W.F. Price, the man behind The Spearhead and a tireless champion of Men’s Rights, has in his latest post taken on one of the gravest injustices facing American men today. I speak, of course, of fat ladies.
Traveling in Europe, Price has noticed that people tend to be skinnier there than in the US, which naturally has led him to think some deep thoughts about fat ladies in America and how disgusting he finds them.
So-called BBWs in the US are not really curvy — they are rotund.
I really can’t stress enough the extent to which obesity has ruined American women’s attractiveness. Feminists blather on and on about how women should be “comfortable” with their bodies, but the truth is that many American women would be viewed as abominations in most of the world.
Those damn feminists, making ladies fat!
If you were to try to come up with a parallel for men, I suppose it would be something like having toothless, homeless alcoholic men say that they should be proud of themselves and feel attractive.
Actually, if you were to find a parallel for men, it would also be, er, fatness. Obesity rates for men and women in the US are roughly the same, with women having only a slight lead: according to a recent CDC survey, 35.5 percent of adult women and 32.2 percent of adult men are “obese,” by current standards. Never mind that these standards are a bit, well, off, in that they classify the overwhelming majority of Americans as overweight or obese. Never mind that more than half of Europeans are also classified as overweight or obese according to these standards. And never mind that the fat shaming shit we hear every day in the media and on the internet is basically a bunch of bull.
Because Price thinks that fat ladies are gross:
Feminists are really that far out there. They are literally delusional by global standards. No normal man in the rest of the world finds obese American women attractive. Sure, they may be able to find some skinny guy from a third world country who will pretend to love them to get a green card, but any self-respecting man will give them a very wide berth.
Ho ho! Wide berth! I get it.
Naturally Price was hailed in the comments for his brave stance. According to dragnet,
The abomination that is the average American woman in flyover country constitutes nothing less than a full-scale loathing of male sexuality.
Andrew S., for his part, admits that
I always had a thing for cute heavy girls.
But he still thinks they’re stuck-up bitches:
Being in the midwest they are a dime a dozen. But since there aren’t a lot of attractive in shape or thin women in this part of the country, and most of the decent looking women have some meat on there bones, well, it was hard to stomach how women who pretty much anywhere else in the world would have been ignored acted like such perfect bitches.
Seriously, the “cute heavy girls” that Andrew prefers need to learn to properly hate themselves for being fat fatties. Maybe that way they’ll be more willing to put up with all this MRA bullshit.
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Yes, this post contains
and high fat content. Because I’m fat, get it?
And I believe her about the aftermath too. I had/have some moderate PTSD. I was reclusive for a few years. It’s part of why my relationship ended. I wasn’t doing much of anything. She is still pissed at the Army because the me who came home wasn’t the me who left (as she said to someone else, “the Army broke my Pecunium”.
I’ve heard people telling stories about me hitting the deck in response to certain types of sounds. I don’t recall that. I recall the sounds, I don’t recall being flat on my face on the concrete. I react to semi-distant gunfire by getting to someplace I can observe the area it came from. I tend to do that with a weapon in hand.
I know where all the exits are from I am. I have a tally in my head of all the things which are in reach which would be useful as weapons. I scan the skyline, and look for open windows (because good snipers shoot from several feet behind the window; it makes them harder to spot. I can tell you if a cop is left or right handed (because that will determine which way to jump/dive if he starts to pull a weapon).
And all of that is background processing. All in all I am “normal”. It doesn’t seem to be degrading my life (anymore… the breakup was hard. We’re still close, just not romantically involved. She was supportive as all get out through it. Contra the Mellers and the NWOs she covered my phone for more than a year after she broke up with me, because I didn’t have the money. She stored all my stuff too, for more than a year. If that’s the sort of being “taken to the cleaners” that comes of being/loving a feminist, I’ll take it).
Even as a male, I got shit from the VA about the PTSD. The physical problems they were glad to deal with. The mental… a one paragraph dismissal. Not even to be considered, because there was no paperwork at the time. I hurt myself when I was in hospital. I didn’t want a diagnosis of PTSD, so I buffaloed the doctor (who didn’t really want to diagnose me with it). It’s not a good idea to have only one interview with an interrogator. We are trained in how to figure out what people want, and to lead them to it. I ran an approach on him, and he said I was, “coping” with my situation.
