The human race faces many dire threats. War, famine, disease, terrorism, giant asteroids, Donald Trump. But the ever-alert readers of the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit know that all these threats pale in comparison to the greatest threat of all. I am speaking, of course, of fat chicks.
In a post with the thoughtful title “Dear obese women I f*king hate you,” a Reddit MGTOW calling himself iamlikethewindbaby outlines his case against these horrible monsters. Speaking fluent SARCASM, he addresses fat chicks directly.
“Thanks for turning average chicks into supermodels and ugly chicks into average chicks,” he declares.
Thanks for filling up my newsfeed with memes about how beautiful fat chicks are. Do you even know how attractiveness is determined? The more healthy and fertile a woman is the more attractive she is. Being obese makes you unattractive, period. F*ck you.
Er, I’m pretty sure attractiveness is determined by whatever the hell people happen to think is attractive. Some people find skinny people attractive; some find fat people attractive; some people don’t pay much attention to weight. There are even a few perverse souls who find Donald Trump attractive, if you can believe that.
Thanks for making a generation of men feel bad about themselves because a fat chick is the best they can do, it’s not their fault 70% of you are overweight.
That’s actually not quite right. According to the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of American women classified as overweight or obese isn’t 70%; it’s 64%. The percentage of men classified as overweight or obese? 74%.
That’s right, fellas; there are more fat dudes than fat chicks in the US.
The percentage of American adults classified as obese? 36% — exactly the same for men and women.
Now, there may be legitimate reasons to wonder if these categories really make sense as they’re currently defined. But one thing is clear: for every fat chick out there fat chick-ing, there’s a fat dude to match.
Thanks for being 400lbs and yet somehow still unable to cook. That’s great. It’s a good thing we did away with those sexist home economics classes.
Dudes, given that you’re all devoted to GOING YOUR OWN WAY and all, shouldn’t you be learning how to cook your own damn dinner?
Thanks for being so fat that being 20lbs overweight isn’t even considered fat anymore. Nothing is sexier than a 5’3 150lb women.
According to some number I found on the internet, the 5’5″ tall Marilyn Monroe saw her weight fluctuate from 115-150 lbs at various points in her adult life. I don’t know why we know this, or if we should, but apparently we do. Here’s a picture of her at one of her more voluptuous moments, in Some Like it Hot.
What a hideous monster!
Thanks for having personalities that match your appearance. It’s important for people’s insides to match their outsides.
Based on iamlikethewindbaby’s personality, I can only assume he looks something like this:
I can’t wait until all your cold-giant-black-hearts explode.
What a lovely fellow.
Iamlikethewindbaby also blames obese women for rising insurance premiums, and snickers a little at the thought of obese women dying before retirement.
It’s true that obesity can increase health care costs and lower life expectancy. But you know what else increases health care costs and lowers life expectancy? Being an angry dickhead.
“There is a direct connection between being constantly angry, competitive, and aggressive, and early heart disease,” notes an article on the “health costs of anger” on mentalhelp.net.
[R]ecent research suggests that men who have poor anger management skills are more likely to suffer a heart attack before age 55 than their more emotionally controlled peers. A separate study indicated that older male subject’s hostility ratings (how hostile and irritable they tend to act towards others) predicted heart disease more accurately than other known risk factors including cholesterol, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking and being overweight. …
The evidence from numerous studies is clear: constant chronic anger, hostility, and aggression raise your risk of developing various deadly forms of heart disease by as much as five times the normal rate. The more hostility you tend to express, the more prone to heart disease you are likely to be.
And the lovely iamlikethewindbaby is hardly the only Reddit MGTOW who fits the angry dickhead profile, as a quick skim through the comments on his post reveals.
Indeed, the lovely fellow who calls himself lordjedi may have cut several weeks off his life expectancy with all the anger in this comment alone:
Not that I haven’t tried a couple times, but my policy for many years has been my bedroom is off limits to fats.
I’m sure the “fats” of the world feel just awful they don’t get to partake of lordjedi’s charms. He continues:
That means no easy money for fatties either. Get a f*cking job, Porkins, if you want to sleep indoors. Every dollar you spend in your short worthless life will be earned by you with your fine arts/wymyn’s studies degree and your $90K student loan debt, while stocking shelves on the 3 AM Walmart shift. Enjoy your Cool Ranch Doritos. Why don’t you f*cking marry them if you love them so much?
If you love your hatred so much, lordjedi, why don’t you marry it? Oh, wait, I guess you have.
MTGOStark, who has clearly never spoken to a woman in the real world, offers this thought.
