So the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit are talking about Body Positivity today. Yes, that means they’re talking about fat women (and men). And yes, it is the shitshow you might expect. Except maybe, somehow, worse.
“DevilmanWunsen” starts off the discussion by complaining that the Body Positivity movement seems to be all about women, with men being ignored. “Search ‘Body Positivity’ on Google Images and see the results for yourselves,” he insists. “It’s not ‘body’ positivity it’s ‘female’ positivity.” And we can’t have that, can we?
“A couple men’s [pictures] popped up but count how many compared to women,” DevilmanWunsen continues.
Google Images is a great way to compile lots of search results in a grid like format and it really does go to show how much coverage this gets in favour of women. Also further proof most feminists don’t really advocate for equality as they never ever bring this up.
Well, they do but never mind. The main reason there isn’t as much talk about Body Positivity for men is that fat men don’t have to deal with as much shit from society as fat women do. Not that fat men don’t have to deal with a lot of shit; it’s just comparatively less and that’s part of why people talk less about male body positivity.
It might also be because Men’s RIghts activists, instead of pushing for male body positivity, would rather spend their time slagging off fat women.
True, a few commenters seem bothered by the lack of body positivity for men — like somethingneet, who complained that “[m]en aren’t allowed to receive any positivity, feminism made sure [of] that.”
But a much larger number of MRAs are far more bothered by the specter of fat women actually feeling ok about their bodies.
Alarming_Draw declares that body positivity
usually promotes toxic female behaviour that overloads our healthcare system with obese or dangerously fat women.
Does this post upset you? Then fuck off-its based on scientific FACT.
Morbid obesity has shot up thanks to women and their bullshit body positivity. It promotes dangerous behaviour to kids.
For what it’s worth, rates of obesity are roughly the same for men and women; though women are far more likely to develop so-called “morbid obesity.” That said, making women (or anyone) feel like shit for being fat is actually more likely to cause them to gain rather than lose weight. And that is a “scientific FACT.”
Not that these guys are interested in listening to reason.
As Booth_Templeton sees it,
a fair percentage of western women have blimped up to enormous proportions to an unhealthy level and want men to find them attractive, and will lash out if anyone says anything about it or rejects them relationship wise because of it, because deep down they feel bad about it, and know it isn’t attractive nor healthy. There are plenty of fat men too, but they don’t get to lash out, well, for anything, much less for being lazy, fat pigs.
One commenter thinks that body positivity is basically a plot by women to make other women unappealing to men. “Women want other women to be undesirable, so they can have a higher chance at scoring a better relationship,” argues AlanTheAblaze. “Throttle the supply, the demand goes up.”
Another commenter, TheSnesLord, thinks the reason men aren’t included in the body positivity movement is that women don’t want their potential dates to get fat.
It’s always been a fact that men are not included in Body Positivity. Even though there are some men in some “Male Body Positivity” photos in Google searches, the actual movement does not include nor promote it for men.
And this is because promoting such a movement for men could result in more men being “less attractive” for women in the dating game. No more six packs, massive arms, muscles, handsomeness, etc. Can’t EVER have women unhappy now can we.
But yet it’s AWESOME and GREAT when women uglify themselves to disgust men because that’s apparently “fighting back against female beauty standards”.
Therefore, it’s all about what women want again.
Other commenters are glad men are (allegedly) excluded from the body positivity movement. According to DjangoOfChadlantis, body positivity is
meant to pander to weakness in society.
men shouldn’t be fat in the first place, neither should women. Not saying we all need to be build like ronnie coleman but am saying we shouldn’t weight over 200 pounds of mostly goo.Its a sign of sloth
Oh is it?
Other commenters agree that body positivity would be a terrible thing for men. AttachableSheep asks
Why on Earth would you want a cultish movement that exists to make you miserable and take your money to extend its reach so it can include you and other men?
We men are lucky that body positivity doesn’t apply to us in my humble opinion.
Sorry, fat guys, the Men’s Rights movement isn’t for you.
