Anarchist Discussion Forums

Not to mention, how many times have you been with somebody who's pretty 'average' looking, nothing special, you know, but then had your mind totally blown in bed? You can never tell, really.

I'm with you Jawn, confidence is what is actually attractive. That's why I hate breast implants, someone had to have the confidence of a shy infant to get them.

i like it how you think people are hot.

I'm skinny as fuck.

So is my girlfriend.

I dig chicks and I dig guys.

i dig chicks who are good-looking and I dig guys who are good-looking.

If a chick is meant to be the way she is and she's cool with that, that's hot, and she's good-looking.

if a chick is meant to be a big girl she could be very hot. if she pretends she's not and starves herself, she's not good-looking.

if a guy is meant to be a skinny guy he could be very hot. if he pretends he's not and takes steroids and works out four hours a day, he's not good looking.

I've lived in five different countries in my life.

In India, China, and Pakistan, I noticed that each and every skin product marketed to anyone includes 'whitening' agents. In Canada and Switzerland, I noticed that the "popular" or "attractive" girls had completely ridiculous looking fake tans, making them orange and probably cancerous.

Be happy with what you are.

People of Native American, Black, and Germanic descent tend to gain weight and muscle more easily, whereas people of East Asian, Southeast Asian and Latin descent tend to conserve weight more easily. This is a biological fact.

Again, be happy with what you are.

I've never had a problem getting laid. No one should have a problem getting laid.

If you eat shit food every day, you're going to be unhealthy. That doesn't mean that having an above or below average weight makes you unhealthy. It means you have to take care of yourself and don't give that responsibility up to the advertisers telling you what to eat, drink, and buy. There is absolutely no logical reason why anyone, ESPECIALLY in the indsutrial world, should be unhealhty in terms of their weight.

That's it for now.

Anorexia sucks, it ain't natural and it's all in the head, and I've had way too many friends suffering from it to dismiss it as just a fucked up thing that happens. It happens for a reason, and that reason is one of the ones why I'm an anarchist.

Levee_En_Masse wrote:Kind of going on and off-topic at the same time, I have 2 major observations in terms of society and body image....
One is that in America especially, overeating and unhealthy foods are advertised constantly (particularly to kids), at the same time that various fad diets (Atkins, anyone?) and unhealthy body images are advertised constantly (mostly to adults). It's like the two play off of eachother, equally contributing to the commodification of the human body and extremes of unhealthy addiction by contributing to eachother.
Another thing is that as an anarchist, I think one can only be consistent by avoiding either extreme as much as possible. Because for example, an anarchist might say: "I can eat as much as I want, I don't have to conform to these illusory body standards", but then they risk being the typical overconsuming person which has become the norm in America.

i highly recommend Susan Bordo's book, Unbearable Weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. It is a collection of essays on this subject, and it begins with a historical look at the contradiction that you're pointing out through underlying western philosophies.

in terms of being an anarchist and being consistent in regards to this stuff, sure, taken out of context, situation, and society, it sounds pretty simple. but not everyone is able to say,well i'm an anarchist so i will choose to avoid both extremes. in many many ways, being an anarcha feminist and also struggling with an eating disorder adds so many additional layers of shame to the mix. just because someone is an anarchist doesn't make them immune. does it make them a walking contradiction? yeah, but just want to point out that because of the shame that's associated with this issue, particularly in many anarchist communities, they aren't often talked about, and since they tend to flourish on secrecy, it's sort of a conducive environment for their continuation. societal influences, media, etc. have an undoubtable influence on body image, dieting, what we eat, and they certainly have a role in eating disorders. but it seems more like they are triggers to something else. Bordo's book talks about this, too and uses comparative examples from earlier time periods.

but yeah, i agree that the goal would be to avoid the extremes and reaquaint ourselves with what our bodies actually need.

well in yiddish we call that "zaftig" unfortunately western culture and media try to tell us what's considered attractive. there is a big difference between "zaftig" and obesity.

it was not healthy, it was social class: famelic if you were a worker. Fat if you were rich and to be rich was the real beauty standard

But, anyway, today we call fat what is not really to be fat. Or someone thinks Marilyn Monroe was fat?

Killer wrote:Fat women were once generally considered to be beautiful because that was seen as a sign of wealth.

How idiotic. Beautiful? More like premature physical degeneration!

And I, and another friends, are not overwigth, don´t know how to say: we have rounded hips, we have bigger breast.

I don't know about most american men but this is how I like women no stick figures for me.

well, that´s true there is a body image where only few women can fit into.
But that´s not only because the body image is someone skinny. Is because there are a lot of difference betwen the bodies of one woman to another.

I have friend who are very thin, and the do sports, and they eat very well, they are really healthy.

There are some who are not so thin, intermediate, they do sports, they eat well...and so and so.

And I, and another friends, are not overwigth, don´t know how to say: we have rounded hips, we have bigger breast. And I play volley twice a week, I go footing some days a week...i do sports, and I eat well (mediterranean food). Some months ago i have had a health problem and I loose so much pounds. My body was more similar to that "standard image of beauty girl", but that was not muy healthy weigth. As I get well, I have gained and now are on my healthy weigth.

