Posted by Amanda Marcotte July 26, 2007 in Body Issues
You’ve probably seen the study trumpeted from every corner about how having fat friends will increase your likelihood of being fat. Stereotypes about weak-willed women no doubt jumped to mind, even if you wished they wouldn’t.
What was not emphasized in most reports: The correlation between fat friends and gaining weight only held for men.
My theory: Men and women both strive for physical standards set for them by men. Discuss.
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I would imagine the framework for this would be along the same lines that leave us with the right wing constantly framing the political landscape the left wing has to deal with. Maybe it’s just that flexibility of outlook in both social issues and body appearance gets squeezed by an inability to be flexible with same.
My theory: Men and women both strive for physical standards set for them by men. Discuss.
I don’t buy it. How can that be the case when women are so powerful in the fashion industry as both consumers and producers? I might add that Playboy models weigh significantly more on average than models in women’s magazines.
That sounds about right.
Brian:Look at this way, by “men”, it doesn’t mean all individual men, it means the mythical man culture (i.e. the patriarchy)
Both women and men are competing under rules and conditions for the pleasure of men, even though if not all men are interested in judging said competition. (I for one, hate the terms of that competition, for a wide variety of reasons, some rather selfish, some not. Hey. At least I’m willing to say it.)
I’ve never had a woman tell me to lose weight, Brian. I’ve had multiple men tell me to do so. I have never been overweight, though I will admit that I shot up to a size 8 or 10 at my fattest. Playboy models are also, by law, a few years older than the ideal runway model, who’s about 15 nowadays.
But fair enough; the patriarchy can overrule an individual man’s desire for a woman who is at a healthy low weight instead of starving. But that doesn’t change the fact that thinness in women is a status symbol, or that women’s bodies demonstrate the status of men who symbolically possess them. Women’s magazines have to overshoot because they’re interested in making sure that women are perpetually unhappy with how they look, which is best achieved by setting a physically impossible standard. Playboy, in contrast, is more about getting men off than making their wives and girlfriends feel inadequate.
Reminds me of one of the few episodes of Family Guy I’ve seen: the fat guy was being called a hypocrite because he was harassing his wife about her weight, he argued: “Men don’t get fat. Only women get fat”. How true! Outside the scope of health, fatness is considered a state of inappropriate ugliness in women. Men gain weight, sure, but “fatness” as a slur is less likely to be applied to them.
Perhaps guys get fat because it is convenient. Hell, it’s hard for most people to maintain a steady weight given our culture of working long hours and eating large portions of unhealthy foods. The difference between men and women is that women gain weight by accident, but men gain weight because they are allowed to by society. Men gain weight because the can gain weight.
You say your theory that men have set the standard needs rephrasing? the Patriarchy set the standards. Any number of books like Fat is a Feminist Issue will back you up on that.
But I have a hard time getting past another “theory” which I would resent more if it were true of me but its just wrong:
Was that necessary?Greensmile, my point about stereotypes is they exist and are drilled into your head, and thus are recalled even when people don’t actually buy into them.
Women’s magazines have to overshoot because they’re interested in making sure that women are perpetually unhappy with how they look, which is best achieved by setting a physically impossible standard. Playboy, in contrast, is more about getting men off than making their wives and girlfriends feel inadequate.
Does any blog earn your regular readership with such a mean tactic (that is, when you don’t think you can get even with a post of your own, a situation with no direct analogue for most women buying magazines)? If not, why do you ascribe such motives to magazines?
I admit I have political prejudices of my own, but it looks like you have a subtle prejudice against capitalism. I have had some platonic women friends in my lifetime who can easily deconstruct Playboy photography in defense of their self-esteem without trashing capitalism in letter or spirit.
Those lazy bon-bon eating women are the ruin of western society! What an ingenious plan to further stigmatize the non-skinny by “proving” that fat is contagious.
Discussions about appropriate or healthy weight standards never actually include men.
I’d say it’s not so subtle, and praise Jesus for that.
Thank you, Amanda, for pointing this out, because I heard this bit on NPR this morning and the ONLY people they interviewed for commentary were self-professed fat ladies.
I’ll just say this. If you don’t have a subtle prejudice against capitalism, meaning you’re not suspicious of potential profit driven actions…
Then you’re like a lamb hanging out with the foxes.
I’d say your theory makes sense, especially since the reason for men to be lean and muscular and such, besides being able to easily intimidate other men, is to get chicks, which obviously scores you patriarchy points.
But I don’t understand the connection between your last sentence and the fact that no one mentioned that the study’s finding only applies to men.
“A subtle prejudice against capitalism” — that’s pretty funny.
What’s Brian think is the purpose of women’s magazines? To sell lipstick?
(Yay the free market!) If so, how does he imagine they do this if women are happy about how they look?
Maybe he thinks it is to enrich woman’s lives (O holy capitalism, which looks out for us all) –in which case I reckon he’s been standing in a different check-out line than I have lately.
Huh, Brian? You do realize women generally buy women’s magazines to improve their performance as sex objects for men, right?
I checked your link and realized you’re that sad case of libertarianism Playboy-worshipping. I really shouldn’t argue with anyone who actually starts a blog to worship the hoary old myth of the playboy, that was practically out of date when Hefner started it.
Brian:
It’s not the magazines that have those motives, because magazines are inanimate objects lacking in volition. It’s the people who write and produce those magazines (as well as the ones who profit from the products and services they push) that you have to worry about.
If you don’t have a prejudice against modern American capitalism, you’re not paying attention.
Sure, but in fairness, praising a men’s magazine for making you feel bad about your physical appearance is a pretty strong indicator that you’ve already bought into the capitalist machine that feeds off your fears and insecurities.
Whoop whoop! Libertarian alert! Thank my lack of god he’s here to defend poor capitalism!
