House of Eratosthenes

Cassy wants to know: “Why should we celebrate morbid obesity?” She has some consistently good points to make at her place and she makes them well, but this one is even better than usual.

Should someone who is obese hate their body? Well, no. Hate is an awfully strong word. But the way this show presents obesity as just another lifestyle choice, one that’s perfectly fine to make, is wrong. And it’s especially wrong considering the show is about teenagers, and directed towards teenagers.
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This acceptance and glamorization of obesity reminds me of how Hollywood used to glamorize cigarettes. Today, of course, smoking is commonly known to be dangerous. People still do it, but it isn’t looked at in a positive light. And while in our greater society fat people are still looked down upon, there is certainly a movement to be more accepting of fat. Does that really help people, or does it just send them down a more comfortable path to an early death?

What I think is sad about this, is that the reactionary movement is against messages being sent through a starlet’s skinny body. So how is the trend upset? By sending a contrary message through another starlet’s blubbery body. The lady’s feminine form cannot ever be separated from the story that is being told, so if it can’t, then why bother with the protest? Why upset an apple cart if you aren’t really going to upset it?

These poor girls have everybody fighting over who gets to instill the proper ideal in their tender li’l heads about how a woman’s body is supposed to look. That can only mean one thing: The parents aren’t taking charge of this…or at least they’re perceived as not taking charge of this.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying this; I have one son and no daughters. But it seems to me — you teach the rug-rats how to eat, you teach ’em how to go running in the morning. And okay then. Now if they’re feeling thin and malnourished they’ll know how to eat, if they’re feeling chunky they’ll know how to go running. Problem solved. Yes, I’m serious. Morbid obesity becomes a threat to long-term health when it’s made into a lifestyle 24x7x365, and it’s made into a lifestyle that way when people don’t know anything different. Habits instilled in childhood, for good or for ill, have a massive influence on this process.

I attached the following comment, you can judge for yourself whether my wisdom is up to par with Cassy’s. Bearing in mind she can edit things after the fact over there, and I cannot:

In the days of Skinny-Elvis — the customer whose ego you wanted to inflate, was not a shrew with latent Daddy-issues or a mouthy little kid, but a straight white man aged 35. James Bond was permanently 35. Superman looked like a boxer or a wrestler, and you just [k]new he had muscles but nobody bothered to pencil ‘em in. It was a man’s world.

Women and cars have been morphed over the last 55 years exactly the same way. If a Thunderbird hit you, your body would inflict about as much damage on the car as it would on a freight locomotive: None. You’d be barely recognizable after scraping up against the T-Bird, just like up against the locomotive. It was a big beautiful boat, mostly steel. If you loaded it onto a truck, the leaf springs sank down toward the pavement in acquiescence.

Cars were manufactured and sold and bought to please men.

Women and girls were dressed up in skimpy clothes with their flesh displayed to please men.

Nowadays, cars are tin and plastic things. You get hit by one of these, and you’ll probably fare much better than the car. This after men have been culturally told to go take a long walk off a short pier. It is a natural consequence of that. Nobody denies this.

Women have a body shape I described on Friday night as “a broomstick upturned with two water balloons dangling from the handle.” Yes you’re damn right it’s unhealthy…

Here’s what cheese[s] me off. While everyone is ready to admit cars are being built in an anti-man mold — and isn’t that just so progressive and wonderful — the female body figure that’s ninety pounds soaking wet is all our fault. It is precisely the same pattern of miniaturization, but the one with a woman’s body shape is more craven and cowardly because the entire male sex has to be used as a scapegoat for it.

But most of the men I know, aren’t any more fond of the less-hefty less-curvy less-substantial female physique, than we are of the planned-obsolete gossamer Fisher-Price “bench press it” econo-box automobile. Both of these things were done contrary to our wishes, but we’re being blamed for one of them.

You know why my eyes are bulging out in this photo? Know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking “Holy mackerel, I’d better not bump this girl up against anything or she’ll probably break!”

