In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. And, at least if he’s straight, vaginas. Even if this young man happens to be a not-so-young man, and one who is defiantly Going His Own Way and thus theoretically immune to the vagina’s siren song. At least that’s the case with one regular over on the Happy Bachelors forum who recently set forth some intriguing theories on vaginas. Specifically, vaginas older than 25. What “Superbad” calls his “Golden Vagina Rule” is pretty simple: “Don’t trust any vagina over 25.” As he explained in a recent thread:
Social commentary written (or spoken) by a woman whose vagina is over 25 years old can be considered mostly bullshit. Null and void. And here is why. You cannot expect a woman, whose primary function is to make babies (aka attract men), to be anything but bitter or dishonest after her eggs and looks start to go. …
And why is this? According to Superbad,
when a woman’s sexuality declines (whored out, dried up vagina, menopause, postpartum depression, psychologically-induced frigidity, insanity, etc.) that she starts blaming men and talking a lot of hate and nonsense.
Just a few quick notes here: Female sexuality is not a finite resource; you cannot use it up by having sex on a regular basis. Nor do vaginas dry up like dead flowers when a woman passes the age of 25. Generally speaking, when a woman is interested in having sex with you, and you don’t just shove your dick in her without so much as a “how do you do,” lubrication is not a problem. If it is, for whatever reason, you can purchase bottles of lubricant at the local drug store. (This is also, FYI, how people are able to have butt sex.) Also, the average age of menopause is 51, not 25; though many believe menopause kills libido and “dries up” the vagina, this is probably a myth.
Oh, and also: mocking women for aging and/or suffering postpartum depression is not just a douchey thing to do, it’s practically psychopathic. Yes, physical beauty fades – eventually – for women and men alike. But having a complete and utter lack of empathy for your fellow human beings is an unattractive quality at any age. Speaking of unattractive beliefs, let’s continue:
The down side of people living longer, is that most women are going to be ugly for vast majority of their lives. That is obviously going to breed resentment and animosity. A woman’s time in the sun is brief. A man becomes more powerful with age. But a woman never gets any prettier. … Feminism has become a way for the uglier, older, less-fertile women to CONTROL young, virile girl’s orgasms and their sexuality.
At this point I feel I should remind Mr. Bad that the word “virile” actually means “manly,” in a general sense; more specifically, it means “capable of functioning as a male in copulation.” If you are interested in women with such capability — hey, let your kink flag fly! – there are several options available to you. (One of them may involve the purchase of equipment; they will all involve the lube I spoke of earlier.) If this isn’t what you want, you may wish to reword your post, and perhaps any dating profiles you may have put up on DoucheMatch.com or PlentyOfCompleteFuckingAssholes or wherever the fuck you may have put them up, so as to ward off any possible confusion on this point.
Superbad continues:
If you think women hate men; trust me, they’d just assume [sic] claw each others eyes out. And here is where a happy bachelor differs. Older men don’t feel the need to compete with younger men. Older men feel a bond with younger men. It is our duty to teach them and pass down any knowledge. We live in a world where the enemy is no longer a bear or tribal war. The enemy is packaged as pretty as a peacock: MARRIAGE. It is a way to sell the old vagina.
Let’s try to work out the logic here. According to Superbad, marriage is a dastardly plot by evil feminists to bind men to vaginas over the age of 25, and presumably the women hosting them as well, who by definition are dried-up, whored-out ugly monsters (both the women and the vaginas, presumably).
Feminists are also trying to “CONTROL” the sexuality of young, fertile (yet also virile) women/vaginas, presumably by keeping them from having sex with … Superbad, who, as a Man Going His Own Way, doesn’t even want to be with women in the first place?
The ideal world, evidently, is one in which men of all ages get to have sex with under-25 vaginas (and their women), and are free to reject outright all women/vaginas older than that. In order to accommodate men of all ages, of course, these young women/vaginas will have to have sex with lots of different men. This will, of course, make them, by Superbad’s reckoning, “whores.”
Forget the old virgin-whore dichotomy; in Superbad’s sexual utopia all women/vaginas will pass through three stages: starting out virgins, they will, for a brief period in their late teens and early twenties, be whores; then, after the age of 25, they will be consigned to the whore-heap of history and become hags.
