cuauhtemoc

Miami here, although I've lived everywhere in Florida but the Panhandle. Met my wonderful partner of two years through the chubby internet, and we always want to meet like-minded people!

ITT: "Serious discussion" I know it's still 2013 and I've already posted once this year about this, but if it's important for dudes in this forum to understand why women who choose to share themselves and their photos/videos with the forum sometimes bail out and vanish, never to be seen again, it's important to understand this thread. It seems there are a few tropes that emerge when contributing female posters leave the community. They were never really into FA stuff in general, or they were just looking to cash in on a paysite, or they lost weight for some superficial reasoning. I submit that its none of these things that makes them go, and it's also nothing so alien and strange about the community, (e.g. they discovers feeders and bail) either. Rather, it's a very familiar phenomenon: men policing women's bodies. I know it's true for me, and I know it's true for my partner whom I've met on another unnamed pink-and-yellow site, and I know it's true for several other men and women in the FA community I've had the pleasure of becoming friends with, that when I first found the community online (way back in the yahoogroups days) I was excited. I was excited because it represented to me a chance to connect with people who felt the same way I do about my (fat) body, after years of hearing the contrary from all sectors of society/media. I thought that sites like this one were ones where bodies of size were celebrated, and if one body type wasn't preferred, at least it wouldn't be poked and prodded and sniped at and criticized, because we all (and I mean straight FA dudes here, the vast majority of the user base of the community) knew what it was like to feel like we were alone with our unorthodox preferences in the world. Of course, however, trends emerge, distinguishing criticism sneaks in. I prefer pears to apples, blondes to brunettes, 400 to 300 to 200. I prefer nerd girls. I prefer this ethnicity to that one. I prefer gainers. This ranking became pervasive, and left largely unchecked by the community, it crystallizes. It informs the place. It chills, and then the preferences are restated, now exclusionary. Why would you ruin your body with a tattoo? Nice body, but she's a butterface (never said to a female poster directly, but rather about women in the general categories and candids), she used to be hot but now she's getting too big, that dyed hair doesn't look good on her, etc. I don't believe that this culture comes about as the result of some nefarious misogynist plot, but rather general patriarchy supported by privilege. This is hardly a problem unique to Curvage or the FA community, but the internet is the domain of the id. We type things we would never say on the regular mainly because we can get away with it. And the usual response to a post like this (if anyone bothers to read it) is that "this is a discussion forum, we're just having a discussion" or some misinformed Constitutionalist going on about free speech rights. To quote the Big Lebowski, "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole." It's more a matter of having a discussion about what type of forum we want to have. It kind of stinks because the people who get to shape this are the most frequent posters, and possibly the ones who feel most entitled to contribute their opinion, however brief, to any thread. People (women included) join sites like this all the time, and we'll continue what has been a fairly consistent pattern of scaring off enthusiastic new joiners not by giving them something different than the mainstream, but rather just becoming another echo chamber for the dehumanizing, misogynistic message that they ca get far more easily elsewhere. tl;dr - All bodies are cool and awesome. No one cares about what you don't like, so just compliment things you find attractive and zip it about things you don't. It's that easy.

So many fedoras. Pretty much the usual shitstorm of huffy dudes and a lot of "bitch" thrown around casually. Again, someone took the time to post a piece by piece nonsense rebuttal instead of a quick sentence or two nonsense rebuttal, someone said I don't know what a word means and offered no alternate definition, someone implied I had been brainwashed by my college professors, (and really specific vitriol for state schools?) a few people dusted off the ol' high school debate handbook and used terms like "straw man," and in a not-at-all surprising twist, someone implied that, wait a sec, Lena Dunham somehow Deserves This negative stuff about her body because her show doesn't portray enough women of color. Fun fact, nowhere in that (admittedly pretty dead-on) Hairpin article is Dunham called a frumpty dumpty. Y'all can gripe until you're blue in the friend-zone about how unfair it is for guys to get accused of misogyny when they call women ugly bitches or how part of a discussion forum is saying that that certain women are ugly bitches, and that's cool. Go for it. Just remember how important it was to you to preserve your personal liberty to post that someone needs more boobs and hair when that pretty lady from the Your Pictures board vanishes. Remember it when she posts something to her tumblr (why is there so much tumblr hate?) about all the assholes and creeps on Curvage being the reason why she left, Maybe I'm an idiot, maybe I'm brainwashed, maybe I did go to state school. (I did.) It doesn't change the simple fact that saying insulting things about people is not ok. Even if those people don't read the board, even if they aren't Christina Hendricks, (who LOVES fedoras, seriously) even if they make a show on HBO that has trouble dealing with certain issues, it's not ok. Quit it. Don't be a jerk. That's it for me, Curvage, I'll be back in 2014 to derail another thread! Amazingly, this counts as progress for me; last time I tried to suggest that there was a correlation between posting mean stuff and people vanishing from the site I was mainly arguing with forum handles that referenced de Sade character or lesser-known SS officers. We shall overcome. P.S. The only people I feel any sorrow for are those who nobly tried to get this thing back on track or came here looking for anything actually related to Lena Dunham. I apologize, deeply.