And for the record, I’ve bought gay men’s magazines to ogle the men. There goes your (probably evolutionary psychology-based) belief that women don’t like to look at (hot) naked men.
And BTW - over at the NYTimes, Dick Cavett is being a huge tool concerning the fat issue. Get off his TV screen, fat people!
The money in women’s magazines comes from ads for makeup, clothing, etc. Women don’t buy makeup and clothing when they are already very happy with how they look. Nor do they buy magazines telling them about the latest sex tips and diets if they are happy with their sex lives and weight. The whole point of women’s magazines is that they have articles and products telling you how to be thinner, sexier, better looking, better in bed, etc.
She ascribes those motives to magazines because to do otherwise would be stupid.
Women becoming genuinely happy with themselves and their looks would be a death knell for an entire industry.
Amanda,
I agree with you on that. And somehow it doesn’t surprise me that the little ‘tidbit’ about men got left out.
Brian,
“I have had some platonic women friends in my lifetime who can easily deconstruct Playboy photography in defense of their self-esteem without trashing capitalism in letter or spirit.”
Are you serious? No don’t answer that I know you were, that was not deconstructing Playboy that was a load of “yeah Playboy has completely unrealistic airbrushed pictures, but men have it SO MUCH WORSE because of romance novels” crap. There are so many things wrong with that argument that I can’t even focus on one.
Brian is kind of a secular inverse of Poe’s Law–that is, at first I thought he was joking.
My theory: Men and women both strive for physical standards set for them by men. Discuss.
I’d say that men are more able to use their personal acquaintances as the standard against which they should be judged. Bob may not like being overweight, but if Jim and Joe are, especially if they’re about the same age and getting older and fatter together, then he doesn’t have to feel quite so bad. If you can avoid the muscle magazines, then most media will give you an image of masculinity that is highly idealized but generally attainable. Men, after all, can make up for a lack of sexiness by owning sexy, expensive objects.
Women don’t have that luxury - they are generally supposed to be one of the sexy expensive objects. Unless they’ve soaked up enough feminism to be able to recognize what is meant by “sex class” and consciously decided to say fuck that, they get to compare themselves to their personal friends, who will all be preoccupied with at least approaching the ideal set up by patriarchy and used extensively by the media.
To libertarians like Brian, capitalism is the same as “conservatism” for “movement conservatives.” Neither can fail, they can only be failed. Same ol’ idiocy.
I’d be reluctant to ascribe any significance to the difference in the results for men and women, given that the study is so poorly designed that it’s hard to believe any of the results have any significance at all. For example, the relationships in the study include some pairs of siblings, who are likely to have very similar weight gain patterns for genetic reasons that have nothing to do with social influence, wildly skewing the results.
Or we could just ignore the whole thing, couldn’t we? Get busy on what really interests us. I have stopped caring about this matter. But I’m old. Any suggestions on how I could lose a few years?
Oh, Brian… really. FYI - patriarchy and capitalism are not synonymous.
And, I may just be limited in vocabulary, but prejudice seems the wrong word to use here. I think of prejudice as something directed against people, not “isms”; it exists because of fear and overgeneralization. I have a nuanced opposition to capitalism in its present-day form, and an overwhelming opposition to capitalism in its neoliberal-wet-dream form, but that has nothing to do with prejudice, and everything to do with common sense and life experience.
The issue in question here is who determines what standards women hold themselves up to. Capitalism is relational, not causal.
I’ll just say this. If you don’t have a subtle prejudice against capitalism, meaning you’re not suspicious of potential profit driven actions…
Then you’re like a lamb hanging out with the foxes.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers. Where’s your skepticism about those lawyers’ profit motive?
And for the record, I’ve bought gay men’s magazines to ogle the men. There goes your (probably evolutionary psychology-based) belief that women don’t like to look at (hot) naked men.
EP predicts that fully nude images of the opposite sex will tend to be more popular among men than women. American women have been getting freer and freer as consumers, and their general behavior has tended to vindicate the prediction. I don’t gamble often, but EP looks more and more like a safe bet (unless you believe Jessica Alba is the new Betty Friedan). In any case, its predictions of general consumer behavior have nothing necessarily to do with you as an individual. That’s why I don’t contradict myself just because you saw some dicks.
Capitalism is causal, in such that the consumptive side is based in the establishment and reinforcement of these beauty standards. The advertising and marketing industries–the desire manufacturing sector–works hard at understanding how to manipulate behavior, and the construction of these standards of acceptability can be directly related to practices within the cultural production/desire manufacturing/consumption practices of advanced capitalist society.
I’ll just say this. If you don’t have a subtle prejudice against capitalism, meaning you’re not suspicious of potential profit driven actions…
Then you’re like a lamb hanging out with the foxes.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers. Where’s your skepticism about those lawyers’ profit motive?
And for the record, I’ve bought gay men’s magazines to ogle the men. There goes your (probably evolutionary psychology-based) belief that women don’t like to look at (hot) naked men.
EP predicts that fully nude images of the opposite sex will tend to be more popular among men than women. American women have been getting freer and freer as consumers, and their general behavior has tended to vindicate the prediction. I don’t gamble often, but EP looks more and more like a safe bet (unless you believe Jessica Alba is the new Betty Friedan). In any case, its predictions of general consumer behavior have nothing necessarily to do with you as an individual. That’s why I don’t contradict myself just because you saw some dicks.
That’s the old question… why do men’s magazines and women’s magazines both have pictures of scantily clad beautiful women on their covers? And, of course, the old answer is that men like to drool over scantily clad beautiful women and women want men to drool over them. Yes, it’s a terrible stereotype but apparently it works for the capitalists who put out these magazines. The idea behind magazines like Glamour is that they are selling ads and if the women who bought the magazine didn’t buy all the cosmetics and perfumes and whatever other crap is between the covers their ad rates would collapse. How best to get women to buy makeup? Convince them they need it.