But that’s actually a good thing, because the Men’s Rights movement is, as you may have gathered, a huge pile of shit.
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I’d be hesitant to assert that crows don’t tell jokes about how many mourning doves it takes to build a nest.
(Two: one to pick the most precarious site possible, and one to pull out twigs like a Milton Bradley game until they reach the absolute minimum that will support the eggs.)
Lions and tigers can interbreed. The result is an animal so huge it has all sorts of health problems and so please don’t interbreed your lions and tigers.
@ david
But I’ve already booked the restaurant. And do you know how had it is to find somewhere that serves gazelle?
@GSS ex-noob:
Yep. That’s why I specified ‘birds’: my understanding was that the prime example of a ring species (and part of the reason why the ‘ring’ name was created) involved birds originally studied along islands off the northern Siberian coast, and continued the rest of the way around the pole after.
@Jenora: Dogs are all interfertile genetically, both with other dogs and wolves. The barrier to interbreeding tends to be size differentials. A Chihuahua and a Great Dane aren’t going to be able to get their freak on.
@Alan. THANK YOU! I loved the Neanderthal flute.
As I understand it, the distinction between sub-species is a lot like deciding where red becomes orange in a rainbow.
@David: Can the ligers and tigons breed true, though? Which would be an even worse idea, but… “Tiger King” exists.
Possibly the definition of “species” should have something about “not existing without people messing with them to make it happen and continue.”
@Jenora: I think there are probably “ring” species across large landmasses, particularly among non-migratory birds. Like the width of Eurasia or North America.
@FMOx: Living with both mourning doves and crows in the yard, I too would bet on the crows thinking such things. Mourning doves must have to breed like crazy just to survive, what with their dumbass nests. And humans have always known crows were clever; we just have scientific experiments now. I am very respectful to ours, and they absolutely won’t get out of the way till you or your car is right up to them. They’s da boss and they’ll look you in the eye to prove it. I look right back at them and so far they have all decided I’m harmless but worthy of respect. However, for really smart birbs, you can’t beat parrots. They remember being dinosaurs.
@GSS ex-noob:
I don’t know about mourning doves, but pigeons (rock doves) used to nest on cliff ledges, and now mainly do so on building ledges. The main purpose of their nests is to stop the eggs rolling off, so in many cases a couple of twigs are adequate. Also the pigeon nests I’ve personally seen are a little more structured than the ones people photograph and make fun of.
(I feel the need to defend the skills and smarts of pigeons)
@Moon Custafer:
(I feel the need to defend the skills and smarts of pigeons)
Dick Dastardly and the Vulture Squadron spent a seventeen-episode series lavishing aerial assault, elaborate schemes, and cracktacular steampunk Mad Invention upon the pursuit of one pigeon. They failed.
(Dear eight-year-old self: remind me again. What part of that did you find so cool that you signed up for it?)
http://www.hakes.com/Image/MediumRes/4644/2/image.jpg
@Moon: We have both imported pigeons by the millions, and native mourning doves.
The mourning doves have about half the IQ of the pigeons, believe me.
You could never make a cartoon about them in the mean streets of NYC like the Animaniacs had The Goodfeathers.
Another bird that’s thoroughly adapted itself to artificial environs is the chimney swift … it’s right there in the name, even.
As for the pigeons being smarter than the native mourning doves, that’s hardly surprising. Unintentionally, we’ve bred them for intelligence. Along with raccoons and a whole host of other animals. Anything that shares space with humans will see accelerating marginal returns from gains in intelligence, as it both becomes more able to make deals with (or even manipulate) humans and more able to use our tools. Consider the effects of decades of making ever trickier-to-open trash can lids, marketed as “raccoon proof”. Raccoons have been faced with a cheap, calorie-dense food source (leftovers) inside of escalatingly tricky to open containers, which must have produced a strong selective pressure for increasing intelligence and dexterity. The raccoons of today can probably run intellectual rings around the ones of 100 years ago, let alone 1000, let alone 50,000, before there were humans in the Americas at all.
