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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Yeah, they feel really bad themselves. So it’s very, very important to them that everybody else feel the same. And if we don’t, they’ll do their best to make us feel really bad. Sorry, guys, it’s not gonna work. Maybe you should get some help.
Did they miss the whole dad bods thing?
It’s odd to see right-wingers throwing the seven deadly sins at others … no, wait, they’re always projecting like lighthouses, so it’s not the least bit odd.
But consider. Lust, greed, and gluttony are all variations on the same theme (excessive hoarding and consumption), driven by envy: must keep up with, or better yet overtake, the Joneses. Wrath is also a product of envy, when it’s not righteous anger at injustice: failure to keep up with the Joneses. And the envy is the product of pride — not healthy pride, like in a job well done, but the narcissistic sort, believing that more people should be beneath one in the pecking order than currently are … including the Joneses. So, six of the seven are all ultimately about the entitled attitudes of those who live, eat, and breathe hierarchy … the right wing.
But the one this guy mentioned, sloth, is the remaining one. Who are the idlest people on the planet, though? The rich. How many days did Trump play golf rather than work? A lot more than he complained about Obama having spent, that’s for sure.
To the ruling class, the accusation of sloth can be a cudgel with which to beat anyone they feel isn’t making them enough money with their labors, and the other six anyone who grumbles about their low place in the hierarchy and the meagre grape-skins they are permitted. But if you take egalitarianism as a starting point, who embody these traits the most? Those at the apex of the socio-economic hierarchy. And look at which political philosophies correspond to which? Lust: the wanton rampages of warlords during history’s more Mad Maxish periods. Greed, envy, and gluttony: Capitalism (and its forerunner, feudalism). Pride and wrath: Fascism. Sloth: nihilism, of the sort typified by incels and the more do-nothing portion of the neoreaction movement (e.g. Mencius Moldbug) — the more active ones being fascists instead. Sloth also seems to be the personal philosophy of the people at the top, the kings and CEOs and hedge fund managers, to judge by their ratios of hours doing good honest work to vacation time. It’s all that’s left once you’ve used the other six to climb all the way to the top of that stupid hierarchy.
What, meanwhile, is the one thing that could obliterate all seven entirely, rendering them moot? Obliteration of the hierarchy itself …
@Surplus to Requirements:
To me, righteous anger isn’t wrath; it’s fury. Wrath has an implication of being uncontrolled and lashing out, whereas fury is much more focused.
And I think that a lot of people would agree that if you can look at the world today and not be furious, you’re not paying attention. (Sadly, many of the people who would agree with this are also the ones being wrathful and merely claiming that it’s fury. See above.)
Every fat person I know (including me) works full-time, often at a physical job. We’re extremely active at sloth, I guess.
This seems like something for r/selfawarewolves … Like OP is just seconds away from self awareness, but never quite reaches it.
Are sloths named after the vice or is the vice named after the animal?
All I know about sloths is they used the be f***ing massive. They have one in the Natural History Museum and I wouldn’t want to mess with him.
Sounds more like he’s describing the various incel groups tbh
@Alan, well that’s one of the European names for ’em – so named after the vice, Europeans being a bit judgmental there perhaps :-s
I’ve seen that Giant Sloth, I think, and yes – no messing about with those claws. (I think there’s a skeleton in the Pitt-Rivers Museum as well which is a bit impressive not to say extremely daunting)
(indigenous names vary a lot as you might imagine; the one I’ve heard of is the ai-ai (3-toed sloth) which – google says – refers to their cry and not their energy-saving)
(not to be confused, I just realised, with the aye-aye which is of course a Madagascan lemur …)
(not to be confused with novocastrians’ and police officers’ utterances either, I suppose)
Tangentially relevant to the topic: Lizzo(1), by invitation from the Library of Congress, got to play a historic crystal flute that had belonged to President James Madison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NskQtP9dwQE
This summoned the usual plague of Fake Geek Boys lamenting the defilement of something they’d never even heard of until five minutes previously:
http://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1575291726709018624
(1) Singer, rapper, actress, comedienne, and world-class classically-trained flute virtuosa.
2 FMO
Indeed she is.
She also has cool taste in cakes.
From here if you want one. https://www.erinmckennasbakery.com
As a bit of a history nerd, I like that she gave us a mini lecture.
@ opposable thumbs
I wonder whether they considered naming an animal for each of the other ones.
@Alan Robertshaw:
This also affords me a cue to plug one of those online shrines to someone’s obsessive special interest: http://flutetunes.com. Since 2009, they’ve maintained an extensive searchable database of public domain(1) flute music, posting historical information, sheet music, MIDIs, and MP3s for their Featured Tune of the Day daily without fail at about 6:00 AM Eastern U.S. time.
All they’ll divulge is that there are two of them; they’re so determinedly anonymous that they refuse donations. They’re the Phantom Flute Fairies.
(1) They even accept original compositions donated by readers:
https://www.flutetunes.com/tunes.php?id=5057
@FMOx: I loooooved all the videos of that. But I am a Lizzo stan, and besides liking her music and her attitude, I also like it when she pisses off the MRAs/incels/MGTOW/white supremacists (But I repeat myself). I guarantee she’s more physically active every day than 90% of the assholes who are slagging her off online for being large and in charge. Also, c’mon! A flautist rapper! How great is that?
A popular and powerful Black woman using an instrument originally owned by a slaver… that bends the moral arc towards justice just a little bit. Cry moar, man-babies.
I think people here are familiar with my view that Neanderthals (and indeed Heidelbergensis and Denisovan, and possibly some ghost populations) are all full members of the human family (not subspecies). They created the first art that we know of; and also the first music. So thank you for the excuse to post this.