I’ll just say this. If you don’t have a subtle prejudice against capitalism, meaning you’re not suspicious of potential profit driven actions…
Then you’re like a lamb hanging out with the foxes.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers. Where’s your skepticism about those lawyers’ profit motive?
And for the record, I’ve bought gay men’s magazines to ogle the men. There goes your (probably evolutionary psychology-based) belief that women don’t like to look at (hot) naked men.
EP predicts that fully nude images of the opposite sex will tend to be more popular among men than women. American women have been getting freer and freer as consumers, and their general behavior has tended to vindicate the prediction. I don’t gamble often, but EP looks more and more like a safe bet (unless you believe Jessica Alba is the new Betty Friedan). In any case, its predictions of general consumer behavior have nothing necessarily to do with you as an individual. That’s why I don’t contradict myself just because you saw some dicks.
Here’s an interesting monkey wrench thrown into the equation, one I’ve not seen portrayed in any of the lipophobic-hysteric coverage of this nonstory: Many male gym rats and iron-pumping fanatics (Arnold Schwarzenegger being a famous example) are in the “obese” range according to BMI data, because, y’know, big muscles are heavy. Men who pump iron tend to have male friends who do likewise, and men who take up pumping iron are often encouraged by male friends to do so, yes? Might this have skewed the data somewhat?
Have I been shut out of real-time debate here?
I know Amanda has the prerogative legally. But I don’t think it’s fair for someone arguing in good faith here.
I’ll just say this. If you don’t have a subtle prejudice against capitalism, meaning you’re not suspicious of potential profit driven actions…
Then you’re like a lamb hanging out with the foxes.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers. Where’s your skepticism about those lawyers’ profit motive?
And for the record, I’ve bought gay men’s magazines to ogle the men. There goes your (probably evolutionary psychology-based) belief that women don’t like to look at (hot) naked men.
EP predicts that fully nude images of the opposite sex will tend to be more popular among men than women. American women have been getting freer and freer as consumers, and their general behavior has tended to vindicate the prediction. I don’t gamble often, but EP looks more and more like a safe bet (unless you believe Jessica Alba is the new Betty Friedan). In any case, its predictions of general consumer behavior have nothing necessarily to do with you as an individual. That’s why I don’t contradict myself just because you saw some dicks.
And I should add, isn’t it likely that people who hang out together have the same habits? That is, they eat the same kinds of food, hang out at the same McDonald’s? I’ll bet the same can be said of cigarette smokers… that is that if all your friends smoke it’s going to be very hard to quit. And if all your friends are fat, it’s going to be hard to convince them to hang out at the low-cal vegetarian restaurant instead of the Burger King.
I don’t mean to jump to any conclusions, but I’ve had trouble publishing another comment besides that one.
Especially since Burger King is all “manly” and shit and the local veggie restaurant is where the faggy girly men are hanging out.
Who are you calling a faggy girly man? It takes a real man to refrain from eating meat!!!
;)
I can think of (or make up) a couple of reasons why the relationship might hold for men but not for women. Women undergo metabolism-changing events like pregnancy and menopause which tend to affect their weight, independent of their relationship to friends and family. Men might be somewhat more likely to share lifestyles with buddies and co-workers involving conspicuous consumption of beer and fattening foods than women (this is just a Wild-Assed Guess).
I seem to recall that women are more likely to be overweight than men, which certainly isn’t in accord with present patriarchal preferences. I’d actually be more inclined to blame capitalism for the obesity surge of the last few decades.
Hell, faggy girly men are the best eaters of meat
It’s hard to say anything about the study that isn’t idle speculation. Maybe men are more likely to go binge drinking together - who knows?
The more interesting part is how it was reported - without any reference to the fact that it applied only to men. If it applied only to women we could imagine the headline: “Ladies your girlfriends are making you fat” or something to that effect.
As far as comments about capitalism, Playboy, etc - it isn’t that complicated. You sell perfume by making people believe they smell bad. To point that out isn’t some prejudice against capitalism, it’s common fucking sense. The way to drive desire for products and articles based around beauty is to tell people they aren’t beautiful enough as is. Not rocket science.
EP doesn’t predict anything, it’s a field not a theory. Typically it is men who show off and are evaluated by women. Therefore it follows that women would be more interested in nude pictures because it gives them a fuller evaluation of mates. Same reason males of nearly every specious look ostentatious compared to females.
Of course that’s just some stupid shit I just made up, but it makes just as much sense as the theory of EP, which doesn’t even exist.
ProTip:If your comment, on any site doesn’t show up right away, wait a few minutes, as sometimes it has to be sent to a database and spit back out.
And as you’re responding to me, in that situation, speaking for myself, I actually don’t really like the vigilante/bounty hunter type situation we have right now when it comes to corporate crime. But that’s what you guys wanted, so that’s what we have.
Myself? I’d rather create another designation of criminal law dealing with corporate malfeasance, with real teeth. I’d hand out corporate death penalties like fucking CANDY. Your company is caught 3 times breaking corporate law? Bye bye. We sell off all your assets and split the money between all the people you’ve ripped off, or if your business is in infrastructure, have the government take it over, or hand it to the employees to run as a co-op or something like that.
Would it be a mess? Hell yeah. But it would stop a lot of wrongdoing, I’ll tell you that.
And where the crazy, wild, alternative chicks hang out.
The first thing I thought when I read this was “yeah, skinny dudes always seem to be the ones that can eat the most.”
I got it eventually…
“Many male gym rats and iron-pumping fanatics (Arnold Schwarzenegger being a famous example) are in the “obese” range according to BMI data, because, y’know, big muscles are heavy. Men who pump iron tend to have male friends who do likewise, and men who take up pumping iron are often encouraged by male friends to do so, yes? Might this have skewed the data somewhat?”
