BUTTERFLYWEED

Dead men have no use for pretty bodies.

I think this is a pretty cool title. The misandrist undertones aren't lost on me — the beauty of language, I love it. This has nothing to do with that though, even though there is a lot of conversation in there to be had. (I absolutely love how this title could easily fit as a title about sexual assault written by some random radfem on Tumblr. Lol.)

JED'S CUSTOMARY PRE-GAME RANT THAT IS LONGER THAN THE ACTUAL ARTICLE.

The other title idea — that I just thought of on the spot, by the way — would have been something about cannibals and how they want a perfect healthy body with muscles and meat to eat instead of a fatter one. (I used to read a lot of true crime and murder stuff. If you are scared of cannibals eating you when you die, just get a lot of tattoos. They hate the taste of tattoo ink. Trust me.)

I would claim that people have a subconscious consummation kink when interacting with weight and other people's bodies. (There is also a thing about how we live in an extraction and consumption economy, and that fatter people would be a visual telltale of excessive extraction and consumption — informing people that you must be taking advantage of them, somehow. So many ideas, hm.) Turns out that for adults in particular, they think of bodies only in terms of sex — shocker, amirite? — as though your body isn't home to a person. How else are we supposed to interact with a human body anyway? We are socialized to view sex as an end for human interactions. (Look at discourse on opposite-sex friendships, or the amount of propaganda pushed out to tell us that having kids is a moral choice.) It means all human interactions are complex puzzles geared towards sex and sustaining the human race, even when we don't realize it.

When people comment on your fat, they care about whether they would enjoy being you in your body — owning you, fucking you. Zero regard for the "you" in the conversation. Quietly, they wonder whether all your fatty bits, rolls, and love handles would make for enjoyable sex or comfortable holding, or whether, if they were your partner, they would enjoy looking at your sloppy mass of folds and rolls as you crawled into bed beside them. They think about the biomechanics of a bigger person lying against a smaller body — maybe their body. Generalizing off some odd porn flick running in the background of their mind, they first check whether you could fit into the cast of the pornos that shape their taste (and push pedophilic beauty standards, yay!) and then decide whether you are disgusting, irredeemably lazy, or something of the sorts.

"How would that even work?" they ask themselves when they see a bigger woman with a thinner man, or vice versa. But we have to take a step back and ask: does that really matter? Or do you just not care about the plethora of other things couples do that could matter to them? Or actually — you would just never fuck a fat person, but they get pretty when they lose weight, so you'll keep them around just in case.

It's all objectification in the end.

You need to look like something they would be comfortable looking at, having sex with mentally, or just walking around in public with. The proof of this is how we treat South African women or shapely women like Tems, as compared to other fat women. They are all objectively fat. The BMI scale doesn't care where the fat is located — in actuality, they probably carry the same amount. The thing is, their fat distribution is generally socially accepted, so we don't care. We've seen enough sex symbols look like Tems or South African women. We've seen bodies like that be objectified already — like Baartman, the South African woman kept in a zoo because her ass was huge. We've seen big hips and huge asses with almost no belly fat on cartoon characters for years, so it's fine. (Maybe we need more genuinely plus-sized sex symbols.) Because it was never about the fat — it was that you aren't marketable as a sex toy. The difference between fat and thick is where the fat is, something women just can't control. (Let's not mention the disgustingly long list of things that can cause weight gain.)

True, all of this. But I think the rather more unfortunate realization is: in the end, no one cares about your health. Not even you. If people actually cared about health, they would direct as much energy toward the lack of muscles on a female frame as they do toward the presence of fat. (I could rant about this for the length of a full article, but alas.) And if you yourself cared, you wouldn't spend so much time looking in the mirror after a workout. You wouldn't progress so quickly through weights knowing your ligaments are in danger, just to look cool to the other men. If you cared about your health, you would spend more time doing the boring stuff — stretches, flexibility training — not chasing a 445 squat that could cripple you in the future. No one under 30 (without a diagnosed medical condition) who is overweight genuinely goes to the gym because they are scared of hypertension or diabetes, the same way thin people with no muscles who are genuinely at risk of the same issues don't go to the gym. It's because slim people are pretty — modelesque, even, lmao — and fat people are ugly, worthless things whose salvation is tied to their potential. Losing weight can make you pretty too. (It had me reevaluating the gym, and how much hate I must harbor for myself.)

We are all cannibals, ripping each other apart and consuming endlessly, because lust is a bottomless pit where women and men are no more than chunks of meat. Meat we devour through our eyes and rear through systems of social enforcement. You are a product meant to be consumed — and in a political sense, in this modern era, maybe in the future, it could be a protest to be fat.

All inconsequential in the end. This piece is about food, depression, and how people treat their intersection. The previous topic might be a bit conceptually cooler, but I think this one is pretty important as well.

I am listening to Kwesi Arthur's Colours right now. Banger.

THE ACTUAL ARTICLE

I have been pretty plus-sized for most of my life. Saggy man boobs, bulging tummy, an ass fat enough to have both late bloomers and the poster children of prediabetes and sarcopenia in jealous heaving frenzies, and chubby cheeks — the face kind. In the last year, however, I have also gotten lean enough to see my abs for the first time in my life. I can confirm two things.