That’s “done” for any possibility of a PTSD diagnosis, and so for any easy help. I can go to talking sessions, but that’s at inconvenient times, and inconvenient distances, and I am coping. Knowing is a big part of the battle, and I’m able to get out and do things.
But there are times I just retire from the world, and don’t eat much. Now I’m off to walk in the rain, and get some coffee, and some groceries.
That BBC article has over 600 comments! Was it released today?
Pecunium: People didn’t believe her story? That’s… wow. Even before I knew of NephewB’s father and his problems with the VA system (and he has one of the highest decorations possible – which shouldn’t matter, but seems to), what she said about her experiences had a ring of truth to it.
@Pecunium
You did it right, add the implicit verb and see what the declensional requirement is.
Yeah, I have problems with the formal aspects of grammar – both in English and in Hebrew… I spent the relevant years bouncing between Israel and SA, and missed learning…well, everything except how to speak the language/s. Fortunately, my instinctive usage seems to be mostly correct, but then I start to double-guess myself, and end up losing sleep over verb/tense agreement in an email I sent to a customer who’s not even a native speaker.
‘The’ ring of truth? I’m thinking that last bit came out like there might be reasons to disbelieve her, which was totally not what I meant to say. Ah, insomnia. And crazypants cats who want to snuggle/bite at ass o’clock in the morning.
KathleenB; I was less than clear. When she first told people (in her Lj) about the siege she was in, she wasn’t believed. The subsequent stuff gets the usual sorts of disbelief, to which large doses of misogyny get added.
Being a vet, with a less than “heroic” wound, or methods of coping, gets you an E-Ticket level of shit; being female gets that E-Ticket turned up to 11.
Ring of truth was a fine phrase; at least to me.
Pecunium: Ah, I see. I’ve only ever heard of her problems with the VA.
Yeah, I remember Ginmar from the early days on the LJ, and her story about the siege (which she later friendslocked, and I don’t know what happened with it after). At the time, it was quite an unusual story. Since then, we’ve had several official accounts (as in, news and decorations and everything) of similar occurrences – women in “support” roles taking an active part in combat, because once your base/convoy/truck is attacked, waving your hands and shouting “I’m a woman!! by US military rules I am forbidden from ongoing engagement with enemy combatants!!!” isn’t really that effective against IEDs/bullets. Inconsiderate of them, I know.
There’s an interesting article about PTSD in this month’s Skeptical Inquirer, though I don’t know how much I should invest in it considering in the same issue there’s an article that is calling Pinker “brave” for his “invaluable work” making sure that we all investigate those hard questions like whether women are actually people (okay okay, I’m being unfair to the writer’s argument, but so fucking what?). I would usually give it more weight because it’s coming from a person involved in healing veterans who suffer from illnesses that tend to be lumped into PTSD diagnosis, except that many doctors and psychologists are dismissive of their patients, so that’s no guarantee of anything.
The argument in the article is basically :
a) PTSD is very rarely diagnosed as its own discrete illness, but tends to be highly correlated with other issues like depression or substance abuse (or traumatic head injuries that can lead to mental issues), so it might not exist as an actual discrete condition that is truly caused by combat trauma per say, but instead as a socially constructed category that conflates a lot of different issues
b) there is incentive to diagnose PTSD because it is one of the few ways in which the military hierarchy recognizes the very real suffering of veterans and compensates them for it. That line of argument was not very developped though, but I can see how the moral quandary over substance abuse as it is seen in the wider society might result in people preferring to diagnose PTSD (because of social implications of being a victim) as opposed to substance abuse (where society might consider the veteran to be responsible for hir own issues)
c) there was also a line of argument relating to the fact that many societies have had conceptions similar to PTSD but the actual symptoms associated with post-combat traumatisms are highly variable per society, which also seems to indicate the possibility that PTSD is a socially constructed concept (that has an actual basis in existing mental issues that it conflates together, but the category itself being worthless from a diagnosis or treatment perspective as it has no basis in medical fact)
I am not well versed in psychology nor have I any experience with veterans so I’m not sure how convincing those arguments actually are.
The thing is, from my research on several things, there is pretty plainly some sort of cross-cultural problem which comes of either long-term, or very intense, combat. There are cultural norms which seem to mitigate it but some of that isn’t clear because of the lack of widespread memoir writing prior to fairly modern times.