Pretty much any study that relies on the BMI as an indicator of fatness or ill-health is completely and utterly useless. The “friend’s BMI goes up, your BMI goes up too” thing covers at least three different very distinct scenarios under even the assumption that the only variable in the two men’s lives is the ‘fat’ friend’s weight.
Weight issues are really hard for me to discuss. I was overweight for many years…. I was always the fat one in my family. Now, I’m the thinnest, but only because of my eating disorder. Weight and food are issues that affect everyone. I don’t want to judge… I… Well, I feel better about being anorexic than overweight. I’m probably less healthy now, but at least it feels like it’s my choice, sorta. Whatever, but I’m turning 35 in a month, and if I make it to 40 I’ll be shocked.
What I love about this is that I’m one of those crazy-thin people. I’m 6′5″, and starting to get a little freaked because my 32x36 kakhis are feeling a bit tight while my 34x36 jeans are fitting pretty well. I’m sure I’m nowhere close to even hitting 180#, but that male gaze under the patriarchy…….
BMI gets a lot of undeserved criticism. Sure, a fairly tiny number of extremely muscular guys have BMI’s way outside the normal range, but by and large it works well. I think it’s amazing that the vast majority of humans can be adequately described by
mass/height².Nevertheless, there are people who think belt size is a better indicator of obesity.
*My* theory is that men are more likely to have pissing contests that impact their weight. When was the last time you saw women trying to out-drink one another? When was the last time you saw women trying to eat the hottest chiles, or suck down the most burgers, or any of the macho “I’m more man than you and I’ll prove it by putting more stuff into my piehole” crap?
Sure, women are more likely to console themselves with a pint of *really good* ice cream. But we’re more likely to have a friend help us finish it off and say “Girl, the answer isn’t coming from Ben and Jerry.”
And you know it’s funny? Mostly the people who slam BMI are overweight when measured by it.
I feel like a study like this always comes out about every season, and it doesn’t do anything but make us shake our heads. Nobody really promotes safe and healthy ways to prevent obesity in this country because we’re based on consumerism. Yowsa …
Brian, there is nothing wrong with impugning the motivations of those who publish magazines or decry someone engaging in immoral actions in pursuit of profit.
Your retort to Amanda amounts to, “they’re doing it because it makes money. How dare you criticize them?”
“And you know it’s funny? Mostly the people who slam BMI are overweight when measured by it.”
I’m much more bothered by the fact that I’d be skeletal before the BMI classified me as borderline underweight. Don’t get me wrong–I’m also bothered by the fact that my husband (over a foot taller than me, shoulders about six inches broad than mine) would be considered within “normal” BMI range if he was all of twenty pounds heavier than me–but, you know. I’d like something that my doctor might consult before common sense to actually indicate it if I’ve wasted to 75% of my actual ideal weight.
*My* theory is that men are more likely to have pissing contests that impact their weight.
You’re right, but this is only marginally related to men’s weight. Men gain a lot of weight as they get middle aged– the time they’re least likely to be engaging in such pissing contests. However, because when they were younger and had faster metabolisms, they (ok, “we”) could cultivate bad eating habits with impunity, we didn’t learn good eating and exercise behavior that would have served us well when we got older.
Oh my prophetic soul! Do I have EP-dar or WHAT people? Damn, after years and years of studying them, it just gets so you can pick it up with a few clues.
Ah yes, the old “EP says that women all do and think XY & Z - but YOU are still an individual.”
Here’s the funny thing about that - I’ve NEVER been able to get any EP to predict how many women or men will escape their alleged evolutionary-based predilictions. NEVER. It’s always this vague non-empirical mush. Because EP’s have no idea, but even more importantly THEY DON’T CARE. In fact I’d say they don’t want to know, because it would spoil the free and easy pronouncements that they are wont to bestow on the public and be replaced with ACTUAL SCIENCE.
But you have to hand it to EP - it allows people who like to think of themselves as social liberals (even libertarian fiscal conservatives) as non-sexist, no matter what lame-brained Men are from Mars Women are from Venus bullshit they promote in order to bolster sagging male privilege.
I am fully capable of slamming down a myriad of studies on the issue of the female eunuch concept, but let’s just consider one personal anecdote:
I was at a sleep-away youth retreat when I was 15. One girl smuggled some Playgirls in with her. As we oogled the nudies another girl, with a sneer said “you’re so QUEER!”
She was one of the good girls who learned her lesson well - young ladies are made to be seen, not to see. But she didn’t get that lesson from Nature.
I wasn’t aware of who Jessica Alba was, but here’s an interesting quote from her I found in Wikipedia:
“when older men would hit on me, and my youth pastor said it was because I was wearing provocative clothing, when I wasn’t. It just made me feel like if I was in any way desirable to the opposite sex that it was my fault, and it made me ashamed of my body and being a woman.” She also … disagrees with the church’s condemnations of premarital sex and homosexuality, and was bothered by the lack of strong female role models in the Bible. “[I]t certainly wasn’t how I was going to live my life.’”[3]
Ah yes, there’s that evolution again, telling women that the unwanted advances of older men are the fault of the women themselves.
His entire point made no sense. EP is a field of study, it isn’t a specific theory and it doesn’t predict anything. To say that EP is right is a nonsensical statement. Individual theories and practicioners are what make predictions, and those are highly varied.
In general EP theories don’t really predict anything anyway, they simply explain existing behaviors. Any predictions they make would be measured on the timescale of thousands of years anyway.
EP is similar to religion in that it allows people a rationalization for whatever they already believe. Give me a behavior and I’ll invent some EP theory that plausibly explains it. It’s kind of fun really, especially when you realize that some people actually take it seriously.