If being not obese is literally the only thing they have to do in their life to succeed, and they still fail at it (and complain on top), it’s just truly pitiful.
Aanarchist apparently spends much of his Going His Own Way time scanning through profiles on online dating sites.
i see those online profiles where the woman is like 50 lbs overweight and she puts down average. a few extra pounds means 100 lbs overweight. big and beautiful means THAR SHE BLOWS. the funny thing is they want you to ignore their weight, like it has nothing to do with who she is. it’s like she wants you to watch her eat an entire f*cking cake with her bare hands, and treat her as if she’s eating salad and a water.
Huh. That actually sounds like a fun date. Who doesn’t like cake?
I’m 5’4″ and usually around 140-145 lbs. I recently went to a waterpark with my coworkers and initially no one believed I weighed that much (I noted that I have a decent amount of muscle under the curves, especially in my legs, which ups the pounds more than fat would) and several other women declared me an ideal body type with the dudes agreeing. On a BMI scale I’m just shy of “obese” for reference (aka why Kereaa has known BMI is bunk since college).
Given I’m a size eight and have been since high school when a lot of my peers were 0s, 2s, and 4s, pretty darn uplifting to get that many compliments. But it really shows a lot of people have no idea what a certain weight can look like.
I’m sure the MGTOWs will stop whining about fat chicks as soon as those sexbots are on the market.
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnny minute now.
(Preferably sexbots that aren’t sentient. I’d hate for them to be subjected to the same kind of crap MTOWs try to throw at us bio-folk.)
1st of all, just putting it out there, Rebel Wilson is funny and gorgeous, and I will have rather incredulous words for anyone who’d dare say otherwise
2nd of all, stop using BMI, people. It’s no good. I don’t mean it to randos on the internet. They have no need to quantify people’s fatness to begin with. Healthcare professionals, the media, just generally. Why pick the worst available metric? The answer is convenience, obvs, but stop anyway. Now for the MGTOW nonsense
Fat women don’t make average women supermodels. Agencies (and/or Instagram) make average women supermodels. And I’m not sure why that’s bad
But what about all the anti feminist HB10s, beautifully and gracefully succumbing to cancer. Or was that made up?
Average is a relative measure, so being overweight in no way stops one being average
Being 100lbs overweight (via BMI) is pretty fuckin rare, so I’m kinda doubting that dude’s seen enough women that size on dating sites to be able to generalize like he does. Then again, I doubt he’d even know what 100lbs overweight looks like. These are the same guys who think 5’7 95 or summat is the standard, against which all women should be judged
If someone wants you to ignore their weight when determining romantic or sexual compatibility, and you don’t wanna, you don’t hafta. Some people will judge you, but you’re Going Your Own Way(tm). Why do you care? Still no need to fat shame on the intermet like an ass
I “like” the assertion that attractiveness is “determined” by how “healthy” and “fertile” a woman is. I’m not sure if that means they have to fill out a little questionnaire and do some math before they can decide if they’re attracted to a woman, or if it means they can magically sense if a woman has had a hysterectomy or is on some form of pharmaceutical birth control, or has some kind of illness without any outward symptoms and that makes them less attractive automatically.
Looking at the fertility idols of early cultures, it is quite clear that weight has always been associated with fertility. Just not always in the way some would insist…
I lost around 35 pounds due to a recent serious illness, and I would much rather have those pounds back than to go through what I went through, including hospitalization. Strangely enough, the spouse feels the same way about those pounds! What a loser!
They have an idealized silhouette in their minds, refined by pornography and Cosmo; a cookie-cutter to stamp upon their fantasies and a gauge to grade the world. Few women have ever fit this frame, but airbushes and photoshop have created the illusion of it. Now any deviation from that silhouette is a moral failing of the woman being judged.
Familiarity breeds empathy. They need to unplug from the internet and interact with real people, instead of their airbrushed facsimiles.
re: Obesity and its relationship to health,
I have my opinions on that topic, but they’re just opinions! I’m no expert so I won’t chime in on whether I think it’s reasonable to say they’re linked. But I do know about the studies and methods used, and there’s interesting stuff going on in that area!
The truth is, while causality is the gold standard of science, it’s also incredibly hard to achieve, especially in medicine. Those gosh darn ethics committees prevent studies from using proper methods, like the double-blind or the 3×3 or whatnot. Something about it being monstrous to withhold life-saving treatments from people who need it. I know, right? Totally unreasonable.
So medicine and health studies are fraught with a lot of vagueness and caution, and a lot of the things you might read about “X is the new wonder-food!” or “Y causes cancer!” or “Obesity linked to shorter lifespans!” are from studies that demonstrate a correlation between the two. Causality is nearly impossible to show when it comes to health.
