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Furry + Body Image: How I learned to love being a fat guy
6 months ago
Lately I have been reflecting on my relationship with my body and my self image, and how participating in the furry fandom has impacted it. I've been very self conscious about my body, ever since I started hitting puberty basically. I went from a tall lanky kid to tall, broad, and developing very quickly in a way that gave me a lot of unwanted adult male attention. On top of feeling dysphoric, and not even having a word for that feeling, I was getting made fun of by my peers for suddenly getting "fat."
I have a vivid memory of one of the kinda weird kids I would hang out with asking me at the lunchroom once "Why are you fat? Your mom isn't fat, so why are you fat?" Which of course wasn't even correct, my mom has the same type of figure I do, the same type of figure that all the "women" in my family have. It was also just so fucking mean, and probably the first time someone was so direct to me about my size. This is around the time doctors got up my ass about my weight too.
As an adult, I'm still big. Not just "fat" but BIG. Tall, broad shoulders, broad hips, strong arms and legs. Even if I dropped the 70-100 pounds some doctors claim I would need to in order to be a "healthy" BMI I would still be large in stature, and honestly I'd probably look kind of strange without anything to fill out that frame.
And as for how furry all ties into this? Well I've only recently started engaging in the fandom in a wholehearted, sincere way, but I've been around it for a long time. Many college friends of mine were unabashedly furry (still are) and that was when I was introduced to the concept of fat furs. And I'll be so honest it made me really uncomfortable at first! When you spend your entire life being fed messages about how being fat is bad and ugly, being made fun of for being fat, it's hard to see fat fur art and not immediately take it as being mocking without doing some serious internal work.
Eventually I came around, but I still felt a bit weird, uncomfortable with that aspect of furry art in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint. A very subtle shift in the nature of the same. The thing is, when it comes to other people, I don't find fat people unattractive. In fact I find the body type I had pre-T to be INCREDIBLY attractive on women.
But it was really hard to give myself that sort of love. I would draw a lot of my catgirls based on my figure, but slimmed down. I've always used myself as a reference in my art, but mostly to get the posing right. I have been very fortunate to get a lot of support online for my work, and I've had many trans women online and in person tell me that the body type I give my catgirls is the goal they have for themselves in transition. That was really where things started to turn in my view of myself. Like damn you wanna look like me? That's crazy. Totally counter to the messaging society has given me my entire life.
In the last year or so a lot of things have happened to me. I started taking Testosterone again (I did for a while in college but struggled with the weight gain and hair loss and stopped), I've been to more furry conventions, and I've developed a lovely group of furry friends that I talk to regularly, some every day, and I started thinking of my art less as a product I'm trying to make a living off of, and more as something to entertain myself and my friends. And guess what? My friends love a fat guy. And I love a fat guy!
I've also been doing some more studying of figure drawing, reading some of the Morpho books, particularly the Fat and Skin Folds volume. And somewhere in there something clicked. I've always enjoyed drawing a curvaceous form (I even got into beef with my college figure drawing professor over a lack of fat models in class and in our online resources) and I was gaining the skills to draw them even better. I've been drawing much more based on my actual body, and not the idealized version I'd been going off of. Using direct photo reference for a lot of my recent drawings. And it's great! My friends love it! People online love it! I drew a picture of basically myself, and people are going crazy for it! Holy shit!
It's been a wonderfully strange feeling really understanding that my body can be the object of someone's desire, something that people actually find really attractive. It took a lot of work to be okay that. It's totally shifted my view of myself, my attractiveness, my worthiness of love and affection. It truly lifts a weight from my shoulders that I've been carrying probably since I was 12, well over half my life.
Anyway, that is probably enough writing for today. Thank you if you read through all of that, and thank you if you've been enjoying my art!
TLDR; Furries made me love being a fat guy! Epic!
I have a vivid memory of one of the kinda weird kids I would hang out with asking me at the lunchroom once "Why are you fat? Your mom isn't fat, so why are you fat?" Which of course wasn't even correct, my mom has the same type of figure I do, the same type of figure that all the "women" in my family have. It was also just so fucking mean, and probably the first time someone was so direct to me about my size. This is around the time doctors got up my ass about my weight too.
As an adult, I'm still big. Not just "fat" but BIG. Tall, broad shoulders, broad hips, strong arms and legs. Even if I dropped the 70-100 pounds some doctors claim I would need to in order to be a "healthy" BMI I would still be large in stature, and honestly I'd probably look kind of strange without anything to fill out that frame.
And as for how furry all ties into this? Well I've only recently started engaging in the fandom in a wholehearted, sincere way, but I've been around it for a long time. Many college friends of mine were unabashedly furry (still are) and that was when I was introduced to the concept of fat furs. And I'll be so honest it made me really uncomfortable at first! When you spend your entire life being fed messages about how being fat is bad and ugly, being made fun of for being fat, it's hard to see fat fur art and not immediately take it as being mocking without doing some serious internal work.
Eventually I came around, but I still felt a bit weird, uncomfortable with that aspect of furry art in a way I couldn't quite pinpoint. A very subtle shift in the nature of the same. The thing is, when it comes to other people, I don't find fat people unattractive. In fact I find the body type I had pre-T to be INCREDIBLY attractive on women.
But it was really hard to give myself that sort of love. I would draw a lot of my catgirls based on my figure, but slimmed down. I've always used myself as a reference in my art, but mostly to get the posing right. I have been very fortunate to get a lot of support online for my work, and I've had many trans women online and in person tell me that the body type I give my catgirls is the goal they have for themselves in transition. That was really where things started to turn in my view of myself. Like damn you wanna look like me? That's crazy. Totally counter to the messaging society has given me my entire life.
In the last year or so a lot of things have happened to me. I started taking Testosterone again (I did for a while in college but struggled with the weight gain and hair loss and stopped), I've been to more furry conventions, and I've developed a lovely group of furry friends that I talk to regularly, some every day, and I started thinking of my art less as a product I'm trying to make a living off of, and more as something to entertain myself and my friends. And guess what? My friends love a fat guy. And I love a fat guy!
I've also been doing some more studying of figure drawing, reading some of the Morpho books, particularly the Fat and Skin Folds volume. And somewhere in there something clicked. I've always enjoyed drawing a curvaceous form (I even got into beef with my college figure drawing professor over a lack of fat models in class and in our online resources) and I was gaining the skills to draw them even better. I've been drawing much more based on my actual body, and not the idealized version I'd been going off of. Using direct photo reference for a lot of my recent drawings. And it's great! My friends love it! People online love it! I drew a picture of basically myself, and people are going crazy for it! Holy shit!
It's been a wonderfully strange feeling really understanding that my body can be the object of someone's desire, something that people actually find really attractive. It took a lot of work to be okay that. It's totally shifted my view of myself, my attractiveness, my worthiness of love and affection. It truly lifts a weight from my shoulders that I've been carrying probably since I was 12, well over half my life.
Anyway, that is probably enough writing for today. Thank you if you read through all of that, and thank you if you've been enjoying my art!
TLDR; Furries made me love being a fat guy! Epic!
also i'm a quiet follower but i've been really enjoying how you draw figures, means a lot to see :)