By David Futrelle
When plus-sized model Tess Holliday announced last week on Twitter that she would be appearing on the cover of the October issue of Cosmopolitan’s UK edition, she was instantly subject to endless abuse from “concerned” citizens around the globe.
Some hurled insults; others angrily denounced her for “glorifying obesity” by posing for pictures while fat, suggesting that the mere sight of her on a magazine cover would spread the deadly disease of obesity by making impressionable youngsters think that being fat is cool.
Ironically, much of the harshest criticism of Holliday’s Cosmo cover has come from the fans of a certain male celebrity who is himself famously plus-sized. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Looking to see what sort of reaction Holliday’s cover appearance was getting on Reddit, I discovered that most of the criticism was coming from The Donald, Reddit’s infamous forum for Donald Trump superfans.
And some of these guys were, well, pretty worked up about it — and by another article teased on the cover featuring Holliday about a man who had “vetted” his wife’s affair. And so, alongside the requisite jokes about “landwhales” and rants about the alleged need to shame fat people back into skinniness (note: this does not actually work), there were angry declarations of war and predictions of apocalypse.
“This whole magazine cover shows in full display the nosedive degeneracy of the west,” wrote someone calling himself ShortCharge.
- Promotion of unhealthy habits that can lead to a generation of welfare-dependent immobile landwhales
- Promotion of female infidelity and the destruction of the family structure
- Promotion of male emasculation and feminization. Confusing the gender roles which makes for easier population control
- Promotion of laziness and the demonisation of hard work which will lead to welfare dependance and inability to provide for themselves a stable income
With magazines like this promoting obvious degeneracy I keep wondering why you westerners haven’t revolted yet or started a civil war.
This is why so many civilisations kept women in check, let them run rampant and shit like this gets normalize. You western men need to man up and start controlling your women or else the fall of rome 2.0 is imminent
In another thread on the same topic, ShortChange let his imagination run wild, and naturally it ran straight for an orgy to which he was definitely not invited.
Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Now they’re promoting infidelity and having affairs in an otherwise monogamous marriage. The everyday housewife with kids at a supermarket reads a magazine like this and starts getting ideas. She starts cheating, getting fat, divorce the poor guy and now she got daddy government as her provider while countless number of men are running a train on her.
Call it hyperbole, but you really cannot underestimate simple and easily corruptible minds.
LuckyMcDoo was more upset about the article on the husband “vetting” his wife’s affair than he was by Holliday’s appearance on the Cosmo cover:
They really just want their hedonism dignified. What is more hedonistic than wanton sex with different men? You find some faggot cuck with no self-respect who will pay your bills while you fuck “hot” guys. It’s a dream come true for a sociopath woman who is incapable of actually loving anyone but themselves.
Bacon_eating_Jihad, meanwhile, hoped that someday a real rain would come and wash women like Holliday off the streets. Literally:
Here we have yet more proof the world needs a good hard apocalypse level natural disaster to thin the heard of oxygen(and food) thief’s. These kinds of human accidents won’t last a weeks time without the local fast food restaurant to get their food from.
Apparently Mr. Bacon_eating_Jihad here is suffering from the delusion that bacon is some kind of health food. He is also apparently unbothered by the fact that his hero Trump is 1) fat, 2) allergic to exercise and 3) a fast-food addict whose doctor is widely suspected to have lied about his patient’s height so that Trump wouldn’t have to be publicly classified as “obese.”
I mean, again, there’s no shame in being fat (and no shame in being skinny). But there is a little bit of hypocrisy going on if you denounce fat women as degenerate harbingers of the apocalypse while ignoring the fact that the man you see as the savior of humanity is similarly fat.
Someone calling himself Yoursisterlovedick worried that a society with a significant number of fat people in it was destined to break into two:
There have been plenty of studies, that show that diversity decreases social cohesion and social trust. Have there ever been any studies like that with obesity and ugliness in general? I don’t think I’m the only one, I feel a lot less empathy towards fat people and I don’t trust them. What happens to a people when a large part of the population starts looking monstrous instead of human?
Dude, I’m a bit more concerned about the social cohesion of a society in which a large part of the population has decided it’s acceptable to treat other human beings as if they are less than human. Because that’s the society we live in right now. And those are the people who elected Trump president.
@Shadowplay
I’m reminded by the the fact that “whitness” is a recent concept and historically white people hated other kinds of white people,
so if we can just keep that bubble of tolerance expanding to eventually cover all humans (and other theoretical sentients) we can look forward to a diverse utopia.
@Hexum7
Well teen vogue has been surprisingly woke for a teen women’s interest magazine so its been pissing off reactionaries and I doubt they can tell the difference between these magazines.
