Hey I keep seeing that most of the gays in the gay community are well-toned. Are you not accepted as a fat person in the community or do they just not find that attractive? In this particular, German setting, its members can be assumed to be predominantly cisgender, white, and from urban middle-class backgrounds.
Despite the variety of responses in the aforementioned comment section, one thing becomes evident: homosexual cisgender male bodies experience pressure caused by restrictive, fat-phobic body standards.
In the gay scene, binary notions of gender and clear body codes are a common occurrence. A striking example of this is the controversy provoked by a tank top released in by the U. However, this supposedly self-deprecating critique provides deeper insight into a partly misogynistic subculture where the ideal of an athletically built, masculine-presenting, white, male body reigns supreme.
In this subculture, fatphobia and questions of sexual identity are intertwined in very specific ways: Gay men tend to self-objectify themselves in romantic and sexual contexts, reproduce restrictive body norms by performing what is considered a gay identity and try to resist internalized, homophobic body images. In , psychologist Michael D. After analyzing all the interviews, Siever formulated three key findings: Firstly, heterosexual women and homosexual men place a particular emphasis on having a slim to athletic body.
Secondly, the body norms imposed on heterosexual women by dominant society are reproduced within gay subcultures with comparable intensity. Thirdly, the primary cause for this appears to be rooted in the sexual objectification of both groups.