There are two things to say about that. First, and my favourite, is that there are statistical techniques that can approach the double-blind control group standard without actually creating control groups and whatnot! If you take a large population of individuals (say, cancer patients with a specific kind of cancer), and track their various demographics, treatments and outcomes, you can do some juggling with the numbers and create “virtual” control / affected groups! It’s a relatively new technique, but medical papers are starting to pick it up. Its potential for fishing out truth from confusion in fields where ethics are central makes me positively giddy with excitement.
The second is that – well, there’s a saying of “Correlation does not equal causation.” Which is true, but only in a relatively narrow way. A single correlation isn’t the same as a single causation, certainly. But a heaping stack of correlations begins to approach causation. That’s how we prove things, generally. We know gravity is a thing because of the stacks and stacks of evidence we collect on it every day. We know evolution is a thing for the same reason, though we don’t collect as much evidence on it as we do gravity (still a huge amount, mind you). The connection between smoking and throat cancer, between global temperature change and CO2 emissions, between lead in tapwater and childhood learning disabilities – all of these are correlations. Because they aren’t rock solid mathematical laws or clearly defined causations doesn’t make them any less important to pay attention to.
I don’t mean to attack anyone with this! You’re all dear to me and I don’t want this to be taken as support for anyone in the argument of whether obesity and poor health are strongly linked. I don’t know enough of that to say one way or the other. All I know is that correlation isn’t something to be ignored. (I also suspect that the way I’m using the words ‘correlation’ and ‘causation’ is different from the way others are using it)
Frankly, our medical fields are just as interested in policing body standards, as much as any other field of society, so disentangling obesity, sexism, stereotype and health is a very hard problem. We need to tread with caution.
In honour of a woman’s right to choose (her own damn dinner) I suggest we make this thread about all the foods they think women shouldn’t eat.
http://www.thirstyreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/porknachos.jpg
these things look so good
I love these kinds of screeds. They hold a special place in my fat heart for two hilarious assumptions:
1. The specific bonerfeels of a specific individual (or group of individuals) are universal to all men.
All men think like this! This is how all men feel! Only these few, brave, intelligent men have the courage to say how all men really feel, but they are also simultaneously terrified of the jackboots of the feminist hivemind because surely they will come down on those brave
handsome, well-endowed, lovingmen for daring to speak out against them! Oh the huMANity! [/sarcasm]and
2. Because these specific bonerfeels are not being catered to by wimmens, the world is collapsing as we know it.
Wimmens aren’t all stick-thin and this is bad! I know how biology and nutrition work, because I have a penis, and therefore I’m the sciencest sciency person to ever science, and my word should be taken as gospel (or just the truth, because eeew, religion is icky and anyone who has one is a sheeple)! Wimmens need to be stick thin because this is healthy and attractive to MY ALMIGHTY BONER! Any man who dares disagree with MY ALMIGHTY BONER is wrong, or brainwashed by feminists to believe they are attracted to not-stick-thin feeemales! It’s just biology! SCIENCE! [/also sarcasm]
And yet, people still find me physically attractive enough (And they love my personality enough) to not only fuck me, but be in a relationship with me.
http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/029/129/650.gif
I must’ve hypnotized some poor people with my vagina goo again.
(Poor Jackie!) That has to be it! I mean, it’s not like anyone can find my glorious fat ass attractive, right? It’s fat! If they did, it would defy science! And we can’t have that, can we? [/ALSO sarcasm]
But, it’s okay Mr. MGTOW, because the feeling’s mutual! I hate you too, and I wouldn’t touch you or your peen with a ten-foot barge pole used to cross the Thames.
Because neither your dick or your stellar personality are impressive enough to make me reconsider all my life choices of being a feminist and supporting social justice-leaning ideologies, nor are they impressive enough to make me attempt to change my biology just to please you.
In the meantime, I’m going to spend time with people who actually view me as a person and are willing to treat me as such, instead of some elaborate sex toy trophy thing that is beyond mortal comprehension.
So the last statistic I saw looking at mortality and morbidity and BMI showed that people who are a little overweight are actually the healthiest. To me this indicates that they’re not actually overweight, but that the BMI categories are wrong. (And yes, I know BMI has some serious issues). However, since that studies were published the BMI brackets were moved down, which means that people who are more than just a teeny bit overweight are now the healthiest – although their weight hasn’t changed at all 😉
I had poutine for lunch! Feeeeel the misandry!
I’m not arguing that it is. I’m arguing that obesity, while it may be linked with reduced life spans and certain diseases, has not been shown to cause them.
