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.
I’m reminded of the ads for Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic*, with the memorable line “Makes Children and Adults as Fat as Pigs”. This was a selling point at the time. There was also a brand of ‘ironized’ yeast that promised to pack on pounds “quicker than beer”. One of the ads featured a woebegone waif lamenting, “I’m so lonely and unhappy; nobody likes a skinny girl.”
*Sweetened quinine with lemon flavoring. Extremely popular for some reason.
Old ads are amazing.
I used to play with accelerators while I was at uni.
And in the main control room of the accelerator lab of my uni there was a print out of an for Doramad. Which is toothpaste containing radium. The (translated) tag line: ‘For radiantly white teeth!’
And in the beginning 7up contained lithium salts.
There are plenty of old ads praising weight gaining products.
And in a way, those products still exist.
Take protein powder for shakes.
For men they are advertised as weight gainers in the form of muscle mass.
For women they are advertised as a meal substitute to help lose weight.
And yet it’s the same stuff…
So let me get this straight: Western Civilization(tm) is headed down a lard-greased chute to oblivion because an increasing number of women are exhibiting physiques of a sort that Western Civilization(tm)…exalted Back In The Day? (Rubens and Renoir are a couple of the foremost examples that come to mind.)
Heck, Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren would be “too fat” for some of these guys.
Rapid Rabbit, you beat me to The Secret Garden reference! 🙂
@Hexum7:
Based on reading the covers (only) of assorted issues over the years, while in waiting rooms or checkout lines, I have come to the conclusion that they only ever actually printed one issue. Every month since then they’ve reprinted it with a new woman on the cover and some rearrangement of the graphic design. But the actual articles are unchanging, if you go by the blurbs on the cover:
$(NUMBER) Sex Moves That Will Blow His Mind (top left)
$(NUMBER) Steps to a Sexy Body (beneath that)
$(CELEBRITY)’s Rules for Love (top right)
$(WEIGHT LOSS METHOD) that really works! (beneath that)
$(TRUE LIFE STORY) for realz, we swear! (bottom)
I expect somewhere there’s a giant template file, like a form letter template only it’s forty pages long, and they just punch in a dozen or so different names and numbers and of course JPEGs of the current cover model and this month’s crop of advertisements, and then they hit “print” and out of the machine pops the next month’s issue.
OMG, What is it with today?
The google opening page on my phone greeted me with this as my top article:
I felt that I was literally going insane, because I thought the woman in question was a knock-out and not even “fat”. Though when I was a similar size, I hated myself with a virulence that I now so regret. Then I read her comments about how she doesn’t feel she deserves her husband because she isn’t thin enough. Dozens of examples flitted through my mind of people hating themselves for no genuine reason because of weight or feature from my own life and from the lives of others. It really is too much.
And all of this so we can be more attractive to assholes like this? We really have crossed over into actual insanity in so many ways – but these examples of not only conventionally attractive, but beautiful women being vilified?
And aren’t these the same guys who are convinced that nobody will date them because of their wrist circumference or whatever? Shouldn’t they have to spend a few months/years thinking of their inconsistencies in hypocrite jail for stuff like this?
On to email and found this mammother article. Am I dense? Because I don’t see the connection between fat and emasculation and poorly defined gender roles. Aren’t the rigidly defined gender roles and performances messing us all up?
Then I printed out an essay my son wanted me to read. A quick glance revealed a sentence about sexually frustrated and isolated men murdering people because of sexual frustration. This isn’t the topic of his essay, more of an aside, but it upset me. My son is not usually one to believe misogynist nonsense, so I will speak to him, but this is disturbing because as pointed out many times on this blog, these guys are gaining traction in the idea that their problem is not getting laid.
I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. And the looks thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Judging and hating others as a way to make yourself feel better doesn’t actually work. Showing love, compassion and empathy to yourself allows you to extend that love and compassion to others.
@kupo – I know you know this, but there are a LOT of health issues and irregularities that can affect weight. Cortisol dysregulation is poison in so many ways as @Valentin noted. PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) is another common culprit of female overweight. A lot of us are designed to survive famine – it isn’t a bug, it is a feature. Finally, a lot of the health issues that affect weight are poorly understood and/or as yet undiscovered.
