I apologize to thin women everywhere for calling them "skinny" and "cadaverous."

Satan seems to have a problem, however. It is indicative of the extreme attitudes that people have about this subject. I'm not so sure that the fat are necessarily doomed to isolation. I see plenty of them out with other people. Even large groups of large people in gregarious situations. With so many people being fat, they find each other and hang out together, eating.

We have all this food around that does not even need to be cooked. We drive everywhere. When we're not eating or driving around, we're watching TV. No wonder so many of us Americans are obese. We've given up tobacco for antidepressants, too. Antidepressants make people gain weight like mad.

Well, gotta go do some gardening and work out on the old Nordic Track.

Cheer up, everyone. It's a long haul, this life. I don't care if you're fat or thin. Aunty Hattie loves you just the way you are.

Go with Choice #1. She's right. There's no hope.

YOU'RE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMED

Chris:

As a thin woman, I’m not particularly bothered by general resentfulness and jealousy towards thin women. What bothers me is that I see a lot of articles and letters that automatically characterize thin women as being obviously unhealthy, under the thumb of patriarchy, and so image-obsessed that they engage in dangerous practices to maintain their weight.

Seems to me that’s a nice excuse for those writers who would prefer to avoid facing up to genetic variation as well as their own bad eating and exercise habits. And, frankly, given the rapidly expanding waistlines of Americans, I think it’s incredibly irresponsible.

And for those who might attack me for “having it easy,” I can’t eat whatever I want, sit on the couch, and keep my weight down either. If I start eating crap, I notice a change in my body shape in a matter of a few days. I don’t obsess about my weight or food – I don’t weigh myself, count calories, or buy low-fat or diet food products. I do eat quality well-flavored real food, take a walk or do yoga daily, and completely avoid fake food, junk food, and sugary drinks. While I put on weight very fast with poor habits, I also have found it’s not that hard for me to keep it off with fairly minimal effort and no feelings of deprivation.

What you look like matters. Big time. Being beautiful will earn you power, respect, jealousy, adoration, and maybe even fame and fortune. Beautiful women have their choice of mates and friends. Being ugly earns you contempt, disgust, and ridicule. Here's a fun exercise: ask a few people to name 25 women that are famous for being hot. Now ask them to name 25 women that are famous for anything except being hot. See how people do.

Is it fair that beauty equals power? No. Is it the way things "should" be? No. Does beauty have any inherent worth? No. But beauty matters - that's just the way it is. Even infants prefer attractive people.

So there are three ways to deal with it:

1. Pretend that looks don't matter - live in your own little world (as recommended by many commenters here) where you don't care what you look like. Everyone else will still care. Your co-workers will make fun of you behind your back, your children will be embarassed, and your lover will insist on keeping the lights off in bed. But as long as you're blissfully ignorant, it's all good.

2. Play the game - Do what you can to live up to society's ideal of beauty. It's in your own self-interest. Besides, you can't stop the beauty machine anyway, so resistance is futile. People have been bitching about it for decades and yet it's only grown worse. If you achieve a certain standard of beauty, you'll be rewarded. Beautiful people have more power than those that don't - period. But you might feel guilty, like Ayelet, about helping to perpetuate the system.

3. Take down the system - Write articles about how oppressive beauty standards are. Send angry letters to beauty companies, and to magazines that push these images on young children. Enlighten others about how shallow, wasteful, and destructive the quest for beauty is. Your efforts will have absolutely no effect, but your conscience will be clear.

Come on people, Ayelet was just writing about her struggle to choose between the three options. None of them are good, so give her a break. While many of you righteous folks choose to just ignore the role of beauty in our culture, most of us are too engaged with our culture to genuinely make that choice.

That's right. Stuff your face; cram your yammer; inhale you pale; consume the room. In other words....

EEEEEAAAAAATTTT

Be proud of your pendulous breasts, your elephantine bowel movements, your staggeringly excremental air, your chasm-like quim, your gelatinous flesh, you hot-air balloon belly. Who needs sex? Not YOU, you post-pseudo-ad hoc feminist, you.

Don't worry about all those NORMAL women. What do THEY know? While you're enjoying that sixteenth slice of jumbo pizza in your empty apartment, they're being brought to their miserable orgasms by their lame loving husbands, raising their miserable children and being loved by their friends. What a hooooorrriiblllle existence.

And when they come to carry you off in a piano case at the ripe old age of 42, your corpulent countenance shall wear the small smile of They Who Lived Until the Day They Died.

I noticed quite a few letters from thin women who are upset at Ayelet Waldman's comments about Paris Hilton and Lara Flynn Boyle. Boo hoo, they say, why do people hate me because I'm thin? To me, this is like a rich person complaining that poor people resent them, or white people complaining about how hard it is to be white. Get over it; your pain doesn't compare to theirs.

I'm thin too, have been my whole life. It was no fun in junior high and high school when everyone else was developing and I wasn't. But you know what, as an adult, it's nice to be thin and be able to eat what I want. It's nice to lose all that pregnancy weight fast, and it's nice to be able to go clothes shopping without feeling lousy about my body. That said, I'm sensitive to the fact that for the majority of women in this country, weight is a neverending struggle. I'm aware that most women CAN'T eat what they want all the time, and that, if they're the least bit fat, people judge them harshly at every turn. I'm grateful that I don't have to deal with that, and anyone else who is thin should stop whining and count their blessings.