There are indica of such things in the writings of classical Greece, as well as much more fleshed out discussions in the writings of those who took part in the Napoleonic wars. People writing about their friends/relatives, after the US Civil War make reference to a condition termed, “Soldiers Heart” which seems fairly typical of some of the milder forms of what we now call PTSD.
Part of the problem is that how certain types of psychological responses are seen is culturally framed. A very good book on that, is, “The Soldier’s Story”. Sadly I can’t find my copy at the moment, and Google is failing me, but it’s a history of how the narrative of past wars shapes the expectations of the soldiers who are fighting in the present wars.
So the narratives of WW1 shaped the expectations of WW2, which is why there aren’t any novels/poems of disillusionment. And the sense of futility at the root of WW2 narratives is to be found in the accounts of soldiers from Vietnam. One of the interesting things about that is the way in which there are cross-cultural elements in those too. I’ve read books by Aussies about their time in Vietnam, and it’s a lot like US books.
Korea is slightly out of place in this, because there aren’t many books about it, and some of the more known one’s (e.g. M*A*S*H) have been co-opted by the idea of Vietnam. The accounts I’ve read of Korea read a lot more like accounts of WW2, with a much less of the sense of waste one finds in Vietnam accounts. I think that has to do with the way in which time, and so purpose, was so different in those conflicts.
WW2 was, “for the duration”. So too, in most respects, was Korea. One was assigned to a unit, and served until one’s term of duty was up. Vietnam was, in many ways, a more personal war (for US troops) because they had a personal timeline for their participation/risk.
So yes, I do think combat related PTSD is a discrete thing, and yes, I think the cultural millieu in which those who view it shapes it. I think it’s hard to evaluate it in historical documents, because we bring our understandings to it, and that makes it harder to see what it was for those who had it then.
But I don’t think we can do, as George MacDonald Fraser does in, “Quartered Safe Out Here” that it’s something which doesn’t really exist, nor that recognising it makes it more likely to take place. Reading James Jones accounts of coming home again from the Pacific makes it plain that it did, and does, exist.
I hope it’s clear that neither I nor the article say that the suffering and issues that are diagnosed as PTSD aren’t real, that it is the classification that is in question here. The article mentioned in particular the example of emotional numbness and flashbacks, which appears to have been added to the PTSD symptoms but not those of ‘Soldier’s Heart’. There was also the mention of the possibility that at least some forms of ‘shell shock’ are actually a form of brain damage due to a nearby explosion, which would likely cause mental symptoms as well, but are not therefore the result of a *mental* trauma.
I believe it’s not controversial to say that even ‘depression’ as a term is very loaded and seems to encompass many different issues, some of which have been treatable with medication and some which appears to be resistant to such treatment. There’s still a lot of work to do in psychology, especially since parts of it are still beholden to discredited Freudian theories.
But the problem of saying that things more recently added to the description is that we have no way to know if the symptoms were present, and not recorded.
“Shell Shock”, and “Battle Fatigue” didn’t have it as descriptors, but the memoirs, and some of the accounts in more recent (ca. 1970s) oral histories, of both WW1, and WW2 vets include things that seem to be flashbacks.
One of the problems is that, absent a context in which to describe it, the speaker has no way to explain just what’s happening. In the 1880s, no one was looking into it (hell, in the 1970s, in Vancouver, where I have some firsthand accounts, no one was either). It’s just, “Well Jake gets like that, he’s never been quite right since, The War.
TBI, and MTBI are not the same as PTSD. No argument. Various levels of flashback are present in most of the combat vets I know. Not just some, most. I can, almost, tell you when I am about to have one. Lots of them are really low grade. I get, “twitchy”. Some of the things which will cause them I’ve managed to identify, mostly because they are either obvious, or have happened enough to make pattern matching possible.
I’ll wager, all things being equal, that the associated problems, such as depression/substance abuse are effect, not cause/correlation.
I can say that I am glad I seem to have a non-addictive personality. I say that because I was “self-medicating” for some time. I still do, actually. I am much less likely to get drunk than I ever was (not often, even then) prior to my trip to the cradle of civilisation, but there was a chunk of time when I was drinking a lot more than I am now… an average of two beers a night, and the irregular, but not uncommon nights when I would have three, or four.