Superbad has it all figured out. And, as he explains in another comment, these poor gals will have no one but the feminists to blame:
[N]on-fertile women (read: ugly, old, bitchy) are always mad when they see young girls worshiping our cocks… old habits die hard. women are lazy. feminism requires women to get off their fat asses, work, and compete with smarter/stronger beings. most get a taste of “feminism”: working retail and getting fvcked/chucked monthly… and then end up online, looking for a “real man”. but, unfortunately, all the boys that the last generation of femi-turds raised are wimps. so, ladies, here is the game plan. get on your knees when young (so we can rent your mouth and vagina) and THEN, later, wise up, get angry, and MAN UP… and live alone with your cats. Feel free to get online as an old bat and “school” us men. LOL
Yes, Superbad has appended a “LOL” to the tail end of his comment, as if it were some sort of Internet-age equivalent to the more traditional Q.E.D. (Pro-tip: It’s not.) Still, his comments did make me LOL a little, or at least chuckle quietly to myself. Not with you, Superbad. At you.
NOTE: If you didn’t get that reference to “carrousel” earlier, perhaps this scene from Logan’s Run will jog your memory:
Health concerns are a completely different topic than sexual attractiveness. There are people who find smoking sexy and that clearly has no health benefits. (I’m not one of them, but they exist). It seems like every time someone says they’re not attracted to fat people the health thing comes up and it’s sorta tiresome. Do we need to lose weight to not die of a heart attack? Maybe. Do we need to lose weight in order to get laid? Clearly not!
Superbad cracks me up when he goes on and on about “old” vaginas.
It makes me think of hilarious webcomics about balls!
Young Men vs. Old Men in the locker room.
This is what I think of when I see a man wearing a utilikilt.
My vagina may be old, but balls are always hilarious.
“We live in a world where the enemy is no longer a bear”
This man is terribly misguided and fractally wrong.
Bears are still the enemy.
BEARS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE ENEMY.
> If you have a BMI of 30, you’re fat. No matter who you are.
My wife is overweight. She told me the other day that when random strangers tell her she’s fat (and they do, frequently), she wants to say to them, “Yes, asshole, I know I’m fat. Assholes like you, and every single fucking magazine or TV show I ever see, is constantly reminding me of that. You think I’m proud of being fat? Do you think I’m not trying to lose weight? What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish by being the 342th person to point out that I’m fat?”
tl;dr: STFU. Seriously.
The annoying thing I find when people discuss weight is the complete lack of caring about how hard it is to lose weight-especially if you are a woman.
And the tone when discussing it. Even though I know you are trying to be all scientific Avicenna, you are coming off as a pretentious dolt who is so bent on being right, you are ignoring that this insistence on any person with a BMI over 25 is obese makes those of us with this BMI rating of 26 to whatever feel terrible about ourselves.
Which means that someone who reads what you are saying, Avicenna, could very well be triggered into thinking “He means I am stupid. And fat because I am too stupid to know when to stop eating. I will never be thin. I will never be attractive. I am worthless. So my eating this food I know is bad for me does not matter. Because I am worthless and unworthy of love.” Then they binge while crying because they feel so bad.
Oh and the last bit you tacked on is not going to help Avicenna, the part where you triggered has already done the damage. Might want to reconsider insisting being on right when it comes to weight because like religion and politics, it will cause issues.
Just one little point of contention about the BMI thing – yes, “normal” for BMI is up to 24.9, but obese doesn’t start until 30…between those two numbers is overweight. Yes, there are increased health risks with being generally overweight, but if we are going to be all scientific about the BMI and its consequences, we should also try not to mislead people into thinking that they are obese (a medical diagnosis, no?) when what they really are is overweight. Maybe that doesn’t seem very important to some people, but there is a difference.
http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/index.html
I know pregnancy is a different state, but a BMI chart doesn’t account for it. It also doesn’t account for menopausal weight gain, fluctuations in weight due to illnesses, or any other normal factor that can affect your weight. I don’t like that it’s a one size fits all ratio of height to weight that’s supposed to show how healthy someone is. A smoker with a low BMI is not healthier than an overweight nonsmoker who eats right and exercises regularly.