Including presidents of Harvard. And not the Bizarro World Harvard either!
You know the weirdest thing about Brian “Rymes with Cats” Sorgatz is that Playboy has sucked for about a decade. I have no problem with Playboy - I like naked wimmenz, it’s much less insulting to both men and women than shit like Maxim and Gear (and women’s magazines), really does have good interviews and stories and such - but these days it’s just terrible and survives only on brand recognition.
It’s really sad to see someone devoted to something that was at one time good (arguably) but that has turned to complete shit. Bringing up Playboy at all seemed to have less to do with the topic at hand than it did with his personal obsession.
That said, it might be interesting to argue about which is worse, Playboy or say Cosmo. I’d say Cosmo by a longshot.
Bizarro World Harvard is full of really smart people and no annoying MBA types.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers. Where’s your skepticism about those lawyers’ profit motive?
Dude, you’re about 10 years too late for the silicone gel breast implant litigation. That all went bust, so to speak, in the 90s. It’s not a big issue.
In any event, ask yourself about the profit motives of companies that make defective or dangerous products. “The market” is not exactly a rational, cold, sane, perfect force.
Or we could just ignore the whole thing, couldn’t we? Get busy on what really interests us. I have stopped caring about this matter. But I’m old. Any suggestions on how I could lose a few years?
Bathing in the blood of young nubile maidens.
Admittedly, this is unlikely to work, but if they keep annoying me with inane chatter and gales of jackass-like laughter while I’m on the bus in the morning, I’m going to seriously consider an experimental study…
To be honest with you, the fat women didn’t even show up in my mind- that article reminded me of my dad and his co-workers.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled relevant comments.
Wow, that is a significant finding. From the actual study report: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
I agree with others here — as a man who has gained considerable weight and is now working to get it off — that it is far easier to gain weight because we do not have strong social pressure to conform to a healthy appearance and instead can just rely on our friends as a measure of what is OK. (Hell, quite a few male celebrities can remain celebrities even after getting pretty darn chubby: look at country music for example.) At least for me you only have to see your friends once every blue moon and note that they are gaining weight and still seem happy for the stigma of your own weight gain to mostly vanish.
But then to get the weight off both men and women have to fight massive social pressure and maybe men just aren’t used to handling that very well. I am reminded of Alisa Valdez’ “Ruminations of a Feminist Aerobics Instructor” in “Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation”, when she discusses the aerobics classes at the gym that are almost always all women, dancing away in a group ritual every day and men outside looking in with the occasional confused look.
At least for me, dropping the pounds has required a bit more deliberate social isolation to avoid the bad food outings, many reasons outlined quite well by other people here and here.
It certainly is a theory but the last time I tried to out-drink anyone, I weighed 140 lbs (I’m 6′ tall). Today, at nearly 50 years old, I weigh 190. Those extra 50 lbs. did not come from any pissing contests.
“And you know it’s funny? Mostly the people who slam BMI are overweight when measured by it.”
Wait, there’s a typo here.
And you know it’s funny? Mostly the people who are measured by BMI are overweight.”
Fixed it. Call me a bitter fatty if you want, but I’m suspicious of any system of measurement that, like Lake Woebegon, thinks more than half of people are “above average”.
testing, just go on posting comments and pay this no mind.
When I saw that this thread blew up, I knew that Brian guy was going to have trolled it. The mental disease that causes libertarianism has a symptom of showing up at liberal feminist blogs and trolling relentlessly for some reason, with an acute inability to understand that you’re only causing people to pity and loathe you for the your malcontent misogyny that pretty much always seems borne from an inability to relate to women as sexual beings at all.
I thought Playboy had abandoned the girl-next-door mystique, realizing that no one bought the silly notion that their hyper-airbrushed models were real, attainable women in the human sense of those words. But Brian still buys into the mystique, from what I can tell from his blog. Worse, he goads his platonic female friends, who suffer from the tragedy of having no one around to airbrush their thighs before they appear before him, to play into their female training and reassure the males around them that no, they aren’t threatened at all by being compared to unrealistic images of women that they could literally never physically achieve in a million years.
Even the models in Playboy probably feel a gut punch of insecurity when confronted with the models in Playboy. See, they’re not really the same people. Models aren’t really the subjects of photos in those magazines anymore. They are the canvas that airbrushers work upon, and the final image can’t really be said to be them. For instance, most women, yes even the oh-so-attainable Playboy models—still have belly buttons.
Capitalism, while it never does anything wrong, does dictate that sellers of girly magazines probably do benefit from making real life women look pathetic and disgusting. That way the wretched malcontents that can’t really relate well to real women will spend a shitload on the magazines, each image reaffirming to him that the real life bitches that give him so much trouble aren’t worth his erections anyway.
I don’t have a problem with porn, in its place. If you don’t inflate its value and especially if you don’t rub women’s noses in the fact that they could never live up to fantasies (who can?) and you don’t let it tear at your real sex life or be your crutch so you don’t have to learn to deal with real people, porn can be a fine outlet. Like many things, in moderation it can be fine. But overdose and you’re hurting your health.
By the definition given, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’ve been wondering for more than a year why “pro-sex” liberals keep lacking shame over their support of pseudoscientific lawsuits against breast implant manufacturers.
The idea that “pro-sex”—which is a feminist philosophy that pushes the idea that all people have a sexuality that deserves respect—would somehow automatically support a dangerous plastic surgery that exists to separate the rare women who deserve to have a sexuality from the hose beast class, is just wow. You’re really stupid, aren’t you? Maybe you should read some pro-sex feminist bloggers, like Susie Bright or Audacia Ray. Pro-sex is about exposing that people can and should embrace their sexuality even if they’re tormented by the pains of having flawed human bodies. Being pro-sex means I look at my flat-chest and realize that my unique body is sexy and beautiful, not that I should have it cut up to fit some misogynist malcontent’s idea of what I should look like.
