The New Thin

My Reddit Q&A on Monday generated a lot of good questions:

Ever notice on Facebook, when ever an average/fugly/fat chick post’s her picture you have like ten women (only women) chime in with their comments under the picture saying stuff like “HOT!” “you’re so pretty!” “damn you look good” when in fact she isn’t?!

Are women trying to make their not so attractive friend feel better about herself?! Or is there another scheme involved here of setting the bar low in order to boast their own attractive scale up.

I see, hear and read this constantly. What we’re observing however is a carefully constructed feminine social convention, and a feminine-combative one at that. By tacitly reinforcing the “good looks” of an obviously overweight woman with positive compliments, the latent message is that she doesn’t need to improve her looks to attract men. The truth of course is that she could be semi-fuckable after dropping another 15 pounds, but in telling her she’s hot ‘as-is’ the idea, in the form of an encouraging compliment, is to get her to relax and stay fat. Thus the complimenter(s) simultaneously feel relaxed in their fat.

It’s really a socialization attempt by less physically appealing women to regulate the sexual market in favor of themselves.

I can remember experiencing this firsthand long before the advent of social media. In the days I worked in the resort casino industry, I was in the lunchroom with the largely (heh) female advertising department and the conversation came up about how some woman in accounting was “too thin” or she need to gain some weight. I emphatically disagreed; I knew the woman they were going on about and she could’ve lost 10 pounds and still been overweight. The ladies lost their shit when I said she could stand to lose a few pounds and hit the gym more often. The hens practically pounded the table with their fists and the accusations of misogyny, and the old chestnuts about men’s “shallow” desires for the physical all flew wild and furious.

You see all the women at the table were as heavy if not heavier than the woman in question. I had insulted the herd by association.

The funny thing about body image is that most people tend to judge obesity based on their own physique. If you’re overweight and your regular peer group is fatter than you, you tend to think you’re “normal”. It’s similar to eating a donut from a box someone’s brought to work for all to enjoy. If one person is eating a donut it tacitly gives others “permission” to enjoy one too.

I was once at a distillery in Panama with a group of Dutch people I work with and a stunningly attractive Panamanian secretary asked me if I was Dutch. I told her, no, I was American and she said “oh, you don’t ‘look’ American. I laughed at this for a minute and asked her what an American ‘looks’ like and she said, “well, they’re all fat.” I took it as a compliment, but I had to agree with her.

Books and Covers

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but more often than not, it’s a good indicator of what the story’s about. An attractive cover should make the reader want to read it.

Women have far more rigid prerequisites for what makes an acceptable man for an LTR than men do for women. Women base their estimate of a man on his confidence, status, affluence, looks, humor, intellect, creativity, ambition, determination, decisiveness,..and the list goes on. Men’s requisites for intimacy? Looks and sexual availability, that’s it. Beyond that, you can make a case for any ephemeral quality that convinces you the girl’s worth your long term investment, but if she’s not hot enough to keep your physical interest, you’re going to look elsewhere to make up for it.

Yet what is the single most common shaming tactic women use for men? Painting them as ‘shallow‘ for requiring her to maintain a good shape and be sexually available. Men have far too much on the line in the long term NOT to be concerned with demanding the highest standard from a woman for an investment that goes beyond anything she could hope to genuinely appreciate or match by other means. For all of the personal investment a man must make in himself to meet women’s ‘attraction prerequisites’, it only makes pragmatic sense that his (physical) standards for women be strict and exact.

It’s really up to you to make the judgement call, but by no means should you allow accusations of superficiality influence your decision in that. As a Man, you are well within your rights to expect a maintained physique from a woman, considering the far greater sacrifices she expects from you. Would you leave her if she got fat? Damn right you would. Would she leave you if you went beta-listless-unemployed-alcoholic? Damn right she would.

All that said, what it really comes down to is the reason why this girl lost the weight. There are plenty of fresh divorcees frenetically working out at Planet Fitness in the hopes of reconditioning themselves enough to attract another husband – only to fatten up again once she finds the guy who “loves her for who she is”. Women who once were fat, who slim down are prone to this. That’s not to say there aren’t women who make a definitive lifestyle change and go from being a walrus to a Fitness America Pageant contestant and parley that into modeling or  personal training career, but these are the most rare and notable exceptions.

I should also point out that it’s a uniquely White Knight habit to publicly defend a woman’s body image insecurities in order to get the identification / affirmation strokes they believe endears them to women. I hear these guys parrot back the same lines women self-affirm when talking about their body shape or trying to disqualify a sexual competitor, in an effort to be more ‘like’ the women they hope to get with. The idea is that they believe they’ll be rewarded for taking the “fat acceptance, love-who-you-are” tact and be perceived as more modern or up with the right conventions, and that guy’s who actually have the temerity to say they prefer a tight body are the neanderthals – again, to disqualify their own sexual competitors.

The Mechanics of Sexual Selection

Whenever the ‘fat is OK’ debate pops up all it does is serve to further illustrate yet another feminine social convention. All of these conventions are sociological and psychological methodologies with the latent purpose of securing breeding opportunities for less than physically optimal women.

• Point 1: Women know on an instinctual, biological level that, overall, men generally base their breeding selection on the physical conditions of a female. Hips to waist ratio, breast size, facial symmetry, fullness of lips, youthful appearance, etc.

• Point 2: In order to compete with similar women in meeting the physical standards of a given demographic of men, women must create physical methods in order to compensate for this deficit. Thus they have make up, cosmetic surgery, high-heels, hair dye, etc.

• Point 3: Failing this, sociological and psychological constructs are necessary to ‘level the playing field’ in the sexual marketplace. Thus, fat, out of shape women attempt to convince men to feel ashamed for wanting a physically superior female by converting that desire into shame. It becomes superficiality. Likewise, older women who’s sexual marketability wanes with every passing year, must create social constructs that praises the sexual prowess of older women.

Women have been trying to convince themselves for centuries that there ought to be more to sexual attraction for men than physical appeal, and for centuries this method has been thwarted by simple male biology. Rather than play the game better, they attempt to change the rules of the game to better fit their own limitations in a variety of ways.

The problem with the idea that “it’s what’s inside that counts” is that it’s what’s outside that arouses. All the “feeling good about your body” that a fat woman can muster is NEVER going to be an aphrodisiac or a substitute for having a great body that men are aroused by.