The main problem with BMI is that it’s a diagnostic tool. As a tool it’s a moderately useful marker for certain types of possible medical needs/problems.
But that’s all it is, one tool in the box.
When it starts to be used outside that box (or in isolation) it begins to run into all sorts of problems.
First: It has nothing to do with looks.
Second: The technical use of the words, “obese”, “morbidly obese”, etc. are not the same as the common use of those words.
Third: It’s too rigid, and a bit reductionist. I am a slightly built man. I am 5’9″, and about 115 lbs. I have a BMI of about 17. I am healthy. My heart looks great. I have tricuspid valves that cardiologic sonongraphers say look like textbook illustrations. I have clean arteries. I eat lots of butter, and, “too much meat”. If I had a BMI of 23, I would be fat. The average guess for my weight is about 140. The heaviest I have ever been in 136. That was straight out of basic training, and I was carrying extra body fat. I dropped to 125 when I left Basic, and back down to 15-120 when I stopped running 40-60 miles a week.
Fourth: When BMI is used to measure attractiveness it’s useless. It isn’t an aesthetic judgement. MRAL is daft when he says, “over 25 = ‘fatty’,and therefore ugly”. It’s not so. I will wager (long odds) that he has looked at, with lust, a number of women who have a BMW of more than 25. I suspect his hyper-awareness of, “fat” means he has been bothered by taking a second glance at a woman with a BMI of 30, and then decided she was “too big”.
Why? Because weight isn’t looks. Looks is carriage, clothing, curves. I had a girlfriend with a BMI of about 25, more or less. There was no one who was ever going to guess she was, “borderline overweight”. She did ballet. She was running (though she was poor at it). She was in ROTC, a nursing student, etc. She was all of 114 lbs.
But, at 4’10” that puts her at 23.5. When she was having her period she’d move up toward that magical, “25”. MRAL would say (for that week of the month) she was, “fat”. He’d be wrong.
That’s the problem with BMI in all these discussions. It has very limited actual usefulness; and in a limited area, and it has nothing to do with beauty.
In my opinion, the way we talk about weight is useless because you cannot accurately apply statistical information to individuals.
Sure, fat people might be 50% more likely to die of a heart attack (a statistic I pulled out of my ass), you still can’t tell if an individual fat person is more or less likely to have a heart attack than a thin person. And treating them as if they are, or as if they’re bad, or as if they should lose weight when they obviously don’t want to or can’t or whatever, is a complete and total waste of resources.
If we were really concerned about making people healthier, we would mandate free dental cleanings for everyone twice a year and do other things that we *know* would have positive effects on health. But we don’t because we don’t want to, we just want to feel superior.
Or in the case of the US-because too many people think helping each other is wrong if it is mandated. ‘I want to do what I want when I wantitis’ is a terrible disease afflicting a great deal of Americans (and they use what they assume the Constitution says to justify it.)
No one ever said the chart applied to pregnant women. And unless you are constantly pregnant it has no real bearing on the situation.
Diabetics tend to be thinner doesn’t make them healthier. We are discussing people who “just” have obesity as an issue. And we already bombard smokers with anti-smoking information.
Elizabeth. Do you want us to show the same empathy as we do to other groups of people who don’t take care of their health such as the smokers and the drinkers? We treat them far far worse than the obese in terms of medicine. A lung cancer patient is rarely treated as if he has cancer. Usually he is treated like he brought it on himself. Should we start advertising like cigarette adverts?
And I said a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is overweight. A BMI of 30 and above is obese.
Considering I knew her study of the top of my head, how many times do you think I have heard people defend their weight as something out of their control? You can only have so much patience particularly when someone is passing around really daft ideas.
Obesity is a real problem, it isn’t helped by us not dealing with the issues in an open way. Cuddling the people who need things doing just isn’t as healthy and productive as you think it is.
