The Fat Kat

Introduction
On February 25, 2008 Fatxkat posted a video of herself and her friend on youtube.com. The video consists of two young overweight women dancing in their sport bras, short shorts, and soft hanging bellies to Shakira’s “no fighting” song in a TV room. She had 704,274 viewers, 421 of which rated her video as a favorite. At the bottom laid 680 comments which fell within one of the 4 categories of thoughts:
1) people who expressed outrageous surprise and qualified them as very confident
2) others insulted them with highly derogatory phrases
3) some were sexually attracted
4) many supported and defended them against other attacking commentators
It was interesting to see that most of the negative or sexual comments came from male named profiles (and thus I assume were written by men), and the shocked and celebratory viewers had more typically female names (and thus I assume were written by women). Aside from the different perspectives between sexes, there was an overall battle between those who were happy that the status quo of female beauty was finally challenged by these girls who carried themselves as comfortable as top models vs. those who were firmly against such challenge. The author rarely responded to comments, and when she did they were brief, light-hearted, and witty. I assess from the video and her comments that she seems very comfortable with her body, she smiled a lot in the video, was energetic and had playful movements, emphasizing her awareness of her weight (as she tumbled her belly left and right while expressing that she weighed 165lbs).

Analysis of Her Electronic Space
But I move on to examine her blog, which is linked to her video. She keeps herself partially anonymous, but describes herself as a 19yr old, “fat,” “very white,” “blue-eyed,” “brown-haired” girl named “Kat.” She begins her blog on the day of her birthday, and states she started it in order to discuss “…lame ass shit that happens in my life that doesn't really affect anybody else, but you all get to find out anyway.” It appears that although she seems self-assured in her video, in writing she has a lower sense of self-worth and is thus trying to connect with others. She follows a pattern which involves writing something negative about her life, makes a joke, and then coats both with a positive comment. She does not show high levels of neuroticism, but she is painfully sarcastic. She describes the confrontations her two other friends are battling with, yet she does not get involved in them, she is neutral, and therefore does not have an aggressive behavior.

She writes as if she were speaking out loud, but acknowledges that no one is reading, and thus is only writing to herself, but is hopeful others might care. This hopefulness is a positive attribute (views the glass half-full), along with her humorous and creative remarks, and would consequently qualify her for high levels of agreeableness. She seems easily excitable, writing hooray and yay every so often. Along with her creativity and humor, she can be poetic ex: “that’s the beauty of the internet, you cannot unsay, but you can untype.” She also shows a degree of comfort with her sexuality since she makes several sexual remarks. In addition she brings a sense of randomness to her typing as she injects a dialogue of someone ordering a MarioParty videogame at a fast-food establishment, as well as spending several paragraphs on confusing details about her rent payment.

Such self-involving comments, imagination, and sarcasm makes me think that she is someone that openly speaks up among her circle of friends, but has low levels of extroversion overall because she mostly interacts with her 3 friends and doesnt have much to talk about in her blog. But she does like tanning, dying her hair blonde, and buying clothes, which are common activities in America’s popular culture. But she did post a video of herself that rejects social norms, which shows she doesn’t really care what others think of her.
She demonstrates high levels of openness to experience by mentioning that she is moving in with her friends into an apartment in Japan. She also pictures herself dancing around and rubbing her “fat” around the rooms before actually filling them with her belongings, which tells me that she is not a very conscientious person, and thus her romantic free-lancing explains that she is not as concerned with tasks as she is with having fun. But she is organized since her and her friends have planned out the themes for each room.

Overall she seems like a very warm person, but it is still unknown if her confidence is rooted from an invisibility complex she suffers from, and thus by flaunting her negative traits people cant’ make fun of her since she already makes fun of herself. Or she views criticism as superficial and believes that other things are more important to focus on and therefore disregards what others might say. In this case my impression is more in line with a HYPERPERSONAL prediction since she is portrayed as highly confident. This may be an over-attribution due to selective self presentation since we only see her through the materials she posts such as her video and her 3 entry blog. I think there is more to Kat, but only one side of her story is portrayed. By doing this exercise, I realized this. Analyzing Kat’s blog more in-depth, one can see that there are more layers to the onion.