Holy f*** mother of gawd!
Lord J, why do you write so much, WHY?!?!
*explodes in eternal pain and turns into burning ashes*
Some of my posts may be long compared to the norm around here, but they’re not so terribly vast that they would take more than a few minutes to read. And if that’s time you aren’t willing to spare, then so be it. I can live with that.
Nonetheless, it will have to be your choice to miss out. For my part, I think we need
more reading in society, and more writing too. When people start whining about a post that, if you factor out the blockquotes and formatting, is just over five pages in a word processor, I think it portrays
them poorly, not me. If somebody cannot deal with five pages of text on a subject they might otherwise care about, that is their loss.
Don’t explode in eternal pain and ashes! We’d hate to lose your bizarre yet familiar presence around here.
But if you know her, and she is fat, stupid and not a good person, than it's not a prejudice anymore, is it?
Don't judge people by what other people say, nor judge a group by the behaviour of one person. Judge someone by knowing him(experience).
I think
It isn’t prejudice to judge people
after the fact. That much is evident in the prefix of the word
prejudice: It means, more or less, an act or state of pre-judgment. If you make a judgment based on information you have already collected, that is judicial rather than prejudicial. If you make a judgment before you have all the facts, you’re getting ahead of yourself.
Prejudice that most fat people lack the will to control their own weight? I'll admit to that any day. I don't see prejudice as some absolute evil like you obviously do.
I’m not sure what to make of your post, Ramsus. I have a hard time believing you would get so angry for so little reason. Are you toying with me? If not, then please try not to take this topic so personally; or, if you must, then at least explain yourself better. Let’s get started…
You say you admit to the prejudice that “most fat people lack the will to control their own weight.” This is a prejudice because it isn’t proven, and in some cases is obviously wrong. So you’re judging a group of people on unsound grounds in a pejorative manner. What do you think will come of that?
I don’t see prejudice as an “absolute” evil, contrary to your assertion, but there is nothing inherently good about it either. It can be used to positive ends, but that is rarely the case.
Sure, if you want to point fingers, then the real problem is the simple abundance of easy food, but I don't see anyone arguing that we should start creating artificial famines to make people healthier.
You’re right. Nobody is arguing that we should starve people to death. What is your point?
Maybe you don't realize it now, but you have a responsibility to take care of yourself. If you have kids someday, you'll begin to understand.
This is another form of prejudice, completely unrelated to anti-fat bigotry. The premise that “you need to belong to Group X before you can understand Truth Y” is usually false. I don’t need to have kids to understand the benefits of being healthy, any more than I need to be obese to understand the harassment that fat people suffer.
Maybe
you don’t realize that your definition of “take care of yourself” is not the universal definition. Everybody has their own way of interpreting what it means to take care of themselves. I happen to know there are fat parents out there in the world. Does being fat make them
bad parents, all by itself?
Besides, what do you have against offensive jokes? You never watched South Park?
Actually, no, I’ve never watched
South Park beyond the context of clips and snippets. I didn’t much care for what did see.
It’s not that I have something against “offensive” jokes—I don’t—but I do notice that a great deal of offensive humor is not used for the sake of laughter, but instead as an excuse for hateful people to continue expressing some underlying bigotry of theirs, in an environment where, if their views were told seriously, they would be inappropriate.
We see this in abundance in the South, where whites to this day continue to joke about blacks. And if a black person—or anybody else—takes offense, the bigots shrug their shoulders and say “Can’t you take a joke?” Yes, they can take a joke. That’s not the point. What they
don’t want to take is the underlying prejudice. Just because prejudice comes in joke form, that doesn’t suddenly make it okay.
Another example of “prejudice disguised as humor” is abundantly evident amongst right-wing lunatics. Just to name one example, the vicious and mean-spirited Ann Coulter has variously claimed that we should murder the editor of the New York Times, send anthrax to their offices, arrest Democrats, torture foreigners, make liberalism a treasonous offense, etc., etc. And when people say “WTF?!” she just smiles and says, more or less, “What?
Can’t you take a joke?”