My advice is sound. No doctor will defend someone with a BMI over 30. Most doctors will tell you in the overweight category to start watching what you eat and to try and cut down then and start exercising because it is easier to do it then. And I do enjoy unhealthy food, but its a treat for me rather than the norm.
How would you do it then?
The medical and health aspects of obesity are really not the point here, so can we stop arguing about them?
MRAL doesn’t want women to lose weight because it’s unhealthy, he wants women to lose weight because he doesn’t find them sexy and he thinks he has a right to be surrounded by people he finds sexy. If he were concerned with health, he’d be denouncing underweight women (I’m sure MRAL loves him a girl with an eating disorder), high heels, harmful cosmetics, and for that matter male obesity.
Thank you a thousand times over Katz! Mral would care less of women are engaged in unhealthy behaviors that make them sexy to him. I have a very close overweight friend and it does not help when people are cruel to you on a regular basis based on your looks.
Treating an overweight person with the same common courtesy as everyone else is not coddling. Also, what right does anyone have to encourage people they do not know to lose weight? It’s none of your damn business.
Also, I don’t randomly walk up to smokers to tell them about how they need to stop to be healthy. Not my business, if they want to smoke, who gives a damn. Their body, their choice. If there was a health police all stores would also stop selling french fries, cookies, and soda.
Funny how the health police only want to come out for certian things. I fully understand the privilege of never having had someone talk to me about my weight. If that ever happens to me in the future I will happily give the person a big fuck you and go get a burger and shake, bitches!
“No doctor will defend someone with a BMI over 30.”
That statement’s kind of the problem. It’s not a doctor’s job to defend anyone, they aren’t professional moral actors deciding who is good and who is bad. It’s a doctors job to treat the illnesses of the patients who come before them. If those illnesses can be treated through diet and exercise, great. But if they can’t, the patient’s weight isn’t the issue.
I think it’s mean to call people fat and make them feel bad about what they eat or how much they exercise. A plus size friend of mine gets all sorts of comments when she chooses to eat a high calorie food. Why should anyone tell a grown woman what she should or shouldn’t eat? It’s nobody else’s business.
I know a guy that felt so bad about being heavy that he turned to methamphetamine to lose weight. He is skinny now, but he’s also losing his teeth and in trouble with the law. I remember hearing girls throw up in the bathroom after every lunch period during high school. That’s what happens when people are judgmental about plus size people. This national obsession with obesity is going to cause an epidemic of drug abuse and eating disorders.
” We treat them far far worse than the obese in terms of medicine. ” This is patently false, at least in the US. See here (and this is even from a source that tends to support your idea about size and health http://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/sum03/stigma.html).
I also suggest you try your “doctors are always right” line on someone who has not done extensive research on the history of abuse in psychiatric institutions and the history of HIV stigma. I have heard all of this language about “risk groups” and “out of control desire” before. Also, appeals to authority do not work on me, particularly an authority with such a brutal history (you know what those always correct doctors did with people like me 40 years ago? Locked them in a mental institution. Go back another 60 years and I would be lucky to avoid force sterlization and having part of my frontal lobe knocked out with an ice-pick) I expect you to actually prove your premises and to justify your conclusions.
Also, the explicit ignoring of your patient’s reported medical history the moment they exist while fat (instead of actually doing the testing when a patient reports a medical issue-you assume that fat=liar). This behavior kills people and it is because of people like you that I have to call my endocrinologist and check every single time another doctor recommends a medicine or procedure, because, apparantly, I go around telling them I have hashimotos and take levothyroxine for kicks. The swelling thyroid is a parlor trick. Want to guess how long it took to find a doctor that did not automatically dismiss my symptoms based on my weight (despite the fact that my orginal complaints about symptoms were recorded when I was a very muscular 145 lbs)? Six years. And, in reality, he only reconsidered metabolic issues when I vomitted and passed out in the hallway of his office. So I suggest you not assume that you know my health history, my body, and how doctors treat fat people better than I do.
Sidenote: Do not refer to me as “she” or “her”.
The way that Pecenium talked about it showed that there is some validity to the use of it and made it clear that was all.
You on the other hand…well.
Also, are you telling me that a person who smokes and shows up at your door seeking treatment for something that may be cancer will be shown the door and told to go to hell?
