Ive been thinking a bunch about fats and their make-up. You know the ones I’m talking about; the instahams who think they’re make-up artists because they take 16 pictures of their new MAC lipstick, Mess Monster and all the others that cover their face cellulite with sixteen layers of foundation, the collarbone-contouring tutorials using all these expensive bronzers instead of doing that cheap thing called “eating less and they’ll come naturally.” Why all that effort directed toward make-up, instead of toward something like actually getting in shape? I was thinking about this in the context of disordered eating that I struggled with for a decade, on and off and to vary degrees of severity, in a variety of forms. I gained and lost and was super fit and super weak in turn throughout this whole time, but one thing remained consistent throughout: I always felt like I had to “have my face on,” so to speak. I always had a make-up routine that changed and evolved with different products over time, but I always had something on. People talk about control with eating disorders, and that was one of my things that I controlled. Having decent make-up made me believe I was fooling the world into thinking I had my shit together, like maybe if I looked put-together people wouldn’t see my body as badly as I did, like they wouldn’t know I’d thrown up multiple times that day. That’s what body dysmorphia will do to you. I feel a particular kind of uncomfortable whenever I see fats being obsessive about make-up, because I see what they’re doing; it’s the same thing I did. The thing with fats is that their body flaws aren’t in their heads. They’re on their bodies, full and gross and there for all the world to see, and they know this, if only subconsciously. And when they cake their faces in make-up, their trying to trick themselves and the world the same way I and my eating disorder felt we had to act to make it through the day. It’s a coping mechanism, like food has become for them and like lack of food was for me. I’m pretty sure their obnoxious hair colors and wannabe-pinup gear play into it to; I know in my screw-up relationship with food & my body I’ve obsessively worn one or more articles of clothing, sometimes to the point of rags, because it was a matter of emotional security. I guess what I’m trying to say is that from my personal experience, I think the obnoxious physical presentation of a lot of fat women is very indicative of much deeper psychological issues they’re trying to mask with Youtube contour lessons and a-line skirts. When you feel like you can’t trust your body, either because it feels like a liar & a traitor or because you’re destroyed it past the point of usefulness, make-up and clothes are a temporarily comforting but ultimately useless band-aid on a gaping wound. Fat people are so determined to make people think that they’re healthy and happy and normal, but this obsession that so many of them seem to have? C’mon now. That’s one of the most frustrating things for me: their inability to see how mentally unhealthy they are, to consider the fact that the ways in which they act ARE NOT NORMAL.