That’s not humor. That’s mean-spirited bigotry wrapped in a shell of humor. So if you want to make jokes about fat people because you
hate fat people, I’m not very likely to laugh. That’s not because I don’t have a sense of humor. It’s because you’re not being funny.
I expect that we will someday discover that stress is a significant contributor to health problems. Therefore, inasmuch as anti-fat bigotry causes people to be stressed out by constantly worrying about their image, thinking they are bad people, and enduring taunts and jokes, it would stand to reason that, if we as a society were not so obsessed about fat, it would not be as unhealthy for us as it purportedly currently is.
I think it's kind of pathetic that fatty Fred would let what bitchy Jane says get to him so much that it causes him to gain more weight on account of stress. You're not going to get Jane to stop being a bitch, so why not just ignore her? You won't just feel better -- you'll actually be better.
Maybe it is pathetic that people would let the opinions of others control them. I truthfully agree with you there. But just because people have weaknesses, and can sometimes be pathetic, doesn’t mean that we should kick them while they’re down. Are you really going to argue the other way, Ramsus? Do you really think that we should stress fat people out as much as we like, because if they can’t deal with it, tough shit? There’s an phrase for that: Blaming the victim.
Example: Violent husbands should be free to assault their wives as much as they like, because if these women cared enough about themselves, they’d do something.
That’s a disgusting notion! We should never blamer the victim for our own bigoted misbehavior.
Also, you can put away your clichés. Maybe clothes don't make the person, but I'll be damned if you tell me they can't influence what people think about that person. You'd have to be retarded or ignorant (if not both) to claim such a thing.
You shouldn't expect others not to judge you based on appearances, because you have no influence over others. What would you ask of them next, world peace?
I am not saying that people do not judge others based upon appearance. Obviously many people do that. I am saying that to do so is a prejudice which usually is a poor indication of the veracity of the sorts of judgments being made. And just because these practices are common, does not make them right or even logically consistent.
I should, and can, and
do expect people to grow up and stop making idiotic judgments about other people. And you’re right, my expectations of don’t count for much in the grand scheme of things, but they
do influence my own conduct and outlook, and therein they can begin to make a difference. If you really want to harass fat people, you’re welcome to try. But I want to persuade those people that it isn’t worth it…and I am also welcome to try.
I’m not stupid. I’m not weak-willed, or humble. I leave a wake in this world. It’s not a very big wake, but it’s mine, and I try to live up to the ideals that can make me proud of my actions and their consequences. I do have influence over other people—your own, (mock?) angry reply is evidence enough of this—and I intend to use my influence to bend the world to my will, to whatever extent I am able.
In accusing me of having no ability to make a difference, you are implying, Ramsus, that we should go on living as children, accepting that people will be idiots and simply “roll with the punches” or else try to conform to the demands of others on fear of further ridicule, rather than trying to take some of these bigoted idiots and shape them up into better human beings. I don’t like that scenario! And I won’t be kowtowed into accepting it! Bigotry seldom dies easily, but if it won’t be swayed by reason, and won’t be swayed by example, then it will have to be swayed by constant harassment of the very same sort that bigots dish out to their victims with malicious glee.
There's a reason it's illegal to do heroin. In case you didn't notice, we look down upon recklessly ruining your body in constant pursuit of simple, non-constructive pleasures.
Oh, but maybe you think it's healthy to be morbidly obese. Just try saying that to a doctor though.
Your heroin analogy is not apt. Substance abuse leads to the altering of one’s state of mind. In effect it reshapes people’s identity. Additionally, the addictiveness of many of these drugs leads to compulsive behavior. It is easy to understand why being a hardcore junkie is not a good idea. Even so, however, it would be inappropriate to treat these people cruelly solely for that reason—as you would have us do toward fat people under similar pretenses.
As for your comment about morbid obesity, I never said that it is healthy. In fact, I said several times that it physically overwhelms the body. I never even said that moderate or even slight overweight is healthy. What I said is that excess weight is popularly believed to be more unhealthy than there is medical proof to demonstrate. What you have done is make a straw-man argument, which is not helpful to your case.
You would let your lifestyle determine who you are? Sorry, but I'd rather choose my own lifestyle and suit it to my needs, not the other way around. There's a reason the things you choose to do are considered lifestyle choices.