The reason this topic upsets me and the reason I hate it when people talk about obesity like it causes health problems is because that belief causes me and people like me active harm. Regardless of the symptoms I talk to my doctor about, my doctor only wants to talk about my weight and how to manage that. Personally I believe my weight is linked to my health conditions, but as a symptom, not as a cause.
I could talk a lot more about this, but honestly I’m feeling right now like no one cares when I say this is causing me harm and I feel like no one is listening to what I’m saying and they are making a whole lot of inferences about what I’m saying and why I’m saying it that just aren’t true.
When I started reading this post I thought, “great! I’ve been feeling awful about myself because of my weight recently, and knowing that MGTOWS don’t like that about me makes me feel better!” But now I’m feeling even worse. That’s not the fault of the people here but it does tell me I need to bow out of the discussion because I’m starting to cry at work now. 🙁
*munches on apple fritter from Starbucks*
FEEL THE MISANDRY!!!!
@ kupo: no kidding!! The reason why I gained 50 lbs was because several years ago my left hip locked and I couldn’t walk without a limp for 7 months. It’s still a bit wonky but is much better.
But of course I got accused of ‘letting myself go’. 😛 And when I explained I just got eyerolls.
David,
First off, I find it offensive that you would use the term “fat.” While that may be the language that was used from those you were quoting, there was no reason for you to use it as well. And although there are those who embrace the word, others do not, and therefore it should be avoided.
Second, your joke about the posters acting like babies is ageist and inappropriate. By making fun of the posters using that picture, you’re belittling those who are simply acting developmentally appropriate and an important stage in life that we all go through.
When I come to this blog, it’s one thing to be offended by the actions of the people you’re reporting on. It’s another to be offended by the language and humor you use.
@kupo
*Offers virtual shoulder*
Do what you need to do. Just know that we love you, even if some of us aren’t good at showing it *deliberate cough*
I’m 41, sometimes I have been slim (the only time I was actually ever thin was when I was quite severely ill) and sometimes I’m fat. Currently I’m a little heavier than I’d like due to neglecting my health during four months of hell with the welfare people. I can’t exercise anymore due to my back, but I have switched back to a more healthy diet again now I am not wanting to comfort eat cake (mmm cake) all the time. I’ll probably have dropped a couple of stone by the end of the year, but we shall see. I’m glad my weight seems to enrage this person so much though, almost makes me want to grab the huge bag of toffee popcorn rather than the spinach salad 😀
at least one study suggests fat shaming causes weight gain.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/fat-shaming-on-the-london-underground/418110/
I am fat and Im on a very restrictive diet right now. Losing weight would help my health situation long term
, that’s absolutely a medical fact about my body, but my doctor doesnt want me to even worry about losing weight right now because I need to make sure Im getting enough nutrition avoiding stuff that makes me sicker. Unfortunately, I really cant eat very much at all because Im poor, so I havent been eating much, which again is not what the doctor recommends. I work or am in school full time, use public transit, on my feet a lot. Im fine, Im not feeling sorry for myself, Im just trying to give an example of what a fat person’s lifestyle might be like that you dont know about. Someone else, maybe they just lost a ton of weight, maybe they have a condition, maybe theyre really poor and all they can eat is cheap fattening shit, you dont know.
I know this scumbag in the OP is beyond understandings things like “poor people arent poor on purpose” much less how that connects to “fat people arent fat just to annoy you” but regular ppl are fatphobic all the time, so…
Im sick of fat shamers trying to pretend its a health concern. No, its not. I think it links to ableism as well.
I must say I feel lucky that my doctor doesn’t badger me about my weight. I am on ten different types of medication over half of which cite weight gain as a side effect so he is pretty understanding. Having read some horror stories of people being fat shamed by their health practioners I truly feel fortunate to have such a nice practice.
Well, it would be better than marrying a rage-balloon like lordjedi. But if I was going to marry junk food, I would probably pick Fritos. Or maybe a Kit-Kat bar.
My fat ass is off to enjoy some delicious Misandry Pizza now.
In the spirit of things they think ladies shouldn’t eat…
Copycat Double Chocolate Costco Muffins.
I need to bake some of these right now, because I don’t have a costco card and I have been craving some for basically ever.
For what it’s worth, Kupo, I do agree with you one hundred percent. Things like this make me terrified of going to the doctor, mostly because I don’t know if I’ll actually be taken care of, or if I’ll be lectured about my weight.
I also put up with this from my family. My grandma and mother have, for quite some time, made lots of comments about my weight, my mother even going so far as to insult a lovely dress my aunt got for me, because it made me “look pregnant”.
