How a Rogue Professor Convinced Woke Scholars “Fat Bodybuilding” Was a Thing

Another one of my favorite papers he did was Fat Bodybuilding. That's what I was... Yeah, yeah, yeah, Fat Bodybuilding. Fat Bodybuilding, um... So it turns out Peter has a friend named Richard Baldwin. And you should pull Richard Baldwin up. Richard Baldwin is a real professional bodybuilder. He was like, what was it, Mr. Olympia 1978 or something, right? And he's also a history professor. So the dude's jacked, even 70-something. He's jacked. And so, uh... He said we could use his identity to do our papers. That's him in the 70s? Yeah. Is that him now? He's got one in a black t-shirt where it's like... He's 71 years old and it's just insane. That's back in the day. Yeah, the one where he's doing the most muscular pose? Right there. Bam. He's still like that. And... Jesus Christ. So he let us use his identity. That's him older. He's still jacked. Wow. 65 there. He's fit. So we were like, we got to write bodybuilding-themed papers because we have a bodybuilder. And so we claim that his... There it is, the black... The related images down there is where he's in the black t-shirt. I actually photoshopped a copy of that specific image and put Fat Bodybuilder on the t-shirt. I used to have that picture. That's him, like when he was letting us use his identity. So there he's in his 70s. I think he's like 71 there. That's insane. Yeah, look at those arms. Wow. And yeah, so we wrote this paper, Fat Bodybuilding, saying that bodybuilders are abnormally large. Fat people are abnormally large. Muscle and fat are just two types of tissue and it's only fatphobic science that distinguishes their worth and fatphobic society that says one means more than the other. So we even had lines like, you have to build a politic... There's some quote. It wasn't our line. We quoted somebody that says, it takes time to build a fat body. It takes even more time to build a politicized fat body. So that was the theme of the paper. And so we said that there should be... In fact, that professional bodybuilding as a sport needs to add another category. There are four categories for each of men and women that they compete in. Yeah, apparently something like bikini and I don't know what they are. Whatever they are. Yeah, something. They're four and I don't remember what they are. But they need to add a fifth one in for fat bodybuilding where people of any body shape and size can come in and it can't be competitive because that would be fat shaming. And so it has to be just a political performative display rooted in Judith Butler's politics of parody. Oh my God. Which we got that idea from reading an actual fat scholar, maybe the leading fat scholar, Charlotte Cooper. And Charlotte Cooper is just like totally a nut job activist in the UK, but they hate the Olympics as you might imagine. It's that maximally fat phobic environment. Except Sumo in the Olympics? Is it? I think it is. Wow, no. But they protested the 2000 and she's in London. So they protested the 2012 games, summer games. And what they did is they held in a park like Fatty Olympics is what they literally called it. They literally called it that. And it was like them playing dizzy bat and like yelling about and holding up protest signs about how the Olympics sucks. And so we're like, what in the hell is this? And so then we decided to write this fat bodybuilding paper based off of the idea of politics of parody, of like making a joke out of the thing. So we're going to make a joke at a bodybuilding. We said that competitors can wear the fat-tion, that's their word, not ours, of their choice, which is clothing designed for fat people. Fat-tion of their choice. So it's really hard, it's really hard to talk about, to explain, to criticize the fat study stuff without, like it's just so preposterous. How do you walk the line of like tipping them off? Like, because it seems like some of your stuff is so loony that I just don't like, how do they not know they're being fucked with? Because they're too serious about them. They take themselves too seriously. So I'll give you an example with that exact paper, right? At the end, Pete, you know, is a big sci-fi guy. So he's all into Star Trek. So we called the last section was fat bodybuilding, the final frontier for fat. They went berserk about this. They were like, you cannot call it that for two reasons. You can't use the word final because it would imply there is an end to fat activism, which can never end. Oh my God. And you can't use the word frontier because it reminds you of genocides. The frontier, like the frontier of the American West. That's it said it evokes imagery of the American West. Native American genocide? Oh my God. So you can't say the final frontier because frontier, the word, is poisoned. Oh my God, the final frontier, but that's Star Trek. I know. How are you doing that? They're so like, I mean, smelling their own farts, man. They're smelling their own farts all day long. So, so freaking bad. That's just, I can't, I can't, like, as you're saying this, I know you're telling the truth, but I can't imagine that this is literally commonplace. I mean, it's so hard not to laugh. I mean, like, so we talked about health at every size. Do you know who made up health at every size? Who? Linda Bacon. That's her name? She's not real. She's real. It's like, and it's like, it's just her name. It just happens to be. This is so crazy though. What a great name. It just shows you that the world, like when Andrew Weiner kept, sent his dick to girls. Oh, I know. Come on, man. This is too on the nose. Oh Jesus. When I was in grad school, actually, we had to learn about, so there's this thing in probability theory. It's named after a mathematician whose last name is Weiner. And so it's actually called the Weiner measure. And so we had this Chinese teacher who was talking about the Weiner measure and we're all laughing and he had no idea why we were laughing. Oh boy. His English wasn't great. Oh, it was so awkward.