You’d rather let your identity choose your lifestyle than have your lifestyle choose your identity? That doesn’t make any sense! I’m not even sure what you’re trying to say, but I am going to presume you are trying to argue that people should not become victims to their own circumstances. That is true enough, but it doesn’t have anything to do with toning down the anti-fat bigotry in this society and accepting that people should be able to lead satisfying lives regardless or perhaps even because of their fatness. Many more people would be fat and happy, if society were not so crushingly cruel toward them.
And in case you're too dense and stupid to read into it, I implied that forming prejudice based on skin color is a bad thing, because it isn't something determined by a person's actions -- whereas your appearance has a direct relationship to what you've been doing since you've been born.
Nope. You said that being fat is a bad thing and should be changed, whereas skin color cannot be changed. You therefore implied that being black is also a bad thing, except that it cannot be changed.
I don’t think you meant it that way, but, in your ignorance, that is how it came out. You need to be aware of it.
Meanwhile, I want to reiterate that, just because a thing
can be changed, does not mean it
must be changed. Simply because fatness is something we can burn from our bodies, does not mean we should do that, any more than we should
grow our weight just because we can do that as well. Any credible reasons for changing one’s body fat weight in any direction would have to come from someplace else.
Oh right, because it's okay to stress out our bodies and shorten our lives while inconveniencing society, just so we can enjoy our monstrously oversized meals or lack of physical activity. It's something forced upon us by our uncontrollable lifestyles that dominate our every action.
Thus, it's okay to be fat, and it's bad to say that it isn't!
There is plenty of room to discuss the political ramifications of alternative lifestyles. Let’s start at the beginning. We live in a free country. Therefore, if people want to “enjoy their monstrously oversized meals” or “lack of physical activity,” then we as a society must be willing to accommodate them to the fullest extent possible before we step in with regulations and laws that discriminate against them.
At some point, perhaps such intervention is necessary. ZeaLitY began to touch on that subject when he mentioned banning soda from schools. And I mentioned to Radical_Dreamer that, somewhere between excessive regulation and insufficient regulation, there is certainly a point where laws can be maximally just, appropriate, and beneficial to the growth and prosperity of society and individuals alike.
There are many freedoms we enjoy which constitute a drain on things like the healthcare system. To some extent, we simply must accept that drain and try to make it as efficiently small as possible from the supply side. This is because society exists to provide basic rights and protections to everybody. And a fat person’s right to good medical care outweighs your right to save a cent or two in taxation. That’s simply how it is. Naturally there is reason to try and make sure that your share of the burden is not
excessive, but only within the context of accepting that the burden
must be shouldered, can we begin to discuss the limits on our share of the obligations.
Why? Because first things come first: Health outranks wealth. No country should deal in the business of putting its poorest and least citizens out on the streets to fend for themselves, simply to enrich the pockets of others. Even our worst criminals deserve a basic quality of life. So if somebody wants to put on weight—hardly a crime!—and someday needs medical care because of it, then that is an expense to which the rest of us must accede.
All of us will constitute a drain on the system from time to time—some people more so than others. That’s not an injustice.
That’s life..
If you ask me, it sounds more like a rather pathetic rationalization for accepting obesity.
I could not have asked for a better post than yours in helping me to highlight the evils of anti-fat bigotry. I still want to think you’re toying with me, because you are usually so much more respectful than this. But if you were serious about what you wrote, serious about raising support for this prejudice, then you shot yourself in the foot today.
Allow me to conclude. You are going into the military to defend…what? Against whom? I’ll tell you: You are going into the military to defend the
liberty of this country, against those who would subvert or injure it. Nowhere in your career will it be said that you fight only for a choice few people who agree with your way of life. No, you will fight for the United States of America and everyone in it.
And if that is the military’s objective, then the civilian administration of this country should be at least as tolerant…and the people themselves should be mindful of what freedom entails.
I refuse to accept that something as inoffensive as fatness should condemn anybody to a life of ridicule and oppression.
Fuck you. I'd rather be a bigot.
*tip of the hat*
Good day, Ramsus.