It’s probably a good thing spirits were forbidden in the barracks. I do know I did, and still do, drink a bit more in social settings than I did.
I don’t think the onset is coincidental.
As a side note, I think that woman in the picture is hot as fuck.
d___d: Thank you for the penis update.
Now go home.
Pecunium:
I’ve been following Gin’s journal since she was in Iraq and while she can be short tempered and irascible and never suffers idiots at all, I have a great deal of affection and respect for her, perhaps because of those qualities and I’ve never doubted her.
While I was young I worked for several years at the Australian War Memorial and spent hours and hours reading the hand written journals of young men who had served in the Boer War, WW1, WW2 and Vietnam. The stories were often horrific and detailed and I suspect was a form of makeshift therapy for the soldiers, because at the time the psychological aspects were ill understood and there was little help for them. It was both heartbreaking and frightening reading as the stress of the environment started to alter the writer’s state of mind. The handwritten nature of the journals made them seem far more immediate. I ended up really attached to the writers and when the journal suddenly stopped was…indescribable.
serenvali: Yes, she can be all those things. She and I share a few things; same military job, both did time in the Nat. Guard, etc. We deal with idiocy differently, which is (I suspect) at least partially a function of her being female, and my not.
Pecunium: I am already home, as I’m very fortunate to not be one of the 20,000 homeless people of my country anymore.
Did you have a reason for lashing out like that or were you just having a bad day? Maybe it’s just me but I really don’t see the harm in expressing one’s appreciation for female beauty. I think it’s cool how her confidence just kind of flows out of the picture, like she’s totally comfortable with her body and refuses to feel like less of a person, despite our culture basically erasing her sexuality. Or that’s the impression I got anyway.
Maybe I should have elaborated this in my last post but I couldn’t really find the right words back then.
Her looks aren’t relevant to the point.
I don’t know quite what to make of the, “bad day” comment, but no, I was not “having a bad day.”
As to why the comment on her looks isn’t relevant, and is actually detrimental to the conversation… Why I prefer small boobs isn’t helping
But but Pecuniummmm! That’s what women are forrr!! To make men hawttt!!! He was just handing a compliment and being nice!/end radfem snark moment.
Angry:
I have to say, human being to human being, that I’m genuinely glad being called “creepy” is not only the worst thing that has happened to Angry, but close to the worst thing he can imagine happening to him.
Cliff:
Is he is MRAL, I think we’ve established that it has not occurred to him.
dd:
The harm is in thinking people give a shit about the contents of your little brain.
The harm is in thinking someone should give a shit about the status of what’s in your pants. Or that they must be informed of any changes, whether its appropriate in timing and situation or not. Sadly, the idiot could not parse out that this was neither the time nor the place.
I wasn’t more than annoyed at the first comment. It was pretty much typical for the sort of comment it was, and I tried to make it clear that the sentiment (that finding women attractive) wasn’t what was wanted; no matter the motive.
But the comeback… “lashing out”, “having a bad day”, were slighting. As if it was just me being, “emotional”, as opposed to having an actual point (no matter how snarkily I may have chosen to deliver it).
Dismissive, rather than being engaging. The follow-up, about how d__d should have done it, but he was too rushed, or something, to find the words.
The sentiment was no better for being elaborated; that Spearheaders are offended by fat women isn’t in any way related to how sexy I, or anyone else, finds fat women. Because it’s not about fat women.
It’s about objectifying women, and making how they look more important than what they do.
Which is what d__d did. I could have spent a lot of time looking for more detailed words, but I did have the right ones, so I used them.
Yeah have you ever thought it is harmful to just um appreciate women’s looks and um nothing else? Because misogynist douches don’t do that all the time. Reducing a woman down to how attractive she is in their eyes. /sarcasm
His lashing out isn’t uncalled for. Dude look at yourself, your first comment and only comment ever on this site and its all about how hawt some woman is. That sounds misogynist especially on a site that mocks misogyny. You didn’t even comment on the actual article but instead choose to play the lets judge women for their looks only game!! I am just appreciating her beauty gosh!! I guess you must have entirely missed the point of the article and just looked at the picture though HAWT and decided to post your oh so original thoughts.
*thought