Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Go with Choice #1. She's right. There's no hope.
YOU'RE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMED
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.
Okay, Ms. Waldman, I came readily to your defense on the homework question, but this is a different matter. You are not among the legions of the hungry who might reasonably expect that any resplendent meal that comes their way might be the last for a while. You can have more whenever you want it. Whether you fall on a Thanksgiving meal like a starving Great Dane on a month's worth of Alpo is your own affair, perhaps your therapist's if you've got one...I bet the therapists of this nation are ready to projectile-vomit after listening to their clientele's post-holiday-blowout self-detestation...but I don't get why it's supposed to be of general interest. One more chapterette in the very long treatise called Sick American Attitudes toward Food. This brand of American angst has been going on for a very long time and is dreadfully stale by this time. Sometimes I think that about five years of mild material deprivation would pull us-as-a-society back into balance and help us spare ourselves a wealth of bad behavior and bad conscience. It's unfortunate, at least from that angle, that the shortage coming our way is most likely going to be a shortage of petrochemicals rather than sugar and meat.
In the interest of balance and justice, I also don't know why people are so intent on promoting wretched excess that they cook til they drop for these holidays. It's bad for everyone involved. This practice allows the host/hostess to watch the guests eat through his/her own haze of exhaustion, too tired to enjoy the company. I also don't get why people insist on preparing so much more than is necessary, or why such emphasis is placed on a great abundance of the kind of food that kills. My mother used to work herself to exhaustion and hysteria over holiday meals, and I decided it would be different when I could make it that way. Now I am the designated holiday hostess for my family and social circle, but as such I make the rules and choose the menu, and we're going to have turkey for the meat-eaters, lobster newburg (out of a can from the Vermont Country Store) for the fish-eaters, spinach, whipped potatoes, asparagus, and cheesecake. That is, a pleasant, sufficient, slightly opulent meal, and the pleasure of coming together on a holiday. Not the kind of blowout that will clog my guests' arteries or knock me on my ass with exhaustion for days thereafter, or send anyone reeling home queasy with self-hate.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