@Hexum7
If you touch feeeemale-targeted reading material in a doctor’s surgery, you’re basically begging to get treatment-resistant cooties. Also you’ll probably catch gay if you read it. Actually, now I come to think of it, real men wouldn’t be visiting a doctor anyway.
Blessed irony.
They only notice women so they can hate.
Apart from all the other wrong here, they’re assuming that hard work is always physical. I put on lots of weight computer programming for 50 – 70 hours a week. It left very little time for exercise.
Also sleep deprivation and stress raise your cortisol levels, and that encourages weight gain. Small kids are adorable, but also exhausting, and I know quite a few women who put on more weight looking after babies and toddlers than they did while pregnant. Plus not having time to cook healthy food.
also too much cortisol can damage your body permanently which means even when the stress is gone, it is sometimes hard to lose weight again. I know @scild knows a lot about cortisol.
I am “lucky” because I always lose weight when I am stressed (and i am often stressed!) so no one will tell me that I am unhealthy just because they look at me.
Does…does he know that fat is literally a food storage device? Come the apocalypse, who’s gonna last longer – people with the thinness these wanksocks demand, or someone like me, with an extra 40kg of iron rations on my person at all times?
I not only have that 40kg to draw on, I have a viciously efficient metabolism which extracts every calorie and cuts expenditure to the absolute minimum. He thinks I’d starve to death in a week? LOLOLOLOLOL. It would take months . I’d just hole up somewhere for a fortnight, by the time I came out everyone else would be too weak to threaten me and I’d have lost maybe 100g or so.
These losers are simply putting all the worst insults they can think of into a hat. Their comments make no sense and have no internal logic. Yet they consider themselves smart. Dunning Kruger at its finest.
There are studies of diversity and social cohesion that are robust in terms of sample size which show a negative relationship. However, it really depends on how you measure diversity and how you measure social cohesion. Is it local pride, national pride, interpersonal trust? Is diversity solely about ethnicity and language or is it about class? Do members of the community have a diversity preference? Some do and some don’t.
Are these permanent and settled communities? Or do these communities have a lot of churn? There are some who argue that communities with a lot of churn (people moving in and out) are less socially cohesive (which makes total sense on a practical level) and that communities with many immigrants also have high churn – almost by definition if they are recent migrants.
Finally, how much does social cohesion based on purely on locality even matter where members of the locality based community have other social and financial resources? I suppose I would argue that it matters some. A community with many different languages spoken without a language in common might have less resilience in the case of say flooding. But how often does that happen?
Sorry – no citations – can’t be bothered.
I tend to lose weight when I’m stressed, also. I have to agree with one other poster – heavier people are more likely to survive famines.
This brought to my mind a very old comic I remember seeing – it was of women drinking and gambling, while ignoring their kids. The caption was something like: “Why stop with the vote, ladies?” So, shaming women for doing the same things men have done for thousands of years.
Weird how someone can claim that housewives are gullible creatures whose beliefs are shaped by the supermarket tabloid headlines they’re exposed to…
…on the very same forum where people calmly assert that a large segment of humanity are monsters, are Other, and everyone nods in agreement. At least housewives know Bat Boy is tongue in cheek.
I’m more worried about what happens to a population when a large part of it loses their critical thinking skills and their empathy. There’s no bottom to what paranoid, angry people will believe.
I think this is pissing them off especially hard because their primitive notions of justice require that non-conforming women be punished. But – quelle horreur! – fat women are being rewarded with magazine covers, body positive affirmations, and government handouts. Since women are Pavlovian livestock motivated solely by kibbles and head pats (the “reasoning” goes), more and more women will be flocking to put on extra pounds so they too can reap these sweet sweet benefits.
Fortunately, these amateur behavioral psychologists have come up with one weird trick to reverse this dastardly trend: instead of the carrot, the stick! Fat shaming!
Pretty slick how that dovetails exactly with their desire to hurt and abuse women. They could equally well use the tools of positive reinforcement, but we all know that would never happen. They just want free license to be assholes, and they’re too cowardly to do it on their own IRL, so they’re forever demanding that society back them up.
Too bad reality is a tad more complicated than a Skinner box.
I have sadly accepted I am meat on the hoof if civilisation falls. Then they’ll want me.
Joke is on them; my hip joint replacement will shatter in the fire’s heat and spray them with shrapnel. Ha!
The fat; the last of those that others feel they can malign. ‘Cos self will and all that.
David Sedaris’s sister wore the bottom half of a fat suit when she went on a home visit just to mess with her dad, It worked; he freaked out. She walked out normal on the last day and his reaction was to tell her all the things he wanted to say when she turned up half fat.
Her top half was normal; fat suit legs. He thought so little of biology that he did not question her rig. Glorious. What a doucher.
