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Maxim put a gorgeous normal-sized woman on the cover of its “Hot 100” issue this year and, as predictably as the swallows returning to Capistrano, internet losers have crawled out from under their rocks to castigate her as “lazy and overweight.”
In the replies to a tweet from the New York Post on the subject, the incels assemble, a good number of them sporting the blue checkmarks you have to pay Elon Musk $8 a month to have by your name.
Yes, I’m sure that God thinks she’s a hideous fat uggo.
Others joked that “at least she’s a woman.”
A few commenters offered critiques of the critiques.
The reactions of the losers aside, I’m not sure that Maxim deserves any awards for courage for labeling this very attractive woman very attractive. Maxim’s article on Graham is filled with language celebrating this average-sized woman as some weird anomaly in the world of attractive women:
The bodacious bombshell’s confidence is contagious and inspirational, proving that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. In a world where size zero has reigned supreme for far too long, Ashley reminds us that the secret to overcoming it all isn’t just about embracing your curves, but accepting yourself just the way you are.
“All shapes and sizes?” Really? Graham is pretty much the same size as the average woman, and it’s doubtful many straight men (aside from her performative online critics) would have any real problem with her particular shape. She’s not actually fat or even “plus-sized” by the standards of anything other than the modeling industry. Hell, she was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue–seven years ago. Finding her hot is not a revolutionary act.
By the way, here’s the profile picture of Donnie, the guy who thinks Graham is “lazy and overweight, most men don’t want you.”
Not to cast aspersions, but come on, dude. You’re overweight. Not that this is a sin–hell, I’m officially obese myself–but seriously, the self-awareness is not strong with these guys. Glass houses, fellas.
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Two comments: 1.) Pushing extra-skinny people as the end-all and be-all of beauty is every bit as much of a choice as showcasing a (slightly) plus-sized model, one which not everyone is going to agree with, either way. 2.) That said, the choice to pick someone beyond the “usual default” for this was likely to generate controversy, as controversy is (usually) good for sales right now.
Wow. She’s beautiful.
It’s a woman’s job to be attractive to every man in the world. Ashley has failed at her job. Hence the rants.
Tangentially related tech funsies:
2008, I was working in a company that did custom embedded hardware for paper mills and windmills.
Coworker: “Hey, could you look up this micro controller’s specs from their site and print me the layout? I’m kinda busy with doing this epoxy mix we need.”
Me: “Sure thing!”
Me: *types maxim dot com*
Me: *stares at the front page eyes wide*
Me: “Heeeeyyyy, did you know that you can find the specs from maxim-ic dot com, NOT from maxim dot com?” 😅
all i see is a bunch of offended snowflakes crying about a woman being hot. incel-level takes.
Irrelevant as it may be, I don’t find her attractive (I normally find big chested, curvy women attractive) and I’m not sure why one magazine’s opinion on what constitutes attractiveness gets to decide ‘the world’s hottest woman’? That just seems a bit ridiculous. And misogynistic. I skim read some of the Maxim article about Ms Graham; she seems a pleasent person, but the writer clearly had an overdose of superlatives to share. It’s gushing nonsense from people who have never been fat about a women who has never been fat. There’s nothing brave about existing in a conventionally attractive body and making a living from having a conventionally attractive body.
She’s not skinny, but she’s certainly not an average sized woman. The average size in the US is a size 16. She has large breasts but everything else is a size 10, approximately. She’s also fairly toned and tanned. That makes her extremely attractive in the artificial scale that seems to exist in the entertainment/modelling world. I’m unsure how incels could possibly consider her fat? Do they only consume media from the 1990s where even extremely thin women were labeled fat?
They really don’t get out much do they?
Before I scrolled down I looked at the profile pic of Donnie and was like “dude what”?
Statistically a lot of those dudes criticising Graham will be overweight and not remotely conventionally attractive.
Always the way.
Ugh, I’m so annoyed every time right wingers use the word gaslighting to describe something they don’t agree with. Gaslighting does not mean what y’all seem to think it means! It is not gaslighting when someone says they think someone is attractive and you disagree! It is not gaslighting when someone points out things like misogyny and transphobia. Women existing in sizes some dudes are too limited to find acceptable is not fucking gaslighting!!
It’s the same with the word groomer. Right wingers are appropriating the language of psychology that has been useful for abuse victims to make themselves heard and protect themselves. But they don’t use it that way, they use the words to paint themselves as the victims of LGBT people, women, POC, PWD, etc just because we exist. It just makes me so sick and tired.
Haven’t video games and comics taught you anything? A real woman’s anatomy suspends those jumbo gazongas from a pipe cleaner bent into an S-curve:
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4v_FUnWYAUrwdE.jpg
@Full Metal Ox
I’m very confused. The signature says “Liefeld,” but there is nary a pouch to be seen.
@Yutolia
That really is their playbook, isn’t it? See a word that seems to have power, and just start throwing it at everything they don’t like with no understanding of its actual meaning.
I suspect this relates to their one truly held belief: “Us Good, Them Bad.” Since there are no real distinctions beyond this, the idea that words can distinguish between many different things is an alien concept, and so all of these words just mean “Them Bad, therefore Us Good.”
…internet losers have crawled out from under their rocks to castigate her as “lazy and overweight.”
HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW please. We all know at least 90% of those idiots are fantasizing about her just as intently as they fantasize about any VS model. And deep in whatever passes for their hearts, they know it too. And so do the people who make the porn they regularly buy.
Seriously, Ashley Graham may be more buxom than most fashion models, but in actual mainstream straight-male-oriented porn, she really wouldn’t stand out much at all. Or so I’m told…by diligent scientific researchers…
@Raging Bee
I can think of at least three high-profile adult film stars built very much like Ashley Graham. There’s actually a lot more diversity of female body types in the porn industry than in mainstream media.
