fat girl" and some of that is still very alive in me.

And. The process of choosing not to seek out unqueer men (and to rarely seek out men at all) along with the process of beginning transition has really changed how I interact with men's ideas about what's hot. Not that there isn't a lot of fatphobia out here too! Just different

So like, do I know how one would go about divesting from men's opinions or at least not centering the preferences of thin men in ones relationship to self...without being able to move away from seeking men as partners? Nope. But I think it'd be worth it to try.