EP doesn’t predict anything, it’s a field not a theory. Typically it is men who show off and are evaluated by women. Therefore it follows that women would be more interested in nude pictures because it gives them a fuller evaluation of mates. Same reason males of nearly every specious look ostentatious compared to females.
Rock on, Bizarro.
I’m actually reading a book right now that has a lot of theory from evolutionary biologists who study primates—real biologists, not EP wankers who don’t care much for standards of evidence for their theories—and the overwhelming evidence suggests that primates are social creatures, which means the EP notion that we’re just bundles of instincts doesn’t really work too well. Our behavior makes more sense if you look as us as individuals trying to negotiate our survival and that of our children with the knowledge that we’re interdependent. With that in mind, it appears the patriarchy is a social system that developed when human males realized what female bonobos already know; if you band together you can dominate the other sex. Dominant females don’t have much reason to dominate too cruelly, though; they mostly seem interested in using their power to set up matrilineage and to keep males from harassing females. But dominate males want a lot more from females than just decent behavior; since females have wombs and males don’t, there’s a heightened interest in controlling females from cradle to grave. Thus, the patriarchy, which is a subtle alliance between men throughout history to keep women maintained as a sex-and-breeding class, utterly dependent on men for their economic survival.
Chimpanzees would like to dominate females this way, but they don’t control the females’ economic resources, so they’re sort of stuck.
The patriarchy is crumbling, by the way, because women have learned what our bonobo sisters already know; you band together and you have more power.
As for what this has to do with men looking at women in porn? Why do men look and women don’t? IBTP. Both men and women have sexual desire, but in a patriarchy, women’s desires are utterly irrelevant to the social system, since they are objects to be bought and traded and owned and controlled. Under this theory, the prediction would be that as women gained more social power, they would start pursuing their own sexual fantasies. Have things changed in that direction since the 50s, when Playboy was founded and Brian’s idea of the relationships between men and women was stuck? Absolutely—if you don’t know what “slash” is, then the expressions of female sexual desire therein will shock you. You could strain and say that these stories are literary and as such, don’t represent a visual component to desire, but you’d be straining hard enough to give yourself hemmoroids—a large part of what compels women to use TV characters in slash is it’s easy to recall what the men look like.
If women seem more drawn to literary porn than men (though not completely—check out any written porn board and you’ll see plenty of men)—chalk it up to the fact that women lag behind men in sexual freedoms won and therefore have had less time to develop and refine a set of standard fantasies that can easily be recalled with a simple image. When a teenage boy starts getting into porn, he has a set of already well-developed fantasies provided to peruse, and determine which ones he likes, and seek out images that recall them. Teenage girls don’t have that luxury and adult women are only now really diving deep into the process of creating that library of shared narrative.
Also, a lot of women who are visually stimulated already get into gay porn, particularly if their fantasy is watching men get it on. They fly invisible, though, because it’s assumed that the hits on gay porn sites are mostly coming from gay men.
Of course, my theory could be wrong. If I’m right, in the next few decades if women’s social and political power continues to grow, we’re going to see female-audience porn grow and evolve even more. If I’m wrong, it’ll probably peter out or stay the same. We’ll see.
That photo is seriously disturbing.
Thank you, Mustella. BMI is horseshit.
And, for all the speculation people are engaging in on this thread, it’s important to remember that many fat people are not fat because they sit around at Burger King. Here I will quote the brilliant Kate Harding:
People are fat or thin for all kinds of reasons, many of them genetic. The way this study is being reported–as if emailing your fat friend has a greater effect on your weight than genetics or activity level or just about anything–is ridiculous.
Amanda, I’d love to read a post by you about slash.
Amanda, I am getting lost here. Where you say
, are you attributing to our apish ancestors a knowledge connecting sex with bearing children ? Is any apriori desire to have offspring implied? Or is that a human-only foible IN SPITE of our evolutionary roots?You have said, albeit in a slightly different context that “it was always and only about f__king” [archives out of reach, working from memory] which on its own really leaves out womb-control fetish or at least forces alternate connections of inference to justify the notion there is some kind of “hmm, if I can’t make babies I gotta possess those who can” anxiety…you gotta know how babies are caused and WANT the little bothers for that anxiety to make any sense.
Its a lot to ask but where is there one post that sews these patches into a consistent whole?
People are fat or thin for all kinds of reasons, many of them genetic.
This theory requires you to believe that human genetics in the United States has changed markedly over the last 30 years to account for the rising obesity rates. Does that seem feasible to you?
As for Ms Harding, she is a clever lady, but it is worth knowing that she has called me (not personally of course, but people like me) “literally a freak of nature,” if I recall correctly in one of the immediately following paragraphs to that quote. Perhaps it is mostly “eating crap and not exercising” that has increased markedly over the last 30 years.
Are there any magazines that show nekkid pplz of all shapes and sizes and colors, plus interesting articles? I remember reading that Leonard Nimoy was doing a photoshoot of large women and I thought that was pretty neat.
I find this absolutely amazing proof of the patriarchy. The Chicago Sun-Times repeatedly says “people”, not “men”. There’s no reference whatsoever to the fact that it’s only male people who are affected by their friends eating and body types.
Why is that? It’s just so bizarre. It’s like the days when medical studies were only done on men and generalized to be the same for women. Men = people.
Is it that it’s a negative finding about men, and men can’t be anything negative so we have to write “people” instead? Is it patriarchy-induced blindness?
I’m gonna go make some bunny and kitten pancakes now. I’ll save some for Brian to distract him in case he starts threadjacking again.
Slate’s take on the study is teased on the front page with the heading “Maybe Fat People Should be Stigmatized” and a drawing of a fat woman.