Something that I am a bit curious about now is what you would consider ideal weight for a woman? You've already mentioned a bit that you consider a woman closer to your own height to be more attractive, and what you would consider attractive weight would be an interesting thing to know as well, seeing as others have provided examples of what they would consider, and you have responded to a few of those considerations.
Ah, and you’re looking to hold me accountable to my own standards, eh? Very well. Let’s say…oh…180 pounds for a woman at 5’8”. Where sexual attraction is concerned, I do like fatness—but, at the same time, my tastes are tempered by another sort of attraction, which is for a mate with an impressive physical competence. If fat were the only measure by which I judged a woman’s attractiveness, then I would have to say, the fatter the better. But, at some point, additional fatness begins to trample on the toes of other qualities that I find attractive. Thus, much like the rest of you, “some fat but not too much” is the general rule. The only difference is that I prefer more than the average person does. But, as a few of you have mentioned, I don’t stick to that “ideal” number when it comes to finding people attractive.
On a related note, I notice from my little poll that we now have sixteen votes. Of those, thirteen express a preferred weight that is below the ideal female average for that height. Only three express a preferred weight above the ideal—and two of those three (including my vote) are still in favor of a weight below the actual female average for that height.
To put it another way, only one person out of sixteen expressed an interest in women being heavier than they are on average. That’s rather distorted! Considering that most of the people who posted in this thread will end up being overweight, and married to overweight spouses, it’s rather distorted indeed! How much of that is because of a genuine physiological repulsion to modest fatness—which is the level of fatness that most overweight people are at—and how much of that is due to the prejudice against fatness that abounds in our culture and our daily lives?
I am also curious as to what your definitions as far as "excess weight" are? You have stated that excess weight will overwhelm the body and cause certain problems, and I am wondering what weight you believe these problems are likely to happen at.
I used the term “excess weight” throughout my posts mostly because I wanted eloquent synonyms for words like “fat” and “obesity,” which can become repetitive. To define it, “excess weight,” really, is any physical condition where we have grown fat enough that parts of our body are dominated by fat.
I can take my left hand, for instance, and grab my right upper arm. If I wanted, I could pinch a little bit of fat. I don’t consider that excessive. But if I could grab an entire handful of fat from my arm, that would certainly constitute excessiveness. The boundary between excessive and not excessive is somewhat open to interpretation, and therefore varies from person to person, and even body part to body part. If you’re sitting down and can grab a handful of fat from your belly, that may or may not be excessive. It depends on who you ask.
As for the weight at which health problems kick in, I’d be a fool to try and pick a specific number. That can only be settled on a case-by-case basis. The curve of health problems is very smooth, and in lieu of a second axis, any categorization would be arbitrary. Furthermore, we don’t even know the extent to which obesity itself is directly the cause of those health problems.
I would answer your question another way: We all know our own bodies pretty well. I would expect that most of us would take notice if we started to become too fat to live our preferred lifestyle comfortably. That would probably be as good a guideline as any that exists today for deciding that it is time to lose weight, or at least not gain any more. It may well turn out that for most people, that number is higher than their ideal weight, but that’s not much of an issue for me. Our bodies are our conduit between the world of ideas and the world of fact. We should respect them as much as we are able, but we should not feel obliged to maintain their ideal state at the cost of our lifestyle preferences.
And now I'm more curious as to whether you were ostracized not necessarily for being very bright and quirky, but also possibly for being a bit argumentative as well? =P
No. Besides being bright and quirky, the thing that really got me in trouble as a kid is that I was a smartass.
As a critique, a lot of your responses in general to most people seems to lie under the assumption that weighing heavily in their mind, and behind a lot of what they say, is the strong culturally influenced ideal that fat is wrong, that everything everyone has said stems from this prejudice, and pointing out where you believe it might be showing through. Truly, this might be the case in many instances - still, it makes it nearly impossible to make a slightly adverse point to yours, because the point could always easily be written off as having an underlying prejudice that you are discussing showing through.
You have a point. I try to make my arguments hard to rebut. And, usually, I don’t make an argument unless I am confident in its strength. So, usually, it is hard to disagree with me—because, when I bother to contest a point, I’m usually right. That is probably what you are seeing.
