I hadn’t heard about the new Fox reality show, More to Love, until the beginning of the week, when a couple of students in my women’s history class asked me if I had any thoughts about it. I looked up the previews online, and read Samhita’s pre-show analysis at Feministing yesterday. Reluctantly, but in the vague hope that I might be pleasantly surprised, I watched the show last night.
Designed, as Fox claims, to be an “inspirational new series”, More to Love follows a 26 year-old former offensive lineman named Luke (whom we are reminded at every opportunity weighs over 300 pounds) as he chooses a mate from a group of heavy young women (ranging in age from early twenties to early thirties). It was painful to watch. The set-ups were of the sort familiar to anyone who has watched reality television, but the insecurity of so many of the young women involved was all too real. And that’s what was so monstrously infuriating to me; rather than being inspirational, More to Love simply disguised its cruelty behind a guise of compassion; exploitation masqueraded as empathy. The very real low self-esteem of at least some of the women involved was carefully emphasized, reinforcing the idea that a woman whose body mass exceeds the ideal has no real right to either happiness or self-confidence save that that might be bestowed through great good fortune and the magic of Fox television.
But not everyone judged the show as harshly. Kate Harding, a noted activist for fat acceptance, remarks that the show “does little to dispel the myth that fat people’s lives are built around dessert and desperation.” On the other hand, she’s encouraged that the show is willing to present heavy women as desirable:
For all the show’s flaws — and they are legion — and for all the obvious issues every show like this raises about the objectification of women, I couldn’t help being a little flabbergasted by seeing a real, live heterosexual man on television repeatedly extolling the hotness of these particular women, one of whom was wearing a dress I’m pretty sure I’ve tried on at Lane Bryant. Even if a portion of the audience is tuning in to point and laugh at the fatties — and let’s be real, they will be — the bachelor in question won’t be laughing with them. “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type,” Luke drools.
There’s plenty of excellent feminist criticism of the show appearing in the blogosphere this week, but what Kate says here resonated with me and helped me to rethink some (by no means all) of my initial response to More to Love. As awful as the format of the program was, Luke wasn’t presented as particularly odd for his stated interest in larger women. His interest was not framed as a fetish to be analyzed or mocked (there was enough mocking of the female contestants to take up much of the program). The show did imply that Luke’s taste was rare, which reinforced the notion that most men don’t find heavier-than-culturally-mandated-ideal women to be particularly desirable. But as Kate writes, the fact that Luke was there at all, unshamed for his stated preference, represents at least a tiny degree of progress.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which young heterosexual men’s desires are shaped by culture and by their peers. The homosocial principle makes it clear that young males measure their manhood in comparison to other men, whose approval matters more than that of women. In the homosocial equation, dating a thin/pretty/young woman is a way of signaling masculine cachet to other men; dating an older, plainer, or heavier woman will be read by other men as weakness. At its ugliest and most destructive, the culture of what Michael Kimmel calls “Guyland” is a culture in which women’s bodies are trophies to be displayed. If a fellow is genuinely attracted to women who are heavier than what his buddies or his culture declare is most desirable, he faces ridicule as a “chubby chaser” and for lacking the masculine chops to attract someone “hotter” (read = thinner.) If Luke is in any way rare, it is not in his preferences, which I think are quite common — it’s in the confidence that he has to make those desires known. To the extent that he represents the possibility that heterosexual male desire is broader than previously allowed, this is a good thing.
On the other hand, Luke himself is heavy, and I think that largely undercuts the potentially revolutionary aspect of the show. Of course, some heavy men are attracted to heavy women. But how much more radical might it have been to have a leaner man saying, as Luke did, “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type?” There’s an analogy to race here. Films and television programs showed people of the same race kissing years before they showed interracial romances. The “hot slender guy who is attracted to thicker women” barrier is yet uncrossed; a taboo remains in place. While men as well as women suffer from fat-phobia, we already have an extended cultural history of depicting overweight men as desirable. (Think how often, for example, folks tend to say publicly that Bill Clinton looked better when he had more meat on his bones.) What we don’t yet cop to — and what we all would benefit from seeing on television — is that one’s own weight is not in any particular way an indicator of one’s own desires.
In my own life, I’ve never had a particular physical type, having dated (and married) women across the spectrum of weight and height. My wife’s body, like the bodies of so many women, has been transformed by childbearing in the predictable way, a change that hasn’t had the slightest impact on my desire for her. (I ought to note that my own weight has crept up a bit, as the happy obligations of fatherhood have meant less time for working out.) But I’ve certainly sensed undeserved approbation come my way from other men when I’ve been with women who met the cultural ideal for beauty and thinness, and when I’ve been with women who deviated from that absurd standard, I’ve been on the receiving end of homosocial ridicule. I’m not alone in that.
In April 2006, I wrote a post on a similar subject: Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. An excerpt:
For many American men raised to see women as a yardstick with which to measure their own masculinity quotient, a partner’s weight gain is going to be perceived as a very real threat to their own standing. We all know men who get turned on when they realize that their wives or girlfriends are objects of desire for other men. One key question we need to challenge men with: is your partner’s weight gain really turning you off, or are you worried about how other men are reacting to her as a result? Do you miss being able to use other men’s sexual desire as a crutch to stimulate your own libido?
Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.
Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.
If Kate is right, there may well be one small redemptive aspect of More to Love. But though I’m heartened to see the potential for a new discussion about the ways in which culture shapes male desire, I’m not sure it’s worth the heartache and the humiliation we witnessed last night.