And, of course, they say they’re just ‘worried about [my] health’ when I call them out for it, ignoring the fact that they’re not doctors and I haven’t stepped on a scale in front of either of them for quite some time.
Kupo,
I just wanted to let you know that I always listen to you and take what you say seriously.
I don’t mean that in a pressuring way though. I understand if you don’t want to participate in the thread anymore. Just that if you do decide to, at least I’ll listen.
Hi all – just poking my head in to say that until the day I see multiple obesity studies with sound methodology that actually control for the usual factors such as socioeconomic scale, education, etc. but also the effects of the societal stresses put on fat individuals and the effects of the shitty, shitty health care so many fat people receive – including being outright denied care due to their weight – I call bullshit on every freaking obesity study done.
Wow, those people who avoid going to the doctor out of fear of being harassed and humiliated, plus those people who are denied care seem to have negative health outcomes. Damn, who’da thunk it??? Geniuses, those researchers. Geniuses.
To be clear, I don’t doubt that in some cases* there may be adverse effects of excess weight, but until researchers start actually doing their damn work properly and actually controlling for significant factors in almost every fat person’s life, we’ll never know for sure.
*SOME cases. Not ALL cases. I think it’s pretty plain that there are plenty of healthy fat people. Even healthy very fat people.
Hey guys! Just your friendly neighborhood cat loving fat activist weighing in!
Ohlmann, I checked your link, not only is it a link to a goddamned motherfucking BARIATRIC SURGERY site I didn’t notice any actual studies on the page.
The studies I have read, and I’ll link some, furnish others upon request because holy-shit-I’m-supposed-to-be-working, have shown that habits and not weight account for risk of developing diseases and they have no way to control for the constant stigma of being fat
and IF, even IF we could prove that fatness = bad health, we have no way to make people thin long term. 5% keep the weight off (the number in studies is usually significantly lower, but I’ve never seen it higher) everyone else puts it back on in 2-5 years with most of those people gain it back with interest.
Also wanted to add that morbid obesity doesn’t actually require a co-morbidity to be considered morbid. *I’m* morbidly obese, no co-morbidity (must we discuss my glorious ass yet again?)
Some studies, I have more, I just pull these off of a facebook post I made like 100 years ago.
1. Being fat doesn’t increase overall mortality, genetics and exercise do.
Relationship Between Low Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Mortality in Normal-Weight, Overweight, and Obese Men
Ming Wei, MD, MPH; James B. Kampert, PhD; Carolyn E. Barlow, MS; Milton Z. Nichaman, MD, ScD; Larry W. Gibbons, MD, MPH; Ralph S. Paffenbarger, Jr, MD, DrPH; Steven N. Blair, PED
Physical Activity, All-Cause Mortality, and Longevity of College Alumni
Ralph S. Paffenbarger, Jr., M.D., DR.P.H., Robert Hyde, M.A., Alvin L. Wing, M.B.A., and Chung-cheng Hsieh, Sc.D.
N Engl J Med 1986; 314:605-613March 6, 1986DOI: 10.1056/NEJM198603063141003
2. Even if being fat *did* increase mortality, we have no reliable or proven intervention. Dieting and exercise to create weight loss has a long term (5 year+) failure rate of 95%
2a. The majority of people after 5 years have gained back the weight AND are in poorer health than before they started.
Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift
Linda Bacon1* and Lucy Aphramor23
How effective are traditional dietary and exercise interventions for weight loss?
Miller WC.
Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: diets are not the answer.
Mann T, Tomiyama AJ, Westling E, Lew AM, Samuels B, Chatman J.
@Kupo
Just wanted to say that I hear you, and am fully on board with what you are saying. I think regardless of what the actual link is between obesity and health, we should still – in general – either avoid commenting on it, or argue against it. If only due to the fact that the “high weight -> poor health -> bad person” link is so incredibly strong in the cultural mind that we need to risk potentially over-correcting a bit in order to shift perceptions. I don’t care whether or not it’s “technically correct.” In my mind, with things being how they are, it’s the compassionate thing to do.
And whatever collective health benefits there might be from reducing the rate of obesity, I am a firm believer that it pales in comparison to the collective health benefits that could be gained from reducing the stigma of obesity. We already know that weight cycling, and chronic dieting, and body shame, and any number of eating disorders are both A) harmful to health (mental and physical), and B) fueled by poor body image. And on top of that, body shame itself may contribute to obesity. So I honestly couldn’t give two shits about the exact level of causation or correlation between obesity and health when there’s already a much more direct and simple problem to address that might even make the obesity->health link redundant