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Thursday, June 7, 2007 12:00 AM

Healthy, my ass

Many blacks love big women, but having a rump the size of Buffie the Body's can put women at risk for disease.

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  • Wednesday, June 6, 2007 06:45 PM

    I hate to be the bearer of bad news...

    ...but Buffie doesn't look obese to me, either. The size of her rear end and her poor exercise habits aside, she wears a medium top and a size 13-15 in jeans, and neither of those are exactly hallmarks of being huge (and the latter is probably exclusively due to her hip measurements). Since she's obviously carrying very little weight in the stomach area, she's probably got a waist-to-hip ratio that most of us would kill for.

    Most women would not, I'm sure, be able to gain that much around the hips without gaining too much elsewhere, too. And that is a problem. But for heaven's sake, can we get a reasonable look at what obesity really is? Her lack of healthy habits are bad, but then there really aren't a lot of models of any stripe who're eating what they ought to be by nutritionists' standards. Not a lot of the rest of us, either.

    Buffie is a slim woman with a large rear end. And having women like that modeling is a valuable thing, because when I was young one of the chief problems my female friends had was thinking that they had to fit into a certain size before they were "thin enough". Well, some us were wide-hipped where others of us were not. That meant that if we had all been at good, healthy weights for our height, we wouldn't have been wearing the same sizes, and for some of us there was no way we'd ever get down to the size two or four that others idolized.

    Some of us tend to have wide hips. Some of us have big butts. Curvy is good. Some of us are built straight and narrow. Lean is good. Our bodies have their natural shapes and we can't force them to be something else, so we might as well embrace it. The fact that some men prefer "curvy" and others do not does not necessarily have anything to do with promoting obesity or unhealthy habits, because many of us are curvy when we are not obese or unhealthy. Look at a "plus-sized" model sometime--they're almost never obese and many of them aren't even really overweight.

    I'm not going to argue that obesity is good, but honestly, with everybody railing about the horrors of obesity, can someone, anyone actually find an example to rail about who is really obese? That these guys go for an image of a woman like Buffie is, if anything, proof that what they're really interested in has nothing to do with being overweight at all, it's just a matter of proportions.

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