Females nowadays are lovely, especially the ones who are too young for me, but most of ‘em need to eat a sammrich or two.

Morgan, I think you nailed it with your Thing-I-Know…the one that says that it’s not a patriarchal society that pushes young women to unhealthy levels of thinness. It’s the glossy pages of trendy fashion magazines that are doing that. As with so many other TIK’s, I thought that was absolutely profound.

We (ordinary, everyday men) haven’t done this – the encouraging-anorexia thing, OR the it’s OK-to-be- fat thing. We as a group haven’t done jack. In fact I’d say women have done it to themselves. Isn’t it true that they get all dressed-up and whatnot not to attract guys, but to impress other women?

Oh sure, lots of guys write singles’ ads with the words “no fat chicks” or some variant of that, somewhere in the wording. Big whup. Those guys are shallow. Most of those men turn out to be pretty flabby themselves and in no position to judge.

Men are individuals with individual preferences. I have friends who do like the stick-figure, and others who do not. I personally am drawn to a large variety of body types, lopping off only the extremes on both ends of the spectrum. My experience has been that the hottest girls are often (not always) spoiled and shallow, whereas some of ones who don’t get a second look turn out to be warm and intelligent. (Except for the fat ones who have bought into the victim-of-the-patriarchy twaddle. Those ones are ugly inside, too.)

My co-workers and I were having a discussion about this the other day. We were talking about this gal we all knew, someone known to be on the chunky side, and a male colleague said to me, “I think you like her.” I said, “Of course I do.” My colleague said, “You’d date her.” I said, “Yeah, I would. Most of the women I have dated looked like that.” The other guys in the room indicated they didn’t share my taste in women. I said,”Isn’t that a good thing? If we all agreed on what we liked, 100% of men would be chasing 10% of the women, while the other 90% of available females would be standing around without a date.”
- cylarz | 06/23/2010 @ 20:06
Well said cylarz;And,Nikki Blonski does look really good in a fat way.I’d much rather be with her than a hollywood broomstick with balloons lady.Fancy dress is intended to impress other women,women undress to impress men;a lady farmer dressed for field work easily attracts men farmers,a lady mechanic could be under a car and covered with oil and she’ll do fine at attracting gearheads.How fat is too fat?If your active enough you can be well over the doctor approved limit and still be healthy.three cheers and a mug of bud for human variety.
- kermitt | 06/24/2010 @ 06:46
That’s a lot of thinking. If it ain’t pot, it’s these damned skinny chicks, you know? Oddly enough, I was pondering on this topic last night, as I looked at my dog stretched out on the patio in the sun: Humans, both men and women, when we are talking about any animal other than women, revere the slender, fit and purpose built as companions and objects of affection, while we intentionally make things fat when we know we will want to kill them and eat them. It takes an awful lot of attempts at kindness and politically correct posturing to pretend that our core reactions to fat humans are any different. It doesn’t mean fat people are bad people, it just means that every single human on earth should strive to not be fat. It’s healthfulness combined with our responsibility to be useful to one another. The two really can’t be separated, actually.

We’re a long way from the cave, but survival is still survival, and the only thing that has changed about our human instincts is the words we use to describe them as we become more ashamed of them. Wrongfully ashamed of them, I might add. “We have the resources and understanding to be kinder to one another,” people like to say. Well of course we do, and of course we should. But it simply doesn’t follow that we should encourage behavior that runs counter to our higher instincts.

I have the wasps at the ready, so go easy on me here – I know that a little extra weight can be perfectly fine, and that there is such a thing as too skinny, and that different people have different tastes. However, there is a spectrum of generality here, outside the boundaries of which are people who are actively denying their knowledge of what it takes to be an effective human being. And they should not be encouraged in this in any way.
- Andy | 06/24/2010 @ 09:40

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“A Broomstick Upturned With Two Water Balloons Dangling From the Handle”Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

“A Broomstick Upturned With Two Water Balloons Dangling From the Handle”
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010