Or are you going to spend hours berating your patients for making stupid health decisions?
Since when is showing compassion for your patients even if they screw up wrong?
“Since when is showing compassion for your patients even if they screw up wrong?”
In the minds of some really fucked up people. In these people’s world expecting to be treated like a human while fat is like a murderer asking for sympathy for injuries that happened during the murder.
Also, oddly related but randomly seen Is Obesity Bias Evolutionary?
One thing he does point out is how easy it is to get overweight now-which means that MRAL one day will be a fat guy like he so ferociously hates.
Also, since when is being healthy a moral mandate? We’ve already covered “smokers have the right to smoke if they want to.” If you’re living a lifestyle that’s going to lead to you dying at age 50 and you’re aware of this and you want to do it anyway, who has the right to tell you otherwise?
What avicenna is doing here is stating a contingent statement as an absolute. He’s saying “If you want to be healthy, you should maintain a healthy body weight,” which is true, but then leaving off the first part of the statement and just assuming that everyone not only will, but should, make the same choice between better health and the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.
I’ve read a great deal on fat and diets. Key finding: diets don’t work. Sure, they “work” in the short run, but in the long run (over a few years) they fail for almost everyone. Unless they want to stay on a rigorous diet for the rest of their lives, counting calories and obsessing about food constantly, people gain the weight back; if they’re lucky they manage to keep a few pounds off, and that’s it. Also, exercise, while good for you in all sorts of ways, isn’t very effective in keeping weight off.
Oh, and berating people about being fat? Not an effective way to help them lose weight. It IS, however, a highly effective way to make fat people feel like shit.
The only generally effective way to lose a lot of weight and keep it off is bariatric surgery.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There are other ways that can be effective. Meth. Eating disorders. Smoking. Extended illness.
People who aren’t genetically predisposed to be fat may look at themselves and say, I can do it, why can’t they? The reason they can’t? Because of genetics. The reason you can? Because of genetics. And maybe, because of age: people tend to gain weight as they get older. When I was 17, I was skinny as fuck. When I was 21, probably average weight. Now, I’m fat.
But in the end, as Katz and others have pointed out, this whole discussion arose not out of anyone’s concerns about health, but because MRAL, acting like a judgmental prick, declared that fat people are disgusting and lazy and weak. That’s an “argument” that’s hardly worth all this effort rebutting.
Yep, I am expecting to spend the rest of my life counting every calorie I eat. *sighs*
David, I think weight is the new religion since I have never been involved in a heated discussion about God but I have had plenty of arguments over not being a perfect size whatever.
Except, Avicenna’s conlcusion is not even consistent with avicenna’s stated premises. Okay, so avicenna has endorsed these ideas, and, for the sake of argument, let us accept them for the moment:
1) Excess body fat is a good predictor of health risk.
2) Those who have high BMIs have excess body fat.
3) Those who have high BMIs are about 50% of people with excess body fat.
4)People with high BMIs constitute 40% of the population.
Okay, going by those statements, 80% of the population has excess body fat. However, half of those with excess body fat, those who also have high BMI, are singled out for discussion of their diet, exercise, and shape which are seen as out of control, disgusting, and unhealthy-despite the fact that an additional 40% of the population is also unhealthy in this manner. So, the approximately two thirds of non-obese who have excess body fat are exempt from ridicule and discrimination, but those who have high BMI and have excess body fat are legitimate targets. Not only would this unfairly stigmatize an essentially random subgroup with comparable bad habits to two thirds of the non-stigmatized group, these types of scapegoating in fact worsen the root problem, because they mean that the 40% of low BMI people with excess body fat are explicitly and implicitly told that diet, exercise, and fat are not their problems. Even under your model, avicenna, we are doing with excess body weight what has been traditionally done in regards to HIV (and, earlier, with women and syphillus)-scapegoating a sub-population as morally inferior. This tactic not only encourages lack of caution in the non-stigmatized group, furthering the problem, it in fact also increases the “undesirable” behavior within the stigmitized group (as was the case with homophobic HIV prevention ads-they did not increase use of protection in heteros and decreased it in gay men who viewed them).