Look at this topic for instance. You suggest that I label people’s negative comments about fatness as prejudiced, with prejudice of my own. Not so. The evidence is in abundance all around us, in this thread and in the wide world. There is so little reason to discriminate against fat people, and yet not only do we discriminate against them anyway, but we do it with spectacular zeal.
You are welcome to name any anti-fat remark you like, which you believe is not based in prejudice or bigotry, and I will probably be able to show you that in fact it is.
Also, it seems that it would be pointless to search and post links to anything such as a study that possibly links health problems to weight gain, simply because you have also mentioned several times that you believe such studies are taken up based on the prejudice - that these people are searching for why fat is bad, or noticing such things because they wish to prove that fat is bad, to back up their prejudice.
The question of whether fatness is unhealthy is a legitimate debate. It has nothing to do with prejudice until people try to justify their hatred based on this science. You’re welcome to post as many links as you like to studies which link excess weight to health problems, but again, like I said earlier, you will be hard-pressed to find a professionally conducted, elsewhere reproduced study that is able to demonstrate broad statements about fatness as being a direct cause of poor health in general. This is because scientific studies don’t work like that. I’m an engineer; I know! It is extremely difficult to verify broad hypotheses as opposed to narrow ones, and to be certain that the variables in a study are truly isolated and are not incorporating any silent unknowns which may render the study’s conclusions invalid.
For the umpteenth time, I am not trying to argue that being fat is healthy. I am not even saying it is not
unhealthy. I am saying there is not much substance to the popular belief that it is as drastically unhealthy as would befit such a strong prejudice against it.
Still, scientific research is rarely absolute - some people take certain theories as "law," but even these could possibly, in time, be debunked. In this sense, one could say that researchers are simply trying to prove that fat is bad, and it would be highly difficult to argue that point - but if there is a high correlation between such things as, say, weight gain and diabetes, is it really safe to so quickly toss it out the window as "possibly being backed by prejudice"?
A correlation does not establish cause. Neither of us can be certain that body fat itself is the direct cause of diabetes. There is a great deal of physiology that goes into fat accumulation and maintenance, and who knows the mechanisms by which diabetes is formed? If science knew that, we’d be much further along the road to a preventative medicine.
But this is all a bit moot anyhow. Even if fatness directly causes diabetes, that
still does not justify anti-fat bigotry—especially not to the degree it exists in our culture. Those who try to justify their prejudice with scientific information that is inherently neutral when it comes to making the sorts of judgments inherent in a prejudice, are as phony as those who try to excuse their prejudice with humor on the grounds that they are merely joking.
Look at it this way. How much sense does the following statement make to you:
“Being fat is unhealthy. Therefore I hate fat people!”
Ever notice theres not many fat people in the chrono series... Female wise except mama korcha
That is just another example of the ubiquity of anti-fat bigotry; one in which the prejudice is blended with sexism for a double-whammy. Most of the female lead characters in the Chrono series—including all of those of reproductive age—do not have so much as an ounce of excess fat on their bodies. That is the idealized fate of women in a world dreamt up by people whose minds are jaded by anti-fat bigotry. It helps reinforce the message in the minds of all who play the game that fat women are not attractive.
Korcha is a part of it too: Most of the fat women who appear in works of popular culture fit into a small number of personality stereotypes. Korcha is the “big strong fat mother who won’t take any attitude.” This is a caricature that further serves to dehumanize and stereotype fat people.
Whether or not there is any malice intended, the result of concocting a fictitious environment where one group of people are pointedly absent or heavily stereotyped, is inevitably going to lead to malice in the people who buy into that message, and then encounter this taboo group in the real world.
I do have to wonder why you hope women will close the height gap? Is this because of your realization that difference is the root of prejudice, and a hope that with the reduction of difference, the prejudice will likewise be reduced? Personally, I'd rather let natural selection decide the degree of sexual dimorphism in our species, as opposed to philosophical ideals.
Whether you approve or not, the days of natural selection as the primary engine of evolution in our species are over. Cultural selection took over a long time ago, and, in the coming decades and centuries, selection will become a conscious choice. Is that such a bad thing? Why would you rather let the random forces of nature dictate our existence as opposed to our own ideas of form and function? Accepting, for the moment, that we were to factor out all the problems that could result from the exclusive availability of such power—problems that have solutions and are therefore transient rather than fundamental—why indeed is it such a bad idea for humanity to take its fate into its own hands?
