Apr 16 2008
Obesity and Beauty
I’ve been thinking a lot about being fat. This isn’t unusual behavior. I’ve been bigger than 99% of my peers since I was, oh, born. For the majority of my life, I was remarkably unattractive to most guys, excepting the ones who thought I was easy – either because of my looks or the company I kept.
For me, the epitome of figuring out that I was largely unattractive was when my best male friend throughout high school, who was also my enormous secret crush, casually mentioned to me one day that “fat chicks can never be beautiful, only cute.” I’m sure the look on my face was somewhere between utterly crushed, pissed, and thoughtful. It didn’t ruin our friendship, but it did solidify the fact that I should move on from my crush. He ended up dating a girl who was sweet, thoughtful, talented and beautiful. I think he was a little too lucky with that catch.
With the size 16 British participant in beauty pageants, there’s been a lot of talk about whether we, culturally, should float the message around that fat can be beautiful – in case it might encourage more people to become fat or to stay fat. Every overweight woman in the world can guffaw about this now – just get it out before I try to break down that thought.
Minus the men and women in the BBW (big beautiful women) scene, I can think of no man who would prefer a heavier women based strictly on looks. This is largely an instinctive thing, and its based on who you would choose to propagate your seed with. A thinner woman (but not overly thin) is healthier, less likely to have complications with birth, it makes sense that instinctively most men would be more attracted to them. I’m not entirely sure we can fault anyone for that behavior. Fat men get away with being fat because all they have to do is perform successfully once – they don’t have to carry or nurse a baby. If they died moments after the act, they would have succeeded in their instinctive task.
But the argument that we ought not to encourage people to stay or get heavy misses a few points:
1. There are gradations of being heavy or unhealthy. I know overweight people who can out-run, out-lift, and eat better than skinnier people I know. Being physically attractive isn’t about being heavy or not, it’s about being healthy and in shape.
2. I don’t know anyone who wants to be fat (again, minus the BBW crowd). I don’t think one reasonably overweight model would change that.
Sub-point to 2: I also don’t think the way to help people along the path to losing weight is to assert that they shouldn’t bother, that beauty is closed off from them so long as they’re heavy. That attitude is what keeps people like me from enjoying the gym, from wanting to go shopping for clothes, from having confidence in any of my interactions with people.
I’d like to come back to my experience with my crush in high school. I think he was right. There have been a handful of guys along the years who have expressed an attraction to me, and I’ve always been labeled as cute. I like being cute. If they had a Cutie Pageant, I’m sure I could place. My point is, in order for us fatties to get anywhere with weight loss, we have to be appreciative of our bodies. It is only through learning the joy our bodies bring that we can finally nurture them appropriately with good food, good exercise and a good attitude. Being depressed about being fat and not beautiful only leads to bad eating, bad activity and hatred towards our bodies.
But it’s our responsibility to temper social responses for ourselves and remember the amazing things our body does for us and do our best to take care of it, no matter what we look like. We are responsible for the care of our bodies, our minds, our spirits and in my experience social constructs have gotten in the way of me learning how to care for and appreciate all three. I think loving yourself doesn’t mean being resistant to change. It is only through loving (maybe accepting is a better word) yourself that you can become receptive to positive change.
Also, Leonard Nimoy wants you to know that fat women are beautiful.
ha, you were always called the “beautiful” one of us.
I think your high school crush was right, too, and I think it says something about what exactly “beauty” means. It’s a collective ideal, one that women and men are programmed to pursue instinctively (and stress over in ourselves), and yet I’ve never met a single person who didn’t have their own preferences that differed from the standard collective idea of beauty.
I think of beauty as a point where all of those preferences converge, and I think of people who really buy into beauty as a bit foolish.
is it beauty that people are striving for?
Most likely. I think it’s perfectly natural for people to strive for beauty in themselves. I just think there’s maybe a disconnect between that and what other people want — the first is this uniform, collective idea, and the second is anything but.
When I mentioned people who buy into beauty, I was talking about people on the observer end of the equation, thinking of men I have known, maybe one in ten, who honestly believe that cookie-cutter beautiful people are the most appealing. These are the guys whose personal “ratings” of women would correspond perfectly with hotornot.com — in other words, the completely average. (I’m sure this works the other way round as well, it’s just that most of my friends have been male.) There will always be people who have “average” opinions for whatever reason, but just because they represent the average doesn’t mean they’re 50% of the population.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to make yourself more attractive to “most people”, and most of us do so even when we’re not trying to pick people up. I bother to groom myself most mornings, and not just because I’d eventually get fired for looking like a bum. The problem is that “attractive to most people” is a really nebulous target: useful as a goal up to a certain point, and almost certainly destructive beyond it. Society telling women that they had all better be as beautiful/attractive/hot/whatever as possible certainly doesn’t help.
Sorry, I’m ranting, and I answered your question three paragraphs ago.