All of us are healthy. But some guys area tracted by the first, others by the seconds, and no less are atracted by us, the third

I don´t want to "change the body image to another", because this is something static, this is not real. The reality is that there are a lot of bodies, and, of course there are in male bodies.
Not all of you could get the same body of Vin Diesel, it´s absurd! (and i´m sure not healthy)...
...do you understand me? the beauty is not only one way. There are a lot of beautiful girls, but each has a different kind of body.

Well...or that happens in mediterranean area. I hope all that american tv series shere all the girls are blonde and the same body is not real what boring if you don´t like blondes!!!

iirc huntergatherers did have to deal with seasonal changes, they didn't (couldn't) migrate to the levels that say, fowel do.

But I'll trust your analysis as I don't have the time right now to do some googling.

Actually, it's agricultural societies that have the strongest seasonal variation: pre-harvest semi-starvation and post-harvest plenty.

But descent groups which have most relied on agriculture tend to cope with the most carbs, and descent groups which have most relied on hunting, fishing, or herding tend to cope with the most fats. And the old human norm was probably mostly gathering with occasional hunting and, from the upper paleolithic on, occassional fishing, such that they could cope with carbs and with fats.

The reason obesity is so pervasive in current society is that humans were originally hunter gatherers, with a very low muscle to body fat ratio. We'd eat up during the springs and summers, and live off of fat during winters. What then happens is agriculture comes along and makes it so we can eat any time we want, and we do, and we get fat. We are evolved to eat, and we do. Pretty simple.

A healthy person in my opinion is one that is of the same body proportions of a tribes person (which in most soceities is not fat except in later ages as the tribe moves on to support the elders).

BTW, the doctor that did the cavity search? Asshole perverted fucking jerkwad. How much weight could you hide in there anyway? Jesus.

I am sick and tired of being told that skinny women are made to feel as bad as fat women for being out of the range of a 'healthy' body weight [and no, I've been reading stuff from the anti-body-fascism movement for years and I've never once read that healthy looking women were underweight...]

Let me qualify this with the disclosure that I was an obese adolescent as a result of an intake of tricyclic anti-depressants, and when I turned 17 I was freed from them, lost 50 pounds in 3 months and have now maintained a healthy weight for the past 6 years. I have been skinny and I have been fat.

When I was fat I was singled out for it, devalued for it and generally assumed to be lazy and greedy; when I became skinnier I was told that I had an eating disorder and, as a result of having abruptly lost so much weight when I stopped taking the drugs, I was shoved through a litany of invasive and paternalistic examinations. I had a teacher tell the whole class that I was willfully trying to become underweight, that I lied about eating, that I abused diuretics and laxatives. I was taken to a doctor who weighed me naked and did a cavity search to make sure I wasn't concealing weights to tip the scales. It was humiliating.

I still preferred being told I was too skinny and accused of being pathological to being made sexually invisible, devalued by all of my peers and generally perceived as ugly, greedy and lazy as a result of my being overweight. Even when people, heavier friends included, bitched to me that it was unfair that I could now stay so thin, or accused me of not eating, this was absolutely nothing in comparison to the isolation I had experienced as an overweight person.

The fact that I lost the weight so fast also meant that I got to witness, in the space of a short time, a radical shift in how I was treated. My parents treated me better and began to tell me I was beautiful. All of my relatives paid more attention to me. People at work or at school were nicer to me than they had ever been before, suddenly I was invited to more social events, my closest friends treated me better, my boss began to trust me far more and began to include me in fat jokes made about other people.

The fact is that even if those of us who are healthy or skinny [note that skinny doesn't necessarily mean healthy] are envied and resented because of the privilege we are given compared with overweight people, this is a microscopic affliction considering the hateful, rude, unconsciously demeaning assumptions made about obese people. And guess what; fat phobia isn't solving the obesity epidemic anyway.

Considering this is an anarchist forum, I'm a little shocked by the total lack of reference to class as it relates to obesity. The majority of obese people are poor/working class, and people of color are over-represented in this demographic.

Also, I find it interesting that as soon as someone wants to bring up the subject of anorexia and bullimia, they are told that these aren't as big a problem as obesity and we should REALLY be talking about how fat people are getting. As someone who spent my teen girl years in a junior high school where literally half the female student population was bullimic, I'm sick of this trend. I know someone who died and people who almost died because they were told that if they didn't fit a certain model of beauty they were worthless and so they chose a path of self destruction. Some of these people were formerly fat, and had tried to lose weight through other means such as exercise, but when they failed because their bodies were stubbornly chubby, they took it to the extreme.
The fact that women especially are fed propaganda from the age that we could read, that tells us all cellulite is abnormal, that we should be ashamed of larger hips, thicker, even muscular thighs and so on, is still holding a majority of women back from actually liking our bodies. And you know what? We deserve to like our bodies, especially for the simple reason that if we do we are more likely to react to our own obesity by striving to be healthy in meaningful ways rather than starving ourselves to death...

i'm a naturally thin girl, i get tons of shit about being "anorexic" and people (often heavier than me) saying i must not eat and it's not good, etc etc.
actually, i love food and i also eat pretty healthy and its beginning to be kind of a drag when people accuse ME of following medias ideals.
it works both ways.