Unspoken Hierarchies of Attraction: Inside Wake’s Subtle Social Math
One of the more quietly contentious undercurrents in The Wake of Expectations is the subtle presence of fat shaming — or at least what might be read as an unspoken social hierarchy tied to body size. It’s not something Calvin ever explicitly self-analyzes, but it’s something I think is worth unpacking from its origin point in the writing process. The truth is, in the earliest drafts of the novel, it was considerably more overt, and dare I say, even unintentionally mean-spirited. That was less a function of Calvin’s character than a reflection of my own sharper feelings at the time — feelings that, if I’m being honest, were more judgmental and rooted in unquestioned cultural conditioning than I realized at the time. Over time, as both the book and I evolved, I pared those elements down, leaving only the faintest traces. What remains is subtle enough that no one — at least no reader who’s spoken to me about it — has ever really called it out.
Calvin, as he exists on the page now, does not dwell obsessively on other people’s weight. It’s not a preoccupation, certainly nothing like the more biting undercurrent it once was. But there are still moments, woven casually into his private observations or the banter among friends, where his preferences surface: he’s drawn to fit women, he assigns overweight women to a secondary tier in his unspoken social calculus, especially when it comes to romance. These aren’t ideas he voices to wound anyone. He never insults or mocks a woman for her body. He doesn’t point, laugh, or try to make anyone feel small. They are private thoughts, or closed-door conversations with his circle of friends. But they’re there, and they’re not accidental.
It would be easy to say this is just Calvin’s flaw, but it’s also a reflection of the culture that shaped him — and me. Growing up, one of my favorite shows was What’s Happening!!, and it still holds a warm place in my heart. But looking back, the fat shaming in that show was absolutely merciless. The way Rerun and Shirley traded barbs, or even how Mrs. Thomas was sometimes pulled into the jokes, helped set the standard for what was fair game. It taught us — quietly but powerfully — what was acceptable to say, to laugh at, to dismiss as harmless banter. It’s no stretch to see how that bled into my own early attitudes, into the unexamined biases that once wrote themselves more forcefully into my drafts.
But the novel’s interrogation of attraction and social hierarchies doesn’t end with body size. There’s a more complicated thread running through Calvin’s relationships — one that quietly asks why, despite being by all accounts a relatively charming and attractive guy, he almost always seems to need some sort of leverage or imbalance to make romantic scenarios work in his favor. With Kari, it’s that he’s a senior while she’s only a freshman, a power gap that tilts the scale just enough to reassure his insecurities. On the choir tour, it’s his age and worldliness — a college guy among high school girls — that give him a slight edge, not over the girls, but over the other guys: his older, more experienced energy makes him a comparative upgrade in a limited dating pool. And it lingers there: why does someone like Calvin feel the need to lean on these subtle structural advantages to be chosen? What does that reveal about him — or about how much our desirability depends on context, advantage, and timing rather than any innate quality?
And, at a couple of points in the novel, Calvin suggests it might have something to do with his race.
This narrative rides right alongside the stories of his brother Ryan and his mestizo friend Enrique, who at times also gravitate toward women positioned lower in the social pecking order, albeit because of weight rather than age. Calvin, too, is half-Asian, but he isn’t as short as they are — a difference that quietly shifts the way the dating world responds to him. For Ryan and Enrique, being short, half-Asian men means knowing exactly how often they’re overlooked, so they find affection with women who in turn may face their own kinds of marginalization. Not always, but often enough, and willingly.
Then there’s Jake: handsome, tall, and Caucasian. Jake cannot abide even the smallest physical flaw, especially when it comes to weight — and the truth is, he doesn’t have to. In the scene at Garden State University, he literally walks through a door and finds himself immediately in the arms of a woman who’s interested, while Calvin spends the evening awkwardly trying to ingratiate himself to a fellow Filipina mestiza who, with a kind of bitter irony, concludes that he’s “too white” for her.
The book doesn’t explicitly condemn any of these preferences. It simply lays them bare — showing how different characters qualify and disqualify potential partners, each according to their own quiet calculus. Honestly, I half-expected more readers to be unsettled by it.
And there’s an even sharper irony here: that same Filipina who rejects Calvin for being too white exists in the same narrative space as Enrique, who we’re told will only date white women — dismissing Asian women outright because, as he puts it, they “all remind him of his mom.” Even the Asian characters disqualify other Asians (or, in Calvin’s case, half-Asians). It’s a tangle of internalized preferences and social hierarchies that no one in the story ever really unpacks, because that’s how these things usually live — unspoken, but constantly steering who ends up with whom.
And that’s where the mirror sharpens. Because if we bristle at Calvin’s private biases toward overweight women, how often do we question the equally blunt biases that govern so many women’s dating profiles today? It’s entirely normal — practically expected — to see profiles flatly declare, “must be over six feet,” as though an entire swath of men can be dismissed for failing a genetic height test. We rarely call this out as prejudice with the same moral urgency. Yet ironically, short men have even less control over that physical disadvantage than most overweight women do over theirs — even acknowledging that for many people, weight is also extraordinarily difficult to change. In both cases, individuals are at best severely limited in their ability to alter these traits, yet only one of these social biases tends to be labeled as problematic.
Calvin’s not cruel. He’s not out to shame anyone. He doesn’t wield his opinions like weapons. But he still has them, and they live under the surface of his relationships and choices, much like so many of our own quiet, unexamined hierarchies do. It’s one of those threads in The Wake of Expectations that was never meant to dominate the narrative, but to exist in the margins — waiting there for readers sensitive to such things, or willing to look a little closer. Because at the end of the day, it’s rarely the loud, overt insults that shape our social ecosystems. It’s the subtle preferences, the whispered rankings, the quiet systems of worth we carry without ever considering the harm they might do
That’s the place where fiction, at its best, can poke at us. Not to deliver a neat moral lesson, but to hold up a quiet, uncomfortable mirror. And that’s why it stayed in, even if only between the lines.
Javier
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