@K. That Bacon and Pumpkin Soup sounds amazing based on the name alone. I want to make it now. LOL.
Finally @Alan Robertshaw. I pay extra attention to the visiting racoon family because of you. I wish I could box them up and mail them to you, because I am both fascinated against my will and concerned. FYI, racoons chitter and purr and they hug each other. A friend and I were watching the mom hug and groom her baby while purring to the others. My friend was entranced watching them and we tried to get pictures because I told him that I know a guy on a blog who loves racoons.
Back on topic, with a lot of work and life experience I have managed to come a small distance on the body and looks self-hatred thing. I read a site for the chronically ill and one of their articles suggested that the chronically ill try and think something nice about our bodies everyday rather than just the frustration of being ill and I am trying that in conjunction with fighting the constant terrible messages we get from society about not being perfect enough. And I am trying to spread the message of self-acceptance and self-love to the people around me without being a crusader about it.
It is uphill work sometimes though. I gave a pool party for my friends fiftieth birthday and there was one woman who refused to get in the pool, announcing that she couldn’t let anybody see her body.
“We are the middle-aged pool,” we explained. “We turn it up to 95 for aches and pains and we all have the marks of life on us.” It didn’t help, no matter what we tried. In fact, some of the net result was that people who weren’t formerly uncomfortable started to feel self-conscious.
Ooh. We have a rare link mammoth sighting! 😀
@Rabid Rabbit
Assuming they even made it that far — everything I’ve ever read about famines and sieges says the muscular guys have the lowest chances of survival — the fat people have more stored calories, and the small wiry people at least have compact, fuel-efficient bodies, but muscular body types are sort of like cars with powerful, gas-guzzling engines and tiny fuel tanks.
@Moon Custafer
Well, yeah, sure, but in the interests of entertainment I’m sure we could fudge the facts a little.
Interestingly enough my sister was featured in the news over the weekend because she was banned from her gym for wearing a “Trump is human garbage” T-Shirt.
Over half the people commenting on her weight were overweight themselves, yet that didn’t give them pause to criticize her over her weight.
The dead giveaway that people who make bigoted remarks aren’t at all concerned about fat people’s health is that some of the worst abuse seems to come when fat people are working out. If they really wanted fat people to be healthy, they wouldn’t mock them for exercising.
>Confusing gender roles makes for easier population control
>We need well defined gender roles so we can control women easier
Gotta pick one, guys
@Weirwood Treehugger:
…some of the worst abuse seems to come when fat people are working out.
As evidenced by the online reaction Ghyslaine Raza received for playing Jedi, with enthusiasm exceeding his skill, with a mop handle. (First: isn’t active physical play precisely what fat kids are incessantly told they need? Second, is there any Star Wars fan with enough functioning limbs who hasn’t horsed around with a vaccuum cleaner extender, gift-wrapping roll, or similar long cylindrical object?)
Diversity and social cohesion: so we have literature review/ meta-analysis (Morales 2013 and Van der Meer 2014, the first two I found, seem like good ones). Diversity has positive and negative effects, of course, but lower attachment to one’s neighborhood is consistent. Also, probably, a higher perception of crime risk (independent of crime rates).
These are mostly cross-sectional studies, so I also found a large longitudinal Oxford study from 2015 showing that as diversity changes in an area over time, more diversity reduces social trust among the people who’ve stayed in the area the whole time — although diversity may in fact *increase* social trust among those who move.
In and of itself, I think the “diversity reduces social trust” point, although a deeply dumbed-down reading of “Bowling Alone”, is more true than false. See the rise of white nationalist parties in even left-wing European countries, or how California went Republican for a couple decades under the demographic changes of the ‘70s/ 80s.
The problem with the argument is that diversity only has this effect *because of assholes*, and that the proper response is not to attack diversity, but to model not being an asshole.
When they filmed the fight scenes in the Star Wars prequels they had to tell Ewan McGregor to stop making lightsabre noises.
@ auntie mame
Thank you ever so much for thinking about me with your raccoons. I am very envious. They put a ban on their import last year here*. I have sourced some though. They’re at the local screech owl sanctuary (which was a bit counterintuitive).