It’s one reason I suspect high levels of intelligence are likely to persist for geologically significant time now they’ve arrived: smart species around you make it advantageous if you are smarter, too. We probably shouldn’t take credit for launching this animal-IQ arms race, though — it is quite likely we’re a product of it, and it’s been going on for several million years, first in Africa’s rift valley and spreading outward from there.
It’s also a reason to consider our current cushy position as an apex species to probably be temporary, and to enjoy that while it lasts. Several other species and groups of species (the corvids, particularly) seem to be narrowing the intellectual missile gap of late, and there’s no obvious reason we can’t be overtaken eventually. That’s even if we don’t intentionally make something smarter (Caesar the chimp?) or simply make something smart (Skynet?) …
The most critical advantage we have may not even be raw intelligence but language, which effectively adds a third, and much faster-mutating, information-carrying layer atop the longstanding duo of RNA and DNA. Anything that duplicates that ability will likely draw level with us almost on the spot, and it’s obviously going to be designed into any AIs we launch. In the long term, the biosphere as we know it, full of dumb (both in the sense of “mostly nowhere near as smart as us” and in the sense of “mute”) animals and even dumber plants, might be as obsolete as RNA world now, and just doesn’t know it yet.
The distant future probably will not be a Disneyesque utopia of cute and cuddly talking animals, though. Far from it — highly advanced “linguistic life” will probably be as much larger, more complex, and different from rabbits, coyotes, and us as these are from the first ever DNA-using bacterium, so-called “LUCA”, thought to have been similar to the scum that forms the base of the food chain at deep sea black smoker sites now. (Itself unsurprising: that sort of environment was the storm shelter during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Everything extant had an ancestor who took refuge there for a few million years and thereby survived. The initial RNA world shows signs of having lived on the surface, in environments like Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, during the interbombardment epoch.) Owing to the faster speed of linguistic evolution, 10,000 years in the future might be as different from the present as the present is from that ancient black smoker 4 billion years ago.
And our experience of being encapsulated, hermetically distinct “identity siloes”, aka individuals, will not likely be typical then. Do plasmid-swapping bacteria have meaningfully distinct identities, or do they form a genetic “hive mind”? I’m not exactly saying “you will be assimilated; resistance is futile” here, but that’s likely to hit closer to the mark than “the people of then are much like the people of now” is … indeed, aren’t elements of that present already? What are cultures, subcultures, professions with their specialist jargons and pools of expertise, institutions, ethnic identities, and things like that, if not perhaps the early simple ancestors of those future great hives? And we, the ancestors of their cell-nuclei, mitochondria, and such … no, more like the transcription factors and snRNPs and transfer RNAs and such, the swarm of little ancillary things that process the information from the repositories, with the nuclei themselves being great Wikipedia-like assemblages of linguistic objects that provide the gold-masters of key information; and the analogues of proteins, doing the kinetic jobs, will probably most closely resemble some amalgamation of animals and machines. Cyborgs of some sort, remotely directed by the brains.
The things most like us, with a hard border between “their own mind” and “everyone else”, will be that subset of such whose jobs require long enough separations with spotty or low-bandwidth enough communications as to require a high degree of autonomy and a lot of local smarts. Scouts establishing new hives around distant stars, or prospecting among the asteroids, perhaps, along with immune-system and disaster-repair functions that have to assume wrecked infrastructure if not an actively hostile environment. So, explorers, paramedics, firefighters, and such, to put it in terms of recognizable 21st-century occupations. And even they may have relatively short lives as discrete individuals, before (if they survive) returning to the core to be reabsorbed into the polity, their experiences enriching the whole while their temporary individual identity dissolves back into that from whence it came. Almost like the rapture-afterlives of our religions, perhaps, returning to and becoming one with the godhead again. I don’t know whether this would be a bad or a good thing; most likely, our moral intuitions simply aren’t well adapted for conditions in the year 12,000. How does a scout bee feel upon re-entering the hive to do its little ass-waggle dance and then rejoin the swarm? It might feel something like that.