Review: This Fucking Fat by Michael Rhodes
PRIM is an online multimedia platform dedicated to publishing the work of queer Black creatives and creating a community space in which those creatives can connect with others in the community. In addition to cataloguing Black storytelling in all its mediums, from poetry, essays, and scripts, to documentary, music, photography, and film, the minds behind PRIM also run OKHA, a queer Black book club focussing on literature by African, Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx writers.
From the decimal point-precise balancing of macronutrients to the hollow assertions directed at no one in particular that “I’m serious this time”—Is he talking to us? To himself?—Michael Rhodes’s ‘This Fucking Fat’ is a sympathetic portrait of the neurosis which has come to characterise the relationship between modern masculinity and body dysmorphia. The story has all the vulnerability of the diary entry and (in the very best way possible) all the wandering imprecision of the dramatic monologue. The intimacy produced by this blurring of genres reproduces perfectly that particular quirk of human psychology which drives us to be far more unkind to ourselves than we ever would to anyone else.
Published in PRIM’s Our Stories collection, Rhodes offers a counterpoint to the predominant narratives surrounding male beauty standards, giving voice to the interiority of the many men who fall short of the steroid-distended standards set by Hollywood’s leading men and the fitness influencers populating Instagram’s Explore page. Insecurities abound throughout the story, as Rhodes’ inner monologue charts how men’s beauty standards in the twenty-first century have increasingly led the male body to be read as a social one, with onlookers attaching a value and meaning through the body’s perceived attractiveness (or lack thereof). Even as his narrator fears what others must think when looking at his body, he participates in the same acts of ventriloquism: “When he’s walking down the street how does it feel in his body? The looks he must get. What’s it like to have that body?” It is the male body which has become the object of scrutiny here.
Looming large over the story, too, is the spectre of the ongoing pandemic and how, in the fifteen months since the UK government imposed the first lockdown restrictions, a grossly magnified state of self-consciousness seems to have fast become the norm for swathes of young people across the country. If it’s not cosmetic surgery prompted by a year of staring at our own faces on Zoom and every other reflective surface going like some Anthropocene Narcissus then, as with our narrator, it’s an increased consciousness of the physical experience of having a body, limply frustrated at having to move it through the world again after a year of relative inertia. ‘When I go out now I walk more slowly. I’m more fatigued’, he laments. There is no brave face here, no attempt at optimism—just exhaustion, discomfort, and the unrelenting self-criticism to which we’ve all subjected ourselves recently.
Although the question of sexuality remains unclear reading ‘This Fucking Fat’ alone—‘Anxieties at 27’, the accompanying monologue, mentions a first visit to UK Black Pride alongside reflections on binge eating and the frustration of not having “made it” as an artist—the story’s ambiguity highlights how mainstream male fitness culture in the West flirts with a latent but persistent homoerotic charge, at the same time totally de-eroticizing the male body. “Charlie’s fucking stunning!”, the narrator exclaims, before reminiscing about a customer named Billy:
I remember the first time I saw him. Really? Woah! Clothes just don’t fit on people that well. The way his legs move. He swings his arms in the most charming braggadocious way. His ass is amazing! Like two perfect globes in motion. I’ve been squatting for months. No such ass has developed for me. Shit! He has the most amazingly defined chest. I touch my chest. Ha!
This is the umpteenth time our narrator has attempted to begin his fitness journey and, while wiser minds than mine might counsel against the use of exercise as a short-term panacea to feeling unattractive, in the blurring of homosocial admiration and homoerotic attraction Rhodes captures how beauty has become a form of capital for men in a manner previously unheard of. However graceless or gauche it might be to admit it aloud, the truth at the heart of Rhodes’ story is that none of the fantasies animating his narrator’s weight loss journey are at all unfounded. The power of the mythological all-transforming weight loss, ostensibly the only thing standing between him and “finally [going] on a date, [having] better sex, [being] invited to more events,” is a longstanding cultural touchstone rooted in fatphobia and shored up by the entertainment industry, the press, and social media alike. From the Marvelification of male beauty standards to the washboard abs such shows as Love Island have peddled as the masculine norm, much mainstream film and television has long sought to narrow the range of “desirable” bodies on show, even as studios and production companies make hollow overtures to diversity. “This Fucking Fat” is a testament to the enduring power of this narrative, and the necessity of forgiving ourselves for falling prey to it.