The past couple of years of our media and culture, the beauty standard, was that if you were thin, you were beautiful. Now our current age of media, we have shifted significantly that you, as a person regardless of race, shape, size, are beautiful. This has also applied to our wonderful fur babies. Having small animals and nicely groomed animals with a reasonable weight was the norm of our culture. With our recent transition of beauty standards, it's also changed with our pets. There's been a community on the rise and taking over Instagram and other social media platforms.
The Age of CHONK
This community seemly grew overnight, thanks due to how fast memes spread through the internet. You might've seen this on circulate for a while on the internet.
The people that are in the CHONKY community came up with their own labels on classifying different sizes for their animals. It may seem like they are actually fat-shaming their poor Lil fur babies. But actually its terms of endearment! The Guardian did an article on @iambronsoncat on Instagram and other chonky kitties. They also interviewed the owners about Bronson.
According to Bronson's owners, when he was first adopted by them, we weighed at 33 pounds, that's pretty chonky. But a year of a proper diet brought him down 10 pounds, which he's still considered a chonk, but he's a healthy chonk now.
The Guardian raises an apparent concern within the community that "about overfeeding and keeping a pet unhealthy for the sake of cuteness. While humans can decide if they are healthy at every size, animals cannot, nor do they have the ability to tell their owners if they need help.". Mind you, some people out there might treat their animals poorly, but the more wholesome owners are leaving in their bios about details of their fur baby's weight loss journey like Bronson's current journey with becoming A Fine Boi.
Everyone loves a Chonk. As meme’s now dictate the social norm, it is refreshing to hear that people aren’t just out there cultivating Chonks, and are actually concerned about the overall health of these Chonks. I have never seen that Chonk scale before, but it is pretty incredible. I myself am dealing with my own personal Chonk situation, as one of my pets is beginning to enter the “hefty Chonk” category. I lived in California previously, and had a wide open back yard for my dogs to play in, and since moving back they have been kept inside more often than not. Gronk, or Chonky Gronk as he is slowly becoming, has been packing on pounds, and I now have to put on a restrictive diet. As cute as a Chonk can be, it is more important to be healthy.
ReplyDeleteThis post brought back so many repressed memories from my time on Tumblr when I was 15 or 16 years old. I remember there was a post about this user who had a dream where a new meme was circulating that was zoomed-in pictures of fat cats with the caption "bode" (short for bodacious). Here's an example of what the "bode" meme was: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/195/780/810.jpg
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me how memes have a "life span" of sorts, but they always seem to come back around in some form, usually of another meme (such as chonk is the new meme life of bode). Although I think bode was a bit of an obscure Tumblr only meme about five or six years ago, this new meme of having chonky pets is more mainstream and most people with a connection to internet will know what I mean when I say that my pet is a chonky boy (boi if I were typing this interaction out).
I can see where this meme could be dangerous for pets, and their owners as well. If people were to buy into the meme too much to intentionally have overweight, chonky, pets is a scary thought. The animals don't know what being chonky is, and like you said, can't tell their owners to stop feeding them.
This is such a cute post! It has led me searching social media for some fat pets. personally my pets have always been obese and fed with love unless their vets told us to do other wise. I also found this SNL skit on chonks. Worth the watch its as funny as Saturday Night Live episodes always are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRGKSwsD7ac
ReplyDeleteThe skit is about women loving them selves and has a positive message and then starts to joke about shopping at a store called Chonk.
Let me just start by saying that I love this chinchilla with my whole heart.
ReplyDeleteLike Sam said, I remember another "phase" of this chonk trend with the "bode" meme, and I agree that it's kind of like a recurring meme with slightly different words and pictures that center around the same idea.
When you brought up the point about overfeeding pets, I looked it up. Overfeeding pets turns out to be a form of animal abuse, with varying consequences: https://animallaw.foxrothschild.com/2014/11/20/if-your-pet-is-obese-are-you-guilty-of-animal-cruelty/.
I also noticed that, like "bode" and "doge," "chonk" is a shortened and modified version of the original word to add a humorous pronunciation. I think this is an interesting component of memes, and I wonder if it takes place in languages other than English. Either way, a lot of memes tend to center around animals: take the crying cat memes, for example: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/crying-cat (this link has an interesting usage chart too). I think I read somewhere that this was not actually what the cat looked like, but that the eyes had been edited. I remember this being a concern because people were asking if the cat had some kind of condition and if they should be worried, which brings in the spreadability and uncertainty component of memes.
This post was very cute to read, and reminded me of how this is similar for humans relating to the #BodyPosi accounts that help to accept all types of body images. The concern with the "glorification of chonks" can be relevant to humans as well, as long as you are not overeating and abusing your body, having a little extra weight naturally can be normal and beautiful. I understand the concerns with glorifying obese pets, because sometimes owners are guilty of overfeeding and this can be unhealthy for these little chunky monkeys. Sometimes, you will find that pets are actually naturally a little heavier than what is considered to be average weight for their species. There are two ends of the spectrum, and if you are treating your animal right, having a little extra weight shouldn't be harmful. There are differences between extra weight that is healthy and unhealthy depending on the individual animal. It definitely is one of the many issues in the media where the glorification of what can be deemed as both healthy or unhealthy for different reasons is prevalent in the media and can be an issue quite frequently. As long as we realize what the differences are, the memes glorifying chonks can be cute and funny.
ReplyDelete^^^^^https://www.instagram.com/bodyposipanda/ here is a famous instagram influencer that I looked at for my research paper on Body Positivity, which is similar to the chonk memes promoting body image acceptance for all body types.
ReplyDelete