Gaining, Consumption, and Ideology

“A desire is never simply the desire for a certain thing. It's always also a desire for desire itself. A desire to continue to desire. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is to be fully filled-in, met—so that I desire no longer. The ultimate melancholic experience is the experience of a loss of desire itself.” — Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012)

In the gaining world, we tend to place a distinction between reality (attainable weight goals) and fantasy (unattainable or undesirable weight goals). Sexual daydreams allow a gainer to indulge in, say, humiliation without relinquishing respect in his personal and professional life. One may go a step further, however: gaining you do accomplish is every bit as much a fantasy as wanking off to the thought of a college football jock taking you into his arms and telling you he likes you fatter.

We casually define fantasy as a series of mental images, but fantasy is also an imagined solution to a problem that haunts our psyche. Fantasy is always there to provide a simple answer. For us, our core sexual or romantic fantasy is that we should gain weight or help another person gain weight. It is a fantasy precisely because it does not encompass the full significance of what the gainer is proposing he do. The gainer is ideologically captured in such a way that he performs the role of a gainer while his body and identity transform in ways he may not intend.

Gaining weight is neither a mere physical transformation, nor a mere recalculation of a person’s identity. A hypothetical gainer’s success at reproducing his fantasy will shift his relations to social, physical, and economic parts of his life. As much as we tell ourselves that our bodies are nobody’s business but our own, it is impossible to deny that we cannot but affect other people. A gainer putting on 150 pounds can change his relationship to his family, his friends, his partner, and future friends and partners. Surround yourself with supportive people, but even that act changes your relationship to what it means to socialize with others. The gainer’s relationship to his body is not merely erotic. Consider his need to see an agreeable doctor, cultivate belief in his new beauty, adjust to a world made for smaller people, and grapple with new expectations placed upon his body type. Gaining weight also changes his relationship to the economy and to production. 

Take for example the way gyms offer package discounts to corporations. The sales pitch? Healthier employees reduce healthcare costs. One gym cites a proprietary study conducted by a private insurance company as proof that attending their gym cuts medical bills by a third. It’s almost like a video game: if you upgrade your labor force’s health modifiers, you’ll save more in the long run. The bodies of workers become a resource to be managed by the company for its own benefits. A profit-driven world tells us our bodies are to be optimized by employers rather than used by the people who inhabit those bodies. There’s something puritanical about prioritizing usefulness to capital above pleasure and passion.

A few years ago, some friends and I purchased tickets to the Coca Cola Museum in Atlanta. Before being released into the museum proper, visitors were herded into a theater to watch a short film that I assumed would tell us a partisan history of the company. Instead, the film showed disparate slices of life, and at the happy resolution of each, whether it was an air balloon proposal or a family getting cozy after an afternoon of winter sports, Coke products filled the screen. There was no film; all that remained was product.

In a different room, a machine projected onto the walls the roiling brown liquid rising slowly toward the ceiling. A generic male narrator explained the ineffable magic of the secret formula as we were gripped by the simulation of our drowning in Coca Cola. In this idealized world of the product, consumption and enjoyment are not consumer choices, but forceful demands of the corporation who operates perfectly within the ideological framework that birthed it. Our very bodies are to be subjected to the flow of 39 grams of sugar per can as long as we are able to participate in the ideology of consumption. As Karl Marx might say, our bodies become united with commodity itself:

“Marx believes that even our physical senses have become ‘commodified’ under capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, Marx argues, can we move beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the world.” (Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right,  2018, pp. 230-231)

We find ourselves the product all too often: companies like Facebook and Robinhood use your data to sell behavior models to others. Every time you use Netflix to relax, you are simultaneously being exploited to benefit the corporation. It’s up to these companies to design a product addictive or useful enough for us to voluntarily use. When it comes to gaining, our value to system is as consumers. Not merely people who consume, but persons who desire to learn how to consume in new and more efficient ways.

Everything the gainer does, whether he gains or not, is in the pursuit of consumption. He works to consume, and he consumes to propagate not only his pleasure, but his desire itself, lest his link to his ideological master be severed. No matter how aware we are of the workings of our social structures, we still fear the loss of that connection to the ideology of consumption because it has achieved such supremacy in our lives, it becomes a source of meaning. 

Imagine being free from consumption: no will to use social media, no need to eat out or to purchase, no desire to game or to watch television—all of these perceived axes of identity rendered frivolous. Could one find happiness and meaning without the comforts that have been used to buy our cooperation with global capital? Even fat acceptance is increasingly but another axis of marketing, a divergent movement recuperated into the mainstream.

Escaping our drive to consume feels to us like seeking death. In a way it is: how can we end our enslavement to the ruling ideology but by killing the part of the self that is bound to it? We seek to subordinate our will to our internal demands rather than external demands (the very definition of freedom), but in the case of the gainer, the means to achieve his internal demands is one of consumption. 

Can you become fat as a middle finger as resistance to the body optimization fetishism of capitalism? Can you maintain a thin body to distance yourself from the identity of a consumer? The answer that I have come to is this: neither are possible. Fat is not punk; it is profitable. Thin is not punk; it is profitable. No matter how revolutionary or woke you imagine yourself to be, you merely feed the beast who sees nothing but profit.

If individual choices are subsumed by capital, how can we escape the ruling ideology? That answer is in many ways beyond the scope of this short essay, but here’s the short version. We can’t all adopt good opinions to fix the world. We have to actually fix it, which I argue can only happen through collective action that seeks to reorder our world in a way that exalts anything other than profit as our God. We are in this together, not merely as a broader society, but as a narrow one (i.e. gaining). There is solidarity to be found in our curious sexual condition, which is again another topic for another essay.

If we are a part of our society no matter our body type, my anxieties over whether it is gaining or not gaining that makes me most a slave to the power structures has been largely misplaced. I must perceive my lack of agency in order to begin to address it. The man captured by ideology is no threat to anything but his own wellbeing.

And as for gaining, I am finally free. I am not conditioning myself for a glorious revolution, nor am I becoming 300 lbs to fight the capitalist fetishization of human efficiency that reduces us to machines. 

I do not need to dissolve my desires through politics or philosophy. Art is not created to solve all internal conflict. We do not hang out with our friends to learn enough about them that we never need to see them again. 

Getting fat is not a solution to a desire that has always been and will always be with me. It is an outward expression of it. In short, I am not free from desire; I am free to desire within the bounds of my body and the material world which it inhabits.

While I cannot escape the world’s ruling ideology, I can still exist as a gay dude who likes getting fat. And sometimes that is enough.