I’d like women to close the height gap on men because I don’t want gender roles to exist anymore. You more or less got it right on that count.
All the research I have seen has shown a correlation between being significantly overweight and a lower quality of health. This is also true of being significantly underweight. The correlation conjured in my mind was placed there with observations of reality. I note that you do not necciarily deny the correlation between being vastly overweight and various health problems. So if you agree that being vastly overweight is unhealthy, and that finding healthy looking people attractive is indeed an inbuilt and adaptive instinct, I don't see why it is problematic that I do not find vastly overweight people unattractive.
Your argument is fair, but you neglect that people’s individual version of “healthy looking” depends on who you ask. For that matter, it also depends on the level of medical technology available. Therefore, as long as you qualify your anti-fat preferences in a sexual partner with the limitation that they represent only your own views, I think you’re okay.
As to that, there is probably good cause to distinguish between sexual attractiveness and other forms of attention—the “good cause” being that, in this narrower context, many people’s anti-fat prejudice overlaps with their innate physical desires. That’s understandable. It’s not particularly noble—other people might be willing to let physical attractiveness take a second seat to their criteria for pursuing a mate—but it
is particularly human.
My agenda is not to get anyone to say or believe that vastly overweight people are sexually attractive. My agenda is to point out the fecundity, ferocity, and fallaciousness of anti-fat bigotry in our world.
So your goal is a society where fat people are fat because they chose to be fat? If that is the case, then there is less reason to not have a prejudice, as then fatness becomes a consequence of ones actions, which in any law-possesing soceity, is a just basis of judgement. It seems to me that the key difference between my society and yours is that in yours, the path to obesity is something the social order seeks to obstruct. Thus, yours is the society with the inbuilt prejudice against fat people.
You are leaving out one key ingredient in your scenario: My hope in this case is for a society where people are educated to make, not simply judgments, but judgments of a higher wisdom. Gene Roddenberry put it well when fielding a question from an interviewer. He was asked, on the subject of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, why the man is bald—for surely they have a cure for baldness in the 24th century, yes? And Gene’s answer was, “In the 24th century, they won’t care.”
Suppose we’re talking about baldness—another trait that attracts harassment and discrimination. Suppose science comes up with a foolproof, flawless, and utterly convenient cure for it. Now suppose some people prefer to go on being bald. Yes, perhaps they will therefore attract all the more discrimination for it…but as society liberalizes, and old prejudices fade away, we would hope that it would eventually become acceptable to be bald.
The same thing goes for being fat. If we raise our children and saturate our popular culture with the message that being fat is not an ugly or horrible thing, the prejudice will subside. And, thus, even though medical science will have brought us closer in that era to a society where fatness is a matter of choice, fewer people will be inclined to develop a prejudice against it in the first place!
I was trying to make this point to Ramsus: Just because a trait can or cannot be changed voluntarily, does not by itself justify a prejudice against it. You contend that we should be held accountable for that which is under our control. Fine; I agree. But I disagree with the specious reasoning that we should be held accountable for something
solely because it is under our control. I see no reason for fatness to be held to account at all—at least not in the form of a cultural prejudice—whether the condition is voluntary or not.
The BMI certainly isn't a dependable scientific measurement, but at least it places you within a broad enough range to know where you stand as a health-conscious (or health-dead-from-the-neck-up) individual.
The BMI standard is not particularly useful at all. It is not precise enough for fine-tuned assessments, because of its failure to consider the variance in fat mass to lean mass—inasmuch as we are recognizing fatness as correlative with an increased health risk—and because, once the number gets high or low enough to be clearly indicative of an extreme, the extreme is already pretty evident just by looking at the person. BMI is a popular standard nowadays, because it is statistically smooth, but nevertheless it is a poor tool for diagnosing an individual’s risk of health problems.
