#people making these grand points about how the term is being stolen and misused | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hedge-rambles · 2 months

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I'm all in favour of fat positivity and if be lying if I said I didn't have a penchant for larger men but I'm getting a bit annoyed with this thing I keep seeing online lately about the term "bear". Because on Reddit and Tumblr I've seen multiple posts and people in the last couple of years reiterating that bear specifically means fat men, that it was created by and for fat men, about how a broader guy with hair who isn't overweight isn't a bear and it's frankly an offensive misuse of the term.

Except that's bollocks? The term was coined and codified in the 1980s and meant basically "hairy, beer drinker, kinda macho, probably stockier build".

Go look up covers from old issues of Bear Magazine, which is more or less as old as the term itself. It was never about being fat, it was about the hair.

#lgbt stuff #idk it's just kinda irritating #people making these grand points about how the term is being stolen and misused #I've seen people disparaging the description of non fat men at bears and going on to describe bodies that are like #my dude you are describing about 70% of the cover models from the first 30 years of Bear magazine #and to be clear bear subculture has long been more open to fat guys #but it's not reserved for them #beer and body hair are like the original definitions

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