(Got back from a family visit; can’t post here on my phone)
I had skimmed my FB feed while away and saw the picture of Lizzo playing that flute (and caught the “James Madison” part of the headline). I had not initially realized it WAS Lizzo and find it surprising and interesting that she’s a flautist!
Alan – I don’t suppose the taxonomic classification depends on how “human” the various human species and subspecies were in terms of culture and inner life?
@Alan Robertshaw:
I wonder whether they considered naming an animal for each of the other ones.
”Glutton” is an alternate name for the wolverine (and indeed the Latin basis for its scientific name: Gulo gulo.)
@Surplus to Requirements A very good and accurate analysis.
I think the advantage men have over women is that they can carry a hell of a lot more weight than women before they register as “fat” (as someone mentioned above, the whole dad bod thing). I put on weight I didn’t shift in lockdown but would still be considered “healthy” in the doctor’s office, and I’m already getting subtle hints on weight from certain people.
Once they are perceived as fat though I’d say the shaming is on a level.
Nonsense. Weight is rising in every culture in every corner of the globe. It’s almost like we have an aggressively lobbying food industry which goes hand-in-hand with a similarly aggressive diet industry that profits from weight cycling, and which are often owned by the same mega-corps!
@ lumipuna
Well I think you hit the nail on the head there. The whole species thing is pretty arbitrary. There are at least 37 different definitions of species used in academia. Some palaeontologists regard juvenile and adult dinosaurs as different species. They find it more useful to categorise by behaviour and niches. And I think that might also be useful for humans.
Archaic humans could interbreed. So that seems to make the most common definition of species irrelevant.
If we consider behaviour it seems all humans engaged in the same sort of stuff. Day to day living and subsidence could just be convergent evolution. Everyone needs to eat and protect against the elements. And I supposed you could argue there’s an evolutionary pressure for altruism. Although when we see evidence of medical treatment and care, my gut instinct is that’s just compassion.
But it seems all humans engaged in funerary rituals, made art and music, and I suspect engaged in things like story telling. The fact that so many disparate cultures have myths about the Pleiades’ missing star suggests story telling goes a long way back.
So to me the test would be, if you plonked an archaic human kid in college, could they end up as a pilot, or an accountant, or a philosopher? I suspect the answer is an emphatic yes*.
So as far as I’m concerned the morphological differences are no more relevant than hair colour. Not least because there’s no feature of archaic humans that isn’t also found in the modern population. Heck, even the occipital bun is still around.
(* The prevalence of cave painting makes me suspect they’d all be in art school)
@Alan:
Well, yes. Anybody who paid attention in biology for the last several decades should recognize that. I mean, even with the core concept of ‘able to interbreed and produce viable offspring’, ‘ring species’ are a thing. (Three isolated groups of birds, A, B, and C. A can interbreed with B but not C. C can interbreed with B but not A. B can interbreed with both. Where do you draw the lines?) And my understanding is that dogs as a class come close to falling under this, as some dogs can still interbreed with wolves but others can’t.
Sadly the concept was baked into early attempts at understanding biology before we understood what was actually going on at a biochemical level, and how messy and vague things were.
Full Metal Ox:
Interesting. According to English Wikipedia, the wolverine has names with similar etymologies in several West Germanic, Baltic and Finnic languages (for example Finnish ahma). I think the English “glutton” was likely inspired by early modern Latin gulo, which again was likely translated from German Vielfraß.
However, it seems the German name was originally a mistranslation from Norwegian fjellfross, or “mountain cat”, giving the animal an entirely random reputation for gluttony.
Unclear if the Baltic and Finnic names are also based on this incidental reputation that apparently originated in early German naturalist literature. Finnish Wikipedia mentions the animal has other, seemingly old names with no obvious etymology.
Alan:
Taxonomy is indeed highly arbitrary, especially with regard to extinct species. It’s mainly a convention to help us know what kind of organism exactly we’re talking about.
However, the question of dinosaur juveniles and adults being considered possibly different species is not about how we apply the species definition; it’s about what we can know about the fossil animals in the first place. Just because in some (living) animals juveniles and adults have different behaviors and ecological niches doesn’t make them different species in taxonomic sense.
The physical differences between us and neanderthals are indeed fairly superficial, and probably only warrant a subspecies distinction. Neanderthals apparently also had a level of culture and technology not much different from contemporary modern-type humans; and both were probably only a little more advanced than their common ancestor that lived about half a million years ago. Even those differences may well have been caused by limits of cultural accumulation, rather than brainpower as such (so I basically agree with your scenario of a neanderthal going to school in a modern environment).
But until late Pleistocene there were a number of other types of human, broadly speaking, and some of them were more archaic than neanderthals and much more distantly related to us. Or, rather than being “archaic”, they were derived in their own ways, but they apparently had smaller brains and less sophisticated material cultures. In that regard, they were like the earliest types classified (arbitrarily) in the genus Homo in early Pleistocene.
I’d say that being human is a spectrum, both as a lifestyle and a taxonomical similarity to us, both in time and between contemporary sister species (that is, until all our sister species went extinct). By convention, “human” is often used to mean whatever falls taxonomically in the genus Homo. Almost certainly, the gradual evolution of language for example goes back to early Homo species, at least. However, complex story-telling may very well have been restricted to Homo sapiens, if not necessarily modern-type Homo sapiens.
@Jenora: There’s a whole ring of ring species around the north pole, in fact. Each breeding with its neighbors to one side, but can’t with ones farther out from them.
@Nequam: It’s true; “Lizzo plays James Madison’s flute” certainly does look like a random bunch of words. Yours truly, already knowing her flautist abilities, was just delighted.
Also, big props for her saying history is cool. Madison could never have imagined a Black woman, beloved by many, playing his flute. Let alone twerking while she did it and getting the audience to roar in delight.