Do y’all watch the MTV programme Catfish? I’m a recent convert. I can’t even remember how I stumbled across it but to the dismay of my boy, who’s having to negotiate hard for TV time, I’m currently binge-watching my way through the first one hundred episodes ahead of their season seven airing next week. As far as mini-obsessions go, it’s not bad…it doesn’t involve eating so that’s a win, right? My boy’s perspective is bloody hell Mum, for an intelligent woman you don’t half watch some crap…
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show based around on-line relationships, with a couple of cool guys flushing out folk who are stringing other folk along with fake dating profiles. For someone like me, who’s endlessly fascinated with people – aka nosey – it’s irresistible.
Sometimes, like one time out of twenty, the person on the end of the dodgy profile turns out to be the real deal, but more often than not some rogue with questionable morals and a wild imagination has posted fake pictures to entice their poor unsuspecting victim into an on-line relationship.
Now, I’m probably thirty or forty episodes in at this point, right? And fascinating as it is, there’s a theme that I’ve noticed. It never ends well for the fat ones.
It’s a bit formulaic, and the story always unfolds like this; boy (or girl) meets utterly gorgeous girl (or boy) on-line and falls in love. Months pass, sometimes even years pass and despite endless texts/emails/telephone conversations the two never meet, so the one being strung along gets suspicious.
Along come the two cool guys and after a bit of detective work, utterly gorgeous girl (or boy) is rumbled, and generally persuaded to ‘fess up in front of their poor unsuspecting love interest.
Sometimes the person behind the fake profile is a bloke posing as a woman or a woman pretending to be a bloke. Sometimes it’s a woman who just looks like a bloke. Sometimes they have eyes that look in two different directions at the same time but mostly they’re none of the above…nine times out of ten they’re just fat.
And on some level you know, I get why they do what they do. As a fat girl, I totally understand the appeal of pretending to be somebody you’re not, and showing a gorgeous face to the world. It must be lovely, having members of the opposite sex falling at your feet declaring undying love at first sight. The truth is, It doesn’t really matter how warm or funny or bright you are, or how much love you have to give, if you’re fat you’re pretty much invisible.
This programme demonstrates the point beautifully. For all the victims’ chatter about being desperate to meet the person behind the pictures, and how what they look like doesn’t really matter anyway because they’ve fallen in love with the personality, as soon as an arse the size of South East Asia lumbers around the corner it’s pretty much game over, you know?
Now, being invisible to members of the opposite sex doesn’t actually bother me at all, because I’m not in the market for a love-interest for all the reasons we’ve discussed at length in these pages. If you missed those conversations I’ll summarise for you…I can’t be feckin arsed. Too much hassle and anyway I’m safer as a singleton. But if I was feeling fruity and in need of a good seeing to, I wouldn’t imagine that my fat photo would drum up much interest at all.
I reckon that maybe one in a hundred fat folk would regard themselves as fat and fabulous…I envy the ones who do. Me, I’m definitely one of the other ninety nine 🙂