ATTN: Dudes in this thread. No one cares if you don't like Lena Dunham. No cares if you feel she'll "haunt your dreams," or if you think she's "an attention whore with low self-esteem" or if you are frustrated because she "could at least do her hair a little better" or if looks like "frumpty dumpty" to you. The reason you think anyone cares is called privilege, and most dudes, myself included, are born with a ton of it. It helps to explain why us fellas always seem to think that what we feel at any given moment about any given subject is totally legit, and it doesn't help that the internet makes it super easy to broadcast those opinions to the world. Let me make the case for why this might not always be the best idea ever: 1) Curvage (and the fat community in general) is somewhat unique in the internet pornography world (and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that wank pictures do not account for a substantial percentage of why guys log in, or at the very least played a part in our discovering the community) in that the relationship between the producers and consumers of content is much closer than in other communities. Women who graciously post photos of themselves in various states of undress for our amusement also interact with us and browse the same threads we do. People start legit relationships from sites like these. (I'm in one! /humblebrag) Even women who are for-pay content providers are mainly homegrown from these very board and interact with the members on a regular and genuine basis. This is a super-good thing, because it's a hugely important part of why women feel safe and comfortable contributing to the community; we're largely nice and pleasant, and part of that is reflected in the fact that we are at least not so obnoxious we've driven anything without a penis away from this corner of the internet. Basically, this: the women we rely on for generation of significant content frequent these boards. 2) Negative comments have a chilling effect. Two women posted in this thread, as best as I can tell. Both of them, story author Cristina Prince and Curvage-only photo subject Pockets, are significant generators of precisely the type of content most of us like to consume. Pockets's expression of admiration for Lena Dunham was directly contradictory to most of the ones expressed in the thread and listed above, while Cristina's was even more direct, attempting to hush negative commenters. Taken as a whole, it's very rare to see women on the forum express negative opinions about other women, especially other women they don't have personal experience with. I'm positive there are exceptions, but see what I'm getting at, here? 3) No one cares. NO ONE CARES. I cannot harp on this enough, because not only does no one care if you don't like Lena Dunham, no one cares if you like Lena Dunham, too. A moment of total honesty, here: the reason I opened this thread was because I saw an ad for the new season of Girls and I didn't remember her looking as chubby and wanted to see if there were any other pictures up and Curvage is usually good as an aggregator of stuff like that. I certainly didn't click the link thinking to myself, "Awww yeah, time for a few pictures of Lena Dunham and some really clever zingers and blunt, misogynistic dismissals from anonymous internet nobodies." NO ONE is hoping to see your post, and NOTHING will happen as a result of you posting it. Lena Dunham will not see it and rush off for a makeover after a tearful catharsis, Christina Hendricks will not see it and suddenly be inspired to eat cake naked and film it for you, and a hotshot children's publishing executive will not see it and offer you a deal for your witty new satirical take on Humpty Dumpty. The only thing that will happen, (and it has already happened, with dozens of women who posted pictures and videos and stories and communicated with us and made Curvage that much more pleasant for all involved) is that women on these boards will leave. They'll either drift away slowly or vanish abruptly or maybe give us a final goodbye, but probably not, because the drone of "she's ugly" or "she's shallow" is already so very tiring to put up with. So please, please, pleeeeeeeease, dudes of Curvage, think a tiny bit before posting, and think of how your post would land if it was being said to you about a woman in your life who you cared about. I'm not asking anyone to not have their feelings, but if we continue to exercise our privilege and express them at the drop of a hat, every time, the special and importantly different community vibe that persists in this community will eventually become the echo chamber of wangs that so many other online porn communities are, with a bunch of dudes rabidly foaming, and a few women interacting with them out of economic realities instead of shared interests. TL:DR - STOP POSTING NEGATIVE SHIT. BE NICE. IT'LL PAY OFF.