Very interesting thought if weighed from the perspective of someone who affiliates with or even attends a house of worship for which there is an associated “sisterhood”. Not as familiar with churches, I know many synagogues and especially conservative synagogues have these groups but in my synagogue we do not have such a thing nor are likely ever to have one. We have woman for a cantor and a little more than half of our synagogue presidents, [ a role of significant power in shaping congregational policy] have been women. Women often stand in as acting Rabbis at our congregation.
My point is that since women are naturals at working together (they even go to the bathroom together
a kind of pacifier or placebo needs to be provided in patriarchal institutions to sop up and contain that tendency to band together: some kind of sandbox away from the offices of power. If women already have the power, no sandbox provided or wanted, its stench of second class citizenship keeps it from ever being mentioned.
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hm. I keep responding to particular things in the thread yet lo and behold it was a post on whether obesity was universally a socially transmitted disease or was only that for men
Maybe that is why I don’t have any friends. They’d make me fat.
Caren, I don’t think they’re reporting it as “people” just because they think “men” = “people” and they forgot to think about the other half of the population. I think they’re deliberately reporting it this way because the actual findings don’t fit into their script as nicely as they would like. Imagine if it were the other way around — they could demonize fat women and female friendships all at once! The way the actual study turned out means that they can demonize fat people as a whole, certainly an adequate consolation prize, as long as they don’t mention that it only applies to men.
are you attributing to our apish ancestors a knowledge connecting sex with bearing children ? Is any apriori desire to have offspring implied? Or is that a human-only foible IN SPITE of our evolutionary roots?
Yes, I’d say the desire to reproduce is basically built into us. Evolution 101. We can overcome it to a degree, but we’re born to fuck, make babies, and die.
I don’t think women are any more natural at banding together than men; in fact, human history would suggest that men band together far more easily, since we do have, you know, a patriarchy. That some men file minority reports against it doesn’t change the trend. If anything, most women will report that it’s often difficult not to see other women as competitors—since we have lesser resources than men, it means that we end up squabbling over crumbs, or worse, over male attention. The patriarchy divides and conquers women, much to our eternal dismay.
I understand what you’re saying here, ShortWoman, but you’re missing sight of the point that “obesity” is not something that is objectively measured.
Obesity and overweight are measured by BMI. The formula for calculating BMI was created by insurance actuarials. Insurance companies are in business to make money. Insurance companies make more money if they deny claims of insureds who have pre-existing conditions. If there aren’t enough insureds with pre-existing conditions that can be objectively measured by physicians (Type II diabetes, for example) then there is pressure on the insurance actuarials to come up with a measure of supposed health that has absolutely nothing to do with health at all.
Hence, you lock the eggheads up in room together until they come up with the BMI; a calculation that has nothing to do with body fat percentage or fat-to-muscle ratio, is completely independent of health indicators like range of motion, cardiovascular endurance, strength, cholesterol level or blood pressure, and will make almost everyone measured by it fit into the category of having a pre-existing condition, so that the insurance companies can deny more claims.
It’s not that human genetics have changed over the last 30 years, it’s that the insurance companies have pressured the medical establishment to start measuring obesity according to an overly simplistic height-weight ratio that ratchets weight “ideals” down to emaciated proportions.
The confidence interval for women in the study is gigantic, so it’s more that the sample isn’t big enough to tell if the same effect exists for women (and we can probably safely assume if the effect exists, it’s smaller for women).
In a large sample, using BMI might not be a problem, even if it doesn’t work well for individuals. If BMI isn’t wrong in some systematic way, then because of the law of large numbers, the errors introduced by using BMI would cancel out. (I don’t know if BMI has some systematic problem or not.)
And in The Female Brain [FWIW] I have read as much, with the poignant twist that women simultaneously use communication and connection to other women to found their social world while jockeying for first draft status in the mating game…Brizendine portrays a tender balance and perhaps its actually a very different explanation of the same situation as you are depicting but in terms of the stresses and messes of women’s lives, it may amount to the same set of consequences. I am content now, seeing no differences except those inherent in our different vantage points.
Wasn’t there some medical work done some time ago discussing the possibility that body weight setpoints could be thrown off kilter by some form of virus? It was one of the ideas thrown out when trying to figure out cases of morbid obesity.
That’s what immediately came to mind when I saw the headline.
As for the difference between social factors in obesity between men and women (if one can assume the studies are legit) — I wonder if some of it doesn’t have to do with the fact that almost all women who are connected with men (marriage, live-in partners, mothers of their children, caretakers, whatever) end up picking up “second shift”, and thus tend to be far less sedentary?
But dominate males want a lot more from females than just decent behavior; since females have wombs and males don’t, there’s a heightened interest in controlling females from cradle to grave.
Oh, in assuming they’re after the wombs, most of them aren’t thinking quite that deep…
(Shudder) That picture without the belly button is really creepy. Besides, belly buttons are sexy! WTF?
I don’t know a lot about female consumption of porn (or, really, about male consumption…cough, cough), but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that because most men look at some kind of visual porn, that’s the natural end or most developed state of porn (or “erotica,” if you prefer). Women may continue to get their masturbatory fix predominately through writing, and I wouldn’t necessarily interpret that as their sexual or social liberation being stymied or stagnating. In fact, you could probably argue that written porn is superior to visual (not that I’m at all suggesting that writing is always superior to movies or tv, but I can see an argument that written porn engages your imagination more than a video of thrusting pelvises).
From the other thread: I really liked the Planet Smashers’ song you posted.