Other than that, though, I'm perfectly satisfied with myself in self-image, self-confidence, and as a big ol' "screw you" to any modern-day society that dictates rib-counting and protruding hip bones as the better alternative to frequent yet healthy eating and adequate exercise as opposed to either bulimia or die-trying cardiovasculars.
The fact that you put out a “screw you” at all is an indication of how pervasive the anti-fat bigotry is. Apparently your self-confidence has weathered this storm successfully, but many other people were not so lucky, and, in any case, it is a form of harassment up with which neither you nor anybody else should be made to put!
Those who take one look at me and brand me as "fatty-fatty fatso," on the other hand, recognize the fact that they are innately retarded, whether that specific synapse lets them consciously know or not.
Why don’t we see more of you on the Compendium? You’ve got style! Wit! Intellect! I think back to my own spunky audacity at age eighteen; I’d probably have written a post exactly like yours.
So overweight people are considered "stupid" and "inferior" in terms of physical motivation and intellectual reserves; I could tick off quite an extensive list myself of skinny people who belong less in university and more in a sanitarium. It's more a debate over whether people can accept themselves as their own individual self (not as how attractive they are to others, but rather as how attractive they are to themselves) rather than a conglomeration of biases, prejudices, and overall ugliness that others have built into figures, mere images utterly devoid of individuality and struggling to conform to society's standards instead of their own.
Nothing to say to this; just my plaudits.
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers had the physique of an Olympic athlete. That is the natural and optimum condition of the human body. People come in different body-types and ideas of physical beauty vary. However, I, like most of us, find people who are exceedingly underweight or overweight physically repulsive. This is no more an example of prejudice than being repulsed by the smell of tobacco is.
My first inclination is to correct you. Pre-civilized humans had neither the level of nutrition nor the performances of strength and stamina as define the modern Olympian physique. The ancient humans were, on average, lean, fit creatures, with enough fat to blur their major muscle groups. They had enough strength to overcome many of the challenges they commonly endured, but not so much strength that they would starve themselves trying to eat enough. And you can bet they had at least enough fat to insulate and cushion themselves without breaking their bones or freezing to death, as well as enough fat in the colder seasons to help tide them over till the next summer.
But I’m curious as to why you believe otherwise. If you’d care to share your source, I’d like to look at it for myself. Maybe I misinterpreted your definition of “Olympian.”
Now, if someone is 'overweight' but relatively healthy, good for them, that's fine. But really... I can't see that being the case in the majority of circumstances.
Just because you “can’t see that being the case,” does not have any impact on the truth of the matter. And that goes doubly in this modern age of wonders, where medicine can rectify everything from bad vision to missing limbs. Even to the extent that fatness may be unhealthy, it makes little sense to judge modern people by prehistoric standards. Your
instincts may tell you to feel one way or the other, but—as a Christian—I think you know all about suppressing instincts and embracing…“matters of the heart,” let us call them.
I’ve said it a few times in this topic, but I guess it’s worth saying again: I’m not bashing anybody for their sexual attractions, but I think it’s important to remember to keep the prejudice of such attractions limited to itself, and also to bear in mind that sexual attractiveness is not the only standard by which a potential mate can be reasonably evaluated.
The Athenian type woman would have ideally been paler and rather thin, whilst in Sparta, where their women trained to make themselves fit (so that their children would be strong), the ideal woman was fit and strong. I suppose these things really do come down to cultural differences. And in the end, I think I'll have to side with those saying that they aren't prejudices, per say, but rather perceptions.
A very comfortable way of excusing yourself from the ethical conundrum, but hogwash of course—and I think you know it. Ignoring for the moment that you are stereotyping entire populations of women based solely on which people they belonged to—truly a preposterous and unsavory notion—there is
still the issue of anti-fat bigotry, which is larger than just sexual attraction and is in fact the subject of this topic. If Spartan women tended to be fitter and Athenian women tended to be more diminutive, how does that resolve the problem that millions of people today are still harassed for their weight, while millions more (including some of the same people) allow themselves to be engulfed by a prejudice that has little basis and no justification?
Western societies like thin people? And that’s a preference rather than a prejudice? Is that what you’re saying? Because that’s codswallop! Tell me why individuals should conform to what is culturally acceptable, solely because it is popular.
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