@Kat:
I actually think that might not be the case. I think they do find her attractive … and that they also think they shouldn’t and it’s shameful that they do. Hence the freakout, the same sort that you see when these same chuds find a guy attractive, or a trans woman. They find her attractive and fear what that means for their “man cards”.
@Allandrel:
That Sartre quote seems applicable again: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
We see words as tools of communication. Right wingers see words as arrows and spears. Hurl … thwack! Gotcha! Also as gang colors. Half or more of what conservatives say is just representing to their in-group. Aka virtue-signalling … and most of the rest is verbal trench warfare rather than productive debate in a good faith quest for the truth.
That’s also why they think all turncoats are sell-outs. Nobody could have actually been persuaded to switch sides by a sound argument based on principles and evidence, after all, so obviously what really happened was that the other side just made them a better offer. (This happens when someone who isn’t, at their core, a conservative has been in their ranks, perhaps by early indoctrination and inertia, until being exposed to other points of view that made them start questioning. They also see non-conservative in-group members who were never fellow-travelers as turncoats if they didn’t know they were liberal, and then they find out. E.g. Taylor Swift.)
Donnie’s on the chesty side, kind of.
I saw that twitter thread, or perhaps one very like it. One good thing about it: it was a very target-rich environment for blocking the blue-check crowd.
Allandrel: How much you wanna bet there’s at least one porn star who’s been recruited and paid because she looks like Ashley Graham?
And while I don’t follow the porn biz all that closely, I have yet to hear anyone saying “We tried having buxom women in our porn movies but no one wanted them so we dumped ’em all!”
@Allandrel:
Absolutely! It does relate to that. Us good, them bad, gaslighting bad, grooming bad, therefore them can be gaslighting or grooming. It doesn’t matter what the words mean, and they actually dilute the meaning by doing this. I had to explain to my mom recently what grooming really means because she thought it was invented by right wingers to target LGBT people. Thankfully she doesn’t believe the whole “gays recruit children” garbage but she didn’t know the word actually has a real meaning clinically and legally.
I know language changes but sometimes the changes are not for the better. It’s so aggravating they are doing this with either word because they are stealing words that victims should be able to use to describe the abuse they’ve experienced. It has nothing to do with a fat woman appearing on the cover of a magazine or people finding her attractive. Oh, and right wingers? You don’t determine what is attractive for everyone and nobody needs your permission to find someone sexy. Fuck off!
I am an absolutely straight woman, and my first thought upon seeing her was “yowza, that’s a bodacious babe.” My inner straight man is apparently still living in the 20th century.
Yes, losers, she’d get hit on at every beach in the world and probably has, what with being a swimsuit model and all. Even non-model women of her build do. Even women who aren’t skinny and conventionally beautiful do. Not everyone’s as pathetic as these creeps are.
Donnie there is not only overweight, he has man tits. Bro should buy a bro. His measurement over the nips is bigger than hers. And with his extra sloppy fat*, his God’s gonna be mad at him for not being healthy. Also, that wasn’t God who said it, it was historical horndog Ben Franklin!
@FM Ox: Escher Girls!
@Allandrel: snerk. TBF, he’s not good at anyone’s chest. Or feet. Or whatever.
@Surplus: Yeah, it’s so often the “sour grapes” argument.
@Moggie (still love your pic of Shiro-chan): Apparently as of today, some of the checks are going back to actually verified people/institutions/companies who aren’t ever going to pay? I think? Who can keep track? Some accounts with over 1M followers (but not all), and companies who might still be convinced to advertise without the $1K/fee. What-everrr (teenage eye-roll).
*the young lady seems to be, as my 20th C male says, “round, firm, and fully packed”. My fat is… not. It’s all flab, thanks, and we’re very happy together.
She’s not even fat???? Seriously, if they didn’t explicitly refer to her as ‘plus sized’ and ‘curvaceous’ and all that shit, most of these whiny men wouldn’t even notice or care that she’s not “”skinny””*
* The truth is, they don’t really mean ‘skinny’ as in ‘a healthy weight,’ they mean “underweight,” because they’ve been conditioned to think that the way women look when they’re malnourished is good and healthy and pretty and normal
I’d ask what’s wrong with Donnie, but I think we can already guess the answer to that: everything.
i always have to read things like this with gritted teeth because you just know these men all look like the man in the white shirt who said no one wants her. I’m so sick of men like this telling women how we should look. Btw, the one who said men decide what is sexy is wrong..we get to decide.
Wait, size 10? I should have actually looked up pictures of her before generously conceding that she was probably “slightly plus-sized” (to be fair, to have natural breasts that big, you generally need to be at least size 16, though exceptions are obviously possible). Marilyn Monroe was supposedly size 12, so… that’s not plus-sized, that’s completely normal.
Yeah I have no idea what those people in the comments are on about. Bizarre standards.
A lot of people, including Ashley Graham have hips and a ribcage that are relatively wide compared to their height. People see this and confuse it with fat, but it is the shape of their bones and has nothing to do with body fat. I’m not sure what the proper terminology is, and the words that come to mind sound like euphemisms for fat, “wide” “big boned” “barrel chested”.
The ratio between the width of your ribcage and its length is not the same between every human ever, and if you have a wider ribcage you probably have broader shoulders, and wider hips too. The super skinny models these guys think represent objective beauty not only have very little body fat, but also a narrower skeleton. If one of those models gained a lot of body fat they would not look like Ashley Graham. Yes body fat makes you wider too, but there is still a visible difference between that and skeleton shape. (Of course one is something that could theoretically be changed and one you absolutely cannot change). It is actually kinda strange that more people don’t mention the relationship between skeleton shape and appearance but do mention body fat and muscle.