My dad once hugged me, a man, and asked when I was expecting. I later cut contact with him. If he’s expecting a call before he dies then he shouldn’t.
Got news for these guys; not many women are “housewives”. Most of us work these days.
“Confusing gender roles which makes for easier population control.”
What!?! Seriously, what!?! Gender roles are, literally, a form of social control. Breaking down gender roles increases human freedom.
So basically his argument is “we must rigidly adhere to traditional social controls or risk being easily controlled.” I am sure the fact that those traditional controls heavily favor white men is just a coincidence.
It’s always funny to me reading older books. Whenever someone is written as being ill or stressed they are described as “thin and drawn” and everyone worries about them. Older books also usually describe plump people as healthy and rosy.
I guess alt-reichers don’t read much. Or they’d know that the perception of body fat as a sign of weakness and ill health is a recent thing. If anything, if they want the good old days back, they can contribute by treating body fat in women as a sign of health and fertility.
They also probably don’t look at art. The “beauty standards for women have always been waifish and fat acceptance is a sign of feminist degeneracy in this horrible modern world” crowd has not seen European renaissance art, apparently. Or African fertility statues. Or anything.
Not only African fertility statues. Venus of Willendorf, anyone?
Or the women of Peter Paul Rubens!
Hell, my Great-Great-Great-Grandma always complimented my mum on her full figure (wansch in Carinthian).
I have no thyroid thanks to my immune system. I follow renaissance beauty standards. Fat and pale!
I’ve long been curious as to how much the average individual’s weight really has increased over the past few decades— I’m under the impression a lot of the early-to-mid-20th-century statistics were collected by the military, and so would tend to skew young.
And I think the popular perception of average size in the past may be skewed by two things: 1. a lot of the images in circulation are from movies or ads, and so feature professional actors and models rather than average people; 2. fashions prior to 1970 or so tended to be a lot more tailored and close-fitting, and usually were worn over structured undergarments (girdles, etc.)
Oh also vintage clothes that survive are more likely to be special-occasion wear with sentimental value (wedding dresses, etc.) than, say, relaxed house-dresses or farmers’ overalls, so the bias is towards both formal wear and youth.
Just missed the editing window— I was going to add that some of Weegee’s photos of crowds might give a more realistic view of the variety of body types in, say, 1940.
The husband got me this for our anniversary. I’ve been enjoying how necessary fat is.
Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes
There’s a Bacon & Pumpkin soup in here that I can’t wait to bust out come fall/winter.
Ah, but you see. You see. Because evolutionary psychology, a Man’s Sexual Market Value™ is based not on his appearance, but his achievements. And men have all the achievements already, because we do the vital and important labor of society, like hunting the mammoth and producing sperm. A ffeeemale’s SMV™, on the other hand, is based on nothing but her appearance — see above re: evolutionary psychology. (Which is definitely a real thing with real scientific applications and not just a way for privileged white cis het men to “discover” the natural human state privileges white cis het men.)
This is amply proved to be true by the way Trump gets all the sex he wants and totally never has to be coercive or entitled about it — why, women just let him grab them by the pussy, because he’s such an Alpha Male! Overweight women, on the other hand, never have sex. QED!
Buttercup,
Oh hey, point of order: these people didn’t lose their empathy. These are people who never had any to begin with. People like that look around for excuses to exercise their lack of it, and barring a handy excuse, (such as PoC, women, or fat), will just make stuff up.
Let’s break that down further. It’s because a very small number of elites have decided the ideal body those actors and models should have. And because they have the control, average people are barred from entry.
@ Buttercup;
‘specially when their beliefs are shaped by brainfart.com, faux news and the Fabricator-in-Chief….
@WWTH:
It’s one of my favorite things about The Secret Garden. How Mary’s so thin but ends up reassuring her guardian that “I am getting fatter.” Not “I’m putting on some healthy weight that I need,” specifically “fatter.”
@Tosca, Chaos made Flesh, Servant of the Purring Jew
I now want to see a post-apocalyptic series based on this. Large people turn out to have prepared a secret network of caves, wait things out for a few weeks, then come out and take over the world. There would be a lot of comedy about formerly musclebound types now at risk of being beaten up.
If the phrase “population control” here meant “reducing the birth rate to mitigate overpopulation”, then I could see some kind of fever-dream logic to this. If you can’t tell just by looking which gametes each person produces, then the chances of forming a relationship and having children with someone with complimentary gametes is somewhat reduced.
However, I’m pretty sure that “population control” here means “manipulation of the thoughts/emotions/motivations of the existing population”, which would be far better served by rigid and unchangeable gender roles than the inverse.
@Catalpa
It could very well be he meant controlling the size of the population. See, if you let people with uteri believe they’re not trapped into the role of raising children, they might choose not to and then there will be less babies.