Losing weight and gaining muscle doesn't make you less depressed. It does make you considerably more attractive, though. So maybe you can claim you are more confident — but that isn't exactly happiness. "Well, Jed, some people are depressed because of their weight." We will get into that shortly.
The women who serve food actually give you less meat when you are overweight. I am not even joking — this is a grave injustice and I stand vehemently against it. This has happened to me so frequently, and I am starting to sense it applies to more than just protein. The last time, the server gave me less groundnuts and plantain chips than the guy beside me. What the actual fuck? And I will be weird if I ask for more. The fat guy wants more food, ahahaha. (Which direction am I going in?)

Anyway, I "let myself go" earlier this year, and I have been wondering why. (Honestly, I haven't been wondering. I am getting constantly harassed by family and friends who feel the need to make me uncomfortable in the skin I wake up in every day. As if I can't feel my belly roll when I sit. As if I can't feel that my clothes are a bit tighter. As if I don't wake up every morning, look at myself in the mirror, and see that I've gained weight. How utterly rude.) I have been skirting around multiple potential answers.

I just don't feel like it anymore.
Since I realized I could lose weight and it wasn't too hard, I had lost enthusiasm.
I have lost my passion because I hit most of the goals I set, and I hit them a bit too easily.
I can't afford the good gym anymore, and going back to the bad gym is such a big downgrade that I would just rather not. I don't like the bad gym.

But I think the more honest answer is probably more along the lines of: I am depressed and don't really want to do the things I love anymore. In this article, dead men refers to depressed people. Because duh.

WHY IS JED DEPRESSED?

I find it really hard to put my emotions down. As a result, I also find it especially hard to pinpoint the exact source of a lot of my issues and stronger emotions. However, I can map my disdain for the gym a bit easier, since I have had so long to ponder it.

I remember a lot of my issues with the gym started after some guy I asked for help ignored me. No one does that at the gym. After that, I got really self-conscious. I was not fat then, but I started to feel really out of place. My shoes were old and falling apart — my family just can't afford them at the moment. (Jed conveniently leaves out that he wears size 46 shoes that are almost impossible to find cheap. Makes for a better sob story, you know.) My clothes were old, some of them falling apart. And I wasn't rich enough to be touching the same weights as all these iPhone users who own cars. Everyone there also seemed a bit snobbish — but maybe that was just the Pygmalion effect, and I was arriving at conclusions I expected to arrive at. I also went to the gym a number of times without a friend I had planned to work out with, for what I would call a good reason — our timetables weren't aligning. She found out. We haven't really held a sustained conversation since.

"But Jed, none of these seem like a good enough reason to stop going to the gym. I'm sure there are people using a Tecno Spark 10 at your gym, and you definitely aren't the first person to be treated badly by someone you asked for help."

I agree. None of these are particularly good reasons to stop. But they are real. And these extremely erratic, extremely irrational feelings are the consequences of years of mental subjugation and self-esteem issues. Losing weight doesn't undo the multiple times I was chased around House 3 to lose weight. The multiple times I was made to play Subway Surfers IRL because I was fat and lazy. It doesn't erase the misshapen clothes, or the fact that I was called unattractive in SHS by Rodney, or called dirty in front of the whole house. It doesn't change the fact that I lost the house prefect role because I couldn't dress — my hard work just wasn't enough. It doesn't change the fact that the interim English teacher, an NSS personnel, told me I would be attractive if I wasn't fat.

The list could be longer. By the time I finished it, you might be desensitized. But I think the point is clear: just changing my body didn't solve the underlying issues, and when placed in an environment that tested me, I cracked way too easily.

(It's not that these things weren't true. I was a dirty, fat, less-than-attractive child. I wasn't smelly though. I hope.)

Add the other things — how I went from 9 1s in BECE to 4 As in WASSCE. How I am struggling in school and unsure of the job market. Add the fact that I feel like a burden most days, a bad lover, that the love I have wanted most might be gone soon and there's not much I can do. If only you had money, you could get an apartment and stay there with your lover. Take a little pinch of the state of the world, the fact that capitalism has made a slave of a little dreamer boy. Add a bit of the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon into the background of your mindscape — remember, you are always more lucky than you think. Add some slices of failure as an elder brother, sprinkle some poverty and dwindling intelligence, a retiring father and a jobless mother.

BITCH, YOU UGLY AS FUCK! (You out of pocket.)

Add it all and nothing really matters anymore. None of the extraneous things — the gym, your love for music, your want to be a creative, your newfound love for poetry, your urge to be the best at something, anything. It's all gone. What is my poetry worth? Why do I write? What would the gym do except siphon money from my already struggling parents? Why am I eating 6 eggs a day when our fridge is damn near empty most days? Where would they get the money for new gym shoes? Why does any of this even matter when I won't get a job? I'm literally unemployable. Maybe if I didn't spend so much time debating, I would make a good programmer. And before you know it, you're crippled in bed — spilling your heart out onto a Word document because someone said you let yourself go. Damn. I can barely do my assignments anymore. I can't apply anywhere. I'm mentally crippled.

