Hoo boy, I leave this thread alone for a while and look what happens!
I'm about to sound like a raving SOCIALIST LIBERAL! You have been warned.
DyperBoi:
I haven't called anyone here fat, but if a person is fat, I am going to employ the Oxford English or Websters Dictionary and use the correct English term. If fat people are offended because they are, well, fat, and someone uses the correct English term, then so be it, but I keep my proper descriptives generic and not specific to anyone.
It's not the term used, nor whether you actually came out and called someone here fat, it's the sentiment behind the word.
I don't read Hollywood gossip magazines, as celebrities don't interest me in the slightest.
Well, at least we agree on one thing.
It is not society that demands perfection, it is Mother nature, or more accurately-natural selection that causes the sexes to be more attracted to traits that refines the gene pool than pollutes it. That is why some women who are so skinny they can become amenorrhic-they are not good candidates for perpetuation of the human species and natures tells them so. It seems that those most unsuited to compete in the gene refinement game, to wit, fat and or unattractive people, are the first to demand that everyone stop engaging in natural selection. Evolutionary anthropology dictates that nobody should or will listen. No woman wants to brag to her girlfriends that she married the fat, high school dropout hairy slob guy who just got fired from his job as a trash collector. No, instead it is the tall dark handsome striking guy who is a lawyer/doctor/media/Hollywood mogul who drives the Mercedes or Porsche, has country club membership and can advance her up the social ladder.
Are you by any chance tall, dark, handome? Or do you just fantasize about it?
Shall I point out that you're betraying your own prejudices and those of society at large? I mean, that's a nice assumption you made there: fat=impoverished slob garbage collector, tall/handsome=rich f**ker with a Porsche. Guess whose a$$ I'd rather kick. I love how some people say more than they intend without knowing it.
Besides, has it ever occurred to you that some people, regardless of weight, not only don't want to be doctors/lawyers/media moguls, but actively
hate their guts?
I would also point out that 100 years ago people who we'd be reviling as obese these days were the absloute epitome of success. Rich capitalist socialites? Their wives? All shamelessly fat, because they could
afford to eat and eat and eat. And they were pale as clams too...thinness and suntans were the telltale signs of someone who actually had to work for a living--implying poverty, of course. Yuck! Essentially, if you look at the history of society (at least in the West) beauty equals emulating whatever contemporary rich people look like. That's not patriarchy...that's aristocracy. There will always be rich people who everyone wants to be just like, even if only in outward appearance. (Incidentally, it is usually the rich who own the modes of communication and thereby influence what gets put out onto them. And, to paraphrase the old writers' motto, they write what they know.)
Face it, making scientific sounding claims to "prove" that fat people are unattractive because Mother Nature wants it that way is not only offensive, but just makes one look plain stupid. Attractiveness/beauty/etc. are
social constructs, as malleable as the times they reflect, whether you like it or not. If not, then fatness would have been a stigma throughout the ages. And it has NOT. (Study art history...does the name Reubens ring any bells? As in "reubenesque"? Believe it or not, there was a time when that word would
not have been a mildly condescending euphemism.) What's more, don't you think that millions of years of weeding out fat people would have left us only with attractive--read slender--people? Genetically tall, dark, and handsome guys and shapely svelte women? If nature had worked that way, we would have found something to stigmatize a minority of them with. Maybe all redheads would have been discards. Maybe all hairy-chested men. Maybe all dark-skinned people...sound familiar?
Sorry, it may have its
roots in natural selection, instincts, etc, but it's
not natural. Trying to have more stuff than anyone else, or at least to appear to,
is natural. So is demonizing anything that's different from an arbitrary standard. There's your natural order, DyperBoi. Greed, consumption, conformity...remind you of any megabillion-dollar industries that place a high premium on looking attractive?
(Guys fighting over women arguably is also part of the natural order, but what woman really thinks that kind of neanderthalism is sexy anymore? Someone I'm glad I'm not dating, that's who.)
And for those that blame the evil male patriarchy and society, they clearly have not studied and ignore behavioral anthropology. Had they, there are multiple well regarded peer reviewed stidues showing that newborn infants will have their attention held longer when shown attractive human faces than unattractive ones. Babies part of the evil male patriarchy and perpetuators of the unrealistic Hollywood perfection stereotype too?
Nope, just part of their environment. They're not attracted to "attractive" but to the familiar, I wager. I bet if you tried that experiment on a baby in the jungle somewhere, had her compare one of the village women to Elle MacPhereson, she'd be terrified of Elle.
Besides, you'd be surprised how much an infant can pick up from the TV.
Note that I didn't directly call you anything insulting.
cheers
Billy S.