I also contest the notion that “people who “just” have obesity as an issue” is in reality a discrete category that exists in actual society. Now, it is perhaps possible that some non-western/non-developed nations do in fact have a comparably well cared for section of the population with high BMIs, but in most regions where BMI standards are developed and employed, the US and other western countries, the poor and ethnic minorites make up massively disproportionate percentages of those with high BMI. There are other major issues with access to medical care, nutrition, etc. and with increased exposure to stressors and pollution that in reality have huge overlaps with high BMI.
I want to second Hide and Seek’s point as well.
Just because it randomly popped into my head…so if a woman had a vagina grown in a lab that was subsequently implanted into her body-does that mean she will get a pass as long as the vagina was under 25?
Oh, the old causation/correlation debate! A classic! Are we really going to do this here?
May I refer commenters to But Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy?
Listen:
You can be fat and healthy.
You can be fat and unhealthy.
You can be thin and healthy.
You can be thin and unhealthy.
You can’t tell someone’s relative health level by looking at them. Seriously. Here is a slideshow of people at various BMI categories. It is very skewed toward white collar white women, but it still shows you how arbitrary some of the categories are.
There are proven health advantages to physical activity and eating a diet that includes a lot of fiber, fruits, vegetables, water, lean proteins, whole grains, etc. vs. “Thing with melted cheese and a Coke.” Physical activity and diet are far greater predictors of health outcomes than a number on the scale or the BMI.
Fat people are human beings.
Thin people are human beings.
Healthy people are human beings.
Sick people are human beings.
Sick people who maybe contributed to some of their health problems through their own choices are still fucking human beings.
People you don’t want to fuck are human beings.
People you want to fuck are also human beings!
People may find me hot. Or they may not find me hot. You can have whatever dealbreakers you want to have. “I am not attracted to fat chicks.” Big deal, I personally don’t like people who mispronounce the word “library” as “liberry.”
Just say “I am not attracted to fat people.” In the case of MRAL, it’s probable that fat women aren’t attracted to him either.
Where it becomes really not cool is:
1) In the whole ridiculous not-real made-up hierarchy of alphas/betas/zetas/omegas. Once you start talking about that as a serious thing that exists, you’re just talking out of your ass anyway, so whatever you say about fat people is just part of a whole giant bullshit sandwich and officially Doesn’t Matter, though I will say when ugly dudes insist that all women must look like magazine covers or be forever unfuckable by anyone it creates shitty nuggets of undigested corn inside the shit sandwich.
2) Health concern trolling. Oh god, I hate it. Just be not attracted to fat people. COOL. NO ONE IS MAKING YOU BE ATTRACTED TO FAT PEOPLE. But when you have to add the whole “Because it’s so unhealthy because blah blah blah fake science my opinion blah blah blah.” KNOCK IT OFF.
First, because every single fat person is aware of all media narratives about fat people.
They know they are fat.
They know that there are many theories about why that is.
They know about all the diets. All of them. Even that one that worked so well for your aunt that one time.
So when you say “I’m not attracted to fat people” and immediately follow it with concern trolling about health you’re saying “My opinion is REAL because of SCIENCE.” Whatever. Just have your opinion. No one cares. Spare us the sermon.
Finally, before anyone brings it up, I will…
Sick people (for whatever reason) people pay taxes.
And health insurance premiums.
And copays.
And deductibles.
And prescription costs.
It’s not some zero sum game where there are “healthy people who will always be healthy and therefore DESERVE health care” and “leeching sick people who must have drunk a soda with corn syrup to make them that way,” because we’re all just human beings who will age and get sick and have accidents and we know some things but not everything about preventing disease. You may be healthy now, you may not be a year from now or a week from now. You may choke on a peanut at a baseball game and suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen if it takes too long for them to unblock your airway. There are some things you can do to take care of your body and do the best you can to stay healthy, but shit happens, and when and if shit happens to you, you will be deserving of care and compassion. Stop pretending medical care is something that can be deserved, and not something that we all deserve because we are all human beings with one goddamn precious beautiful life on this planet.