I’ve never understood the noise that is made about the visual vs. literary pron/erotica divide.
written porn lets you imagine things in such a way as to maximize the degree to which the scenario matches your personal tastes. pictures force you to confront the maker’s opinions on the matter, which may or may not agree with yours.
it’s basically the same reason that the movie versions of favorite novels from childhood can almost never be universally appealing. for YEARS i thought Hermione Granger was black. until Chris Columbus came along and disabused me of that notion (not that I dislike Emma Watson, she’s just not at all what I imagined).
visual porn is great when my ideas and the maker’s ideas match, and is almost universally unsexy when they don’t. written porn is able to sidestep that complication entirely.
I wonder if some of it doesn’t have to do with the fact that almost all women who are connected with men (marriage, live-in partners, mothers of their children, caretakers, whatever) end up picking up “second shift”, and thus tend to be far less sedentary?
Probably not, since a woman’s likelihood of getting fat goes up if she’s partnered.
Another thing that occurs to me on the written vs. visual porn thing: Visual porn represents a far more visceral threat to the current sexual partner. It’s hard when confronted with real pictures of real people not to feel inadequacy, whereas written porn is easier to write off as pure fantasy. It makes sense that the sex that generally wields more power within relationships have more lenience from the less powerful sex. Women simply have to color inside the lines more because men have more social leeway to get jealous over stuff. Double standards, w00t!
You mean the desire to have sex, don’t you? It’s the separation of sex from reproduction that gives women better lives.
And can you imagine if that fat friends study showed that the effect was far more noticeable on women rather than on men?
You just KNOW the study would say “fat friends make WOMEN fat” not “fat friends make PEOPLE fat.”
Gail Collins perpetrates the same “men = people” mistake in her latest column, which I discuss at my blog - with a shout-out to Amanda and Hoyden About Town.
Probably not, since a woman’s likelihood of getting fat goes up if she’s partnered.
I agree with you there — I’m not saying partnered women don’t get fat, more that due to partnered women’s life circumstances, their fatness is less likely to have anything to do with their social lives.
Though now that I type it out, I realize it makes very little sense. Personally, I blame it on the jetlag (had just gotten off the red-eye from LA when I suggested it).
Now that I’ve had some sleep, I have feeling that the above posters who talked about meat and fast food being promoted as Man Food ™ and the constant pressure on women to diet is probably responsible.
Uh, yah, “The Female Brain” is what is known as “evolutionary psychology bullshit.”
A few weeks ago I said on this very board that evolutionary psychologists seems to get their understanding of human behavior from The Flintstones. A bit of hyperbole, even I will admit.
Except… not, apparently.
This is from the Amazon page for the book:
Truly evolutionary psychology is now beyond the reach of parody.
Wilma!
My theory: Men and women both strive for physical standards set for them by men. Discuss.
May or may not be true. However, I think clothing/fashion has a role to play also. E.g., I notice that in Bollywood Hindi movie/music videos as the girls increasingly mini-skirts, their figures too tend towards the Hollywood slimness. However, that kind of figure does not carry off a sari well. The voluptuousness that e.g., you can see in Indian temple sculptures suits the sari more; and that was the way Indian starlets tended to be also.
That’s interesting because, if we’re talking “hard core” porn, the men tend to have rather large schlongs and to be in pretty good shape (although there’s so much porn out there, it’s obviously impossible to generalize too much). So maybe either men are trained to be less critical of their bodies (well, obviously, but the maybe refers to the next clause), and so have an easier time imagining they actually look like that (which doesn’t mean that works entirely), or the fantasies are more standarized and familiar, so that the guy’s appearance kind of fades into the background. It’s interesting you mention women viewing gay porn; it’d be interesting to see, if women do start going in for more visual porn, what the female models would look like, if they would be “realistic” (whatever exactly that means) or if they would also be idealized, with that being part of the fantasy for women, too.
But Arun, even back in the 70’s when actresses in Bollywood movies did mainly wear saris and not miniskirts, they still would have fit in perfectly with Hollywood figure standards.
I’ve also noticed a big divide between the Bollywood actresses who will do bikinis and miniskirts and the like, and those who usually don’t. All of them are definitely thin, regardless of costume.
For that matter, even the female figures in classical temple sculpture would fit right in on the big screen today.
if we’re talking “hard core” porn, the men tend to have rather large schlongs and to be in pretty good shape.
If we’re still talking about hetero porn, I think this is a perfect example of the differing expectations for men and women. Men in porn are generally dog ugly, and while I’ve never seen a guy in particularly terrible shape, they generally have typical male bodies. I guess they have large dicks, but that’s not something that a man can aspire to.
Additionally, I think there’s a difference between the men in hetero porn and the women in hetero porn (or the men in gay porn) — it mainly has to do with ideas about the gaze, subject and object, etc. Men watching hetero porn are supposed to identify with the man, not idealize his figure. Men in hetero porn have big dicks because men who watch hetero porn want to fantasize that they have big dicks. Anyone watching hetero porn is supposed to be objectifying the women — this is probably why hetero women would rather watch gay porn (it lacks this subject/object dichotomy; everyone is just hot).
I agree with your general points about teh pr0n, opoponax, but, while I certainly can’t claim to be some kind of porn aficionado, most porn I have seen tends to have guys who are pretty muscular and lean. They may be dog ugly, I don’t know; I can’t really judge male attractiveness anyways (unlike almost every other straight man I’ve know, George Clooney does nothing for me), and I wasn’t exactly studying the dude’s face. But if the point of mainstream hetero porn is to portray fantasies of male dominance, a muscular, well-hung dude does that better than a flabby well-hung dude (although maybe I’m just saying more about my own bodies insecurities here).
And, although I’ve never seen any gay porn, I have heard from various people the much gay porn clearly presents one man dominating another.
Well, presumably someone’s clicking on all that penis enlargement spam. I agree that there’s much more pressure on women to define themselves by their physical appearance or hotness, but that doesn’t mean men have no sexual/physical anxieties.
the opoponax, in the 70s most actresses and certainly the stars were quite plump. The trend is going towards being pencil-thin.