(*and various other animals; they didn’t just have it in for raccoons)
I get this shit all the time too. I’m overweight, so I must not be exercising enough, and that’s why I have insomnia! Nevermind I’m on my feet up and down stairs and around a restaurant all day at work, and I walk at least five miles a week and try to eat smaller portions, I’m just lazy and stuff my face!
I’m seriously sick and tired of people who don’t know me personally or what I do from day to day assuming they know what’s best for me without even fucking consulting me about the advice they give me.
And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The world wants me to hate myself enough to buy their bullshit. If I’m fat, there’s a specialty diet/exercise machine/gym membership for that!
And if that doesn’t work, I’m just not trying hard enough to actually make it work, and I need to break myself more to not be (gasp) fat.
@ Moon Custafer and Rabid Rabit…
everything I’ve ever read about famines and sieges says the muscular guys have the lowest chances of survival
Aside from the fuel issue, those with high muscle/low fat bodies are much more vulnerable to cold. It’s not just whales and seals that form a layer of insulating blubber.
My son works in the fitness industry and has the kind of physique that gets put on magazine covers. He has so little body fat it’s difficult to pinch up a skin fold anywhere on him. When our family goes to the beach, he has a swimming tolerance of about 15 minutes. Then he goes blue and has to get out and bask in the sunlight like a lizard. Meanwhile, I’m bobbing about indefinitely and enjoying myself.
It’s not indulgence, or lack of self-control, it’s preparation. Fat people will simply stand around and watch these fuckers die, then we inherit the earth.
@Tosca, Chaos made Flesh, Servant of the Purring Jew
And there’s the script. The fat people hide out just long enough for the thin ones to be too weak to try and cannibalize them, and then stand around and laugh while watching the thin ones die out.
Yes, it would be a fairly mean post-apocalyptic show.
@Full Metal Ox:
Nope, not even George Lucas. Gift-wrap tubes or something similar, coated in aluminum foil, were what he used as light saber props in the original film, with some postwork to make them look more like, well, light sabers. The original film was a low-budget B movie, a fact sometimes forgotten in light of its smash success and all the high budget sequels that were made.
@Knitting Cat Lady,
I haven’t ready many of the studies myself, but from what I’ve heard, the idea that fat will ruin your health is mostly based on correlation studies. There are some weight-related conditions where we know an actual mechanism, but by no means all.
Personally, I’m starting to suspect that being unhealthy might make people fat more than being fat makes people unhealthy. My ex was athletic in high school. He mysteriously gained a lot of weight in college and it turned out he had an undiagnosed hormonal disorder. His weight stabilized for a few years. Then he got rheumatoid arthritis, a basically unexplained auto-immune disease. He’s gained more weight recently because some days his joints are so inflamed he can’t walk more than a few feet at a time.
And this is why, even though it was my dream from the time I was about 4, I was never able to become a professional singer. I realised by the time I was 17 that someone as “fat” as me (I wasn’t terribly fat at that age, just not super thin and I felt like I was as fat as I actually am now) was never going to be able to have a career.
<blockquote.Orion
September 4, 2018 at 3:09 am
@Knitting Cat Lady,
I haven’t ready many of the studies myself, but from what I’ve heard, the idea that fat will ruin your health is mostly based on correlation studies. There are some weight-related conditions where we know an actual mechanism, but by no means all.
And even with those, there’s loads of evidence that even if being fat “increases” your risk of developing say…heart disease (because it couldn’t possibly be being fat & correlated diseases are both symptoms of something else apparently) it also increases your chances of *surviving* said condition for longer periods of time. And old people who lose weight are likely to die sooner than their fat counterparts. And heart patients who lose weight after heart attacks are more likely to die sooner. I was horrified recently that actor/director Kevin Smith’s doctor told him to lose 50 pounds after his heart attack. Knowing what we know about long term survival, how is that not malpractice? Oh, right, he was fat therefore losing weight has to be healthier /s
Didn’t have enough edit window to fix the quote. Sorry about that.
Oh gang, I’m sorry. I messed up that quote thing. I had no idea it would highlight the entire text.
Catalpa:
IIRC, that’s exactly how Discworld dwarves avoid overpopulation.
Frankly, I get the impression that “population control” is something conspiracy theory cranks spout reflexively, because they’ve gotten used to using it as an all-purpose explanation for what They(TM) want.