WHAT HAS IT LOOKED LIKE?

(Let's take a breather — that got kinda sad really quickly. I'm fine, mostly. Send funds if you care about my mental health.)

I think a lot of fat people are concurrently depressed. Remember the question I asked earlier? "Well, Jed, some people are depressed because of their weight." A fat person will probably only fully lose weight and keep it off if they are in a good mental space. And gaining weight becomes confirmation that they aren't good enough — after all, we confirm this daily with stereotypes and crass talk. It's like a chicken and egg situation: the fat or the depression, which came first? However, I find that answering that question doesn't really solve anything. The real solution is therapy. Regardless of which came first, the answer is therapy. They are depressed — does their being fat even matter? (Wahala for broke man pikin. Double wahala for religious man pikin. Triple wahala for Black man pikin.)

I remember how much I begged my mother to let me braid my hair. For me, it felt like many things.

Getting in touch with my Africanness and culture. I haven't felt very African, and that has bothered me. Am I an African poet or a poet from Africa? Am I an African man or a man born in Africa?
It made me feel a little more attractive and potentially more confident.
It made me feel like I had a bit more control over my circumstances and body image — which, as we have discussed, is really important for me. But based on the many things listed above, it should be quite obvious that the throughline is a lack of control.

She didn't care. She said no. I don't care about her reasons, because they weren't really her reasons. In the end, I got them done behind her back, and I was hotter — I thought so at least. I can confirm two things.

Being hotter doesn't solve anything. (I broke up with my toxic ex around that time, so maybe it was just breakup glow though.)
I have crippling anxiety — because I removed the braids two weeks later, panicked that my family would somehow find out.

This seems like it has nothing to do with the actual argument of this piece, but I beg to differ. What the example really seeks to show is that the people who are supposed to equip you with the ability to navigate the world are cronies of the society they grew up in. Your job is to fit into society, with them — not to be an individual who can find peace in their own body and their own existence. My need for control, beauty, and identity meant absolutely nothing to her. I could get new clothes to look better, but finding good clothes as a bigger person costs money and time, they barely exist in the right sizes, and there is the extra layer of societal enforcement — meaning even if I tried to be comfortable, society will remind me who I am. "Ei, you've gotten fat." "Ei, Jed, you've become big oo." (If you don't shurrup over there, erh.) And this applies to almost all other outs. They are harder to access.

FOOD IS THE OPIUM OF THE MASSES

This part is short. Food is accessible and makes dopamine easily accessible. And that should be the end of it. But it's deeper than that. Everything is deeper when it's in my hands.

When Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the masses, he wasn't just saying it as an insult — at least, I don't think so. He was saying that religion also alleviated some of the pain the masses went through, placated them, made them a bit better equipped to deal with societal alienation by numbing them. Ironically, it also meant they were less likely to fight oppressive structures on earth, because there was a better world waiting in the afterlife. The solution was the problem — for them and for their children.

See the parallels to food? Only me? Damn. (I must be crazy.)

In the modern world, food is more accessible than it has ever been. Mega-corporations produce processed food en masse. Capitalism makes bad food cheaper than vegetables, and so on and so forth. It provides temporary comfort for all the struggles and mental duress a person goes through daily — work stress, school, boredom, everything. (My mouth gets lonely very often.) As human beings, we quite literally cannot sustain anger while eating. If you wanted to stop an argument, walk between the people arguing while eating. I'm not kidding — Google it. For a bigger person, this ease of access is a double-edged sword. It means that after getting bullied, after feeling horrible about body image, they can just get a big meal and drown their sorrows in a guilty pleasure. Yale estimates that 20 percent of people are addicted to food. Food is an ouroboros: eat more, need more — whole time, the world gets worse around you.

WHAT HAS THIS MEANT?

Your fat is a veil that covers your failing mental health.

People attack your fatness before truly meeting you. You yourself have learned to mask it rather well. Fat people become the funny friend, because any expression of emotion makes them a fridge protecting snacks — makes them too much, literally. So you build a personality for so long, and even though you are too much, you are simultaneously never enough. Whole time, your bad mental health burns a hole through you. Your fatness is more important than your depression, and the moment you stop performing — stop cracking self-deprecating jokes, stop laughing at the ones where you are subtly the punchline — you become a nervous child, walking around in a shirt a size too small, hands tucked under it to hide your pudgy belly.

I'm amused that no one has asked why I stopped going to the gym and immediately put on 10kg in three months. Surely, said like that, it is obvious that something drastic must be wrong. But alas — your mother would rather tell you to lose weight than interrogate what makes a man quit after four years of trying to be handsome.

PERSONALLY

I still don't want to go to the gym. I can't tell why. I just don't feel happy, and looking pretty won't make that better.

AI was used for editing and grammar stuff(Punctuation, capitalization,those stuff).

Dead Men Have No Use for Pretty Bodies