All anyone’s saying is that when someone is attracted to thin people exclusively, it’s considered normal. When someone’s attracted to fat people exclusively, it’s considered a fetish. So why is that? Why isn’t an exclusive attraction to thin people considered just as fetishistic as an exclusive attraction to fat people?

You know, one of those taking-things-out-to-their-absurd-conclusion-to-make-people-examine-their -assumptions things.

I loved Jap’s comment: “So if you’re fat, you should always go out dressed like a slob, because even if you try no one will ever forget you’re fat? Then please explain to me why all these uber-thin celebrities walk around like slobs — aren’t they cutting in on a fat girl’s dress code?”

Thanks again…JM :)

““how little the concept of male beauty had changed over the millenia, as opposed to female beauty, which boomeranged from Nefertiti to Titian to Kate Moss and all points in between.”

No mystery there, last I knew, over the millenia, with few documentable exceptions, patriarchy has ruled. Men did the choosing, women had little to no say on the matter. I’d even go so far as to say that even today, many women do not take even nearly as seriously a man’s looks as a man does a woman’s. Physical attributes still matter less than earning capacity, social standing within their group and ability to protect.

I hate it, but I’d have to be blind to deny it.

As for the overweight or obese who only date those sinificantly skinnier than themselves, yes, this type of hypocrisy is fairly common.

You know, I really don’t get this. At all. Preferences are preferences, and if a fat person prefers thin people, why should she have to “settle” for a fat person just because she herself is fat? By the same token, why should a thin person who prefers fat people have to “settle” for thin people just because they themselves are thin?

The problem is not the preference, it’s the lack of societal support for preferences outside the norm or outside one’s “league.”

I don’t expect everyone to find me attractive. To use the market metaphor, I’m a specialty product. What I do expect is that the men who do find me attractive not be ashamed of that or ashamed to be seen with me because they’re getting social pressure to date someone thinner. I also expect them not to fetishize me, or break their arms patting themselves on the back congratulating themselves about how open-minded they are.

The history of standards of appearance tell us that they are cultural and change according to time and place.

Particularly for females. Novelist Robert Rodi observed, “how little the concept of male beauty had changed over the millenia, as opposed to female beauty, which boomeranged from Nefertiti to Titian to Kate Moss and all points in between.”

. . . So, yeah. I don’t think Rick’s being a dickhead — not intentionally, at least — but he’s displaying a pretty limited view.

There have always been sedentary people, but using high fructose corn syrup and eating fast food loaded with transfats are relatively new phenomena. Who knows what the ultimate culprit is? We do know that people are literally killing themselves to get thin–doing things much more extreme than the behaviors that supposedly got them to fatness–and overwhelmingly, diets fail them. Studies have also shown that it’s hard to make people *gain* weight even by force-feeding them and limiting their physical movement, so where does that leave us?

Scientists at the time claimed the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was due to bad weather, having no concept of ecology at the time. Similarly, we are just discovering that the endocrine system is quite complex. 1 in 10 women has PCOS, which makes losing weight extremely hard to lose (though of course that’s the #1 piece of advice you’ll get). And in a recent NY Times article, it was reported that how many calories your body extracts from a food may be more dependent on the bacteria living in your gut than anything else. So maybe it’s not our fat genes that we pass on to our children, but our intestinal pH.

Anyway, there’s clearly a lot more going on than people suddenly adamantly refusing to live a healthy lifestyle. We seem to get heavy in all kinds of ways, but seem to get thin in almost no kinds of ways. Judging people on whatever behavior you *imagine* is causing their problem is irrelevant, foolish, and arrogant.

I don’t make the rules, if I did then average looking guys with back hair and crooked noses would be every woman’s ideal of drop dead gorgeous. I don’t get the point of this observation.

If I made the rules, the only job available to you would be mopping chicken guts in a poultry packing plant. You can prefer whatever you want, but stop trying to elevate your preferences into some furniture-of-the-universe objective standard. The history of standards of appearance tell us that they are cultural and change according to time and place.