TW for body policing and hat tip to Kate.
Brought to us courtesy of the Funny reddit, we have an alleged “joke” that has many unique traits, such as not being remotely funny, unless you happen to be amused by people who fail at humor.
A skinny man thinking “I got sweet abs bra” and a fat woman thinking “at least I have nice tits” are shown. Caption: abs on a skinny guy is like tits on a fat girl.
I… I don’t understand. What’s the joke here? I mean, I can compare two random things too! “Hats on a hipster is like xkcd T-shirts on a geek.” “Tabby on a cat is like spots on a dog.” “The half-rotten carrots in my refrigerator are like my partner’s collection of My Little Pony toys.” LOL I AM HILARIOUS SOMEONE SHOULD GIVE ME A COMEDY SHOW OR SOMETHING I AM SO FUNNY.
After examining the comment section in great detail, I have determined that the “joke” is that neither abs on a skinny guy nor tits on a fat girl count, because you’re still ugly. Don’t they have any quality control at the Funny Reddit? This seems like it belongs in the Painful Attempts At Being Funny Reddit. (Like basically all my jokes. Ba-dum-TISH.)
My first response is to point out that both of the people in the picture are totally fucking doable. Like, neither is a ten out of ten for me (for one thing, to be someone I’d want to fuck, that dude really needs fewer abs and longer hair) but I wouldn’t exactly kick either of them out of bed for eating crackers. True, there are some people who apparently think these people are Exhibit A for ugliness. But there are also some people who are like “hot damn I would bang that lady so hard it would create multiple new universes.”
That is because people are fucking different and find different things attractive. Do more people find thin ladies than fat ladies attractive? Probably! Except in Mauritania! (I am not discussing whether women find thin men less attractive, because I have spent far too long in fandoms where women perv over dudes who look like this to respond with anything except quizzical-face.) Part of the reason more people find thin ladies than fat ladies attractive is because American culture is all like “so, fat ladies trying to be sexy, they are all the hilarious? Thin women fap fap fap!” and some of attractiveness is socially constructed. But a huge portion of it isn’t and is based on random idiosyncrasies in the way your neurons fire and the porn you watched when you were fifteen and the girl you had a crush on in middle school and, I don’t know, the phase of the moon when you were born.
So basically: saying that you find thin dudes with abs unattractive is cool, because it is pointless to argue with what people find attractive! Saying that thin dudes with abs are objectively ugly is not cool and also not true!
I also find this interesting because it equates skinny men with fat women. Initially, that makes you think that fat men are the most conventionally attractive men, which is intuitively untrue. However, it’s a product of the way we tend to talk about body image– as a fat/thin dichotomy. In reality, in modern Western society, there are three body archetypes: fat, thin, and muscular.
No one is supposed to be fat. If you’re fat, you will, on average, get the most shit of any of the body types. People will police what you eat and wear! Doctors will assume that many of your ailments are directly related to your weight even if they aren’t! Assholes will call you a whale! For a lot of the culture, the idea of fat people being sexual is inherently hilarious, and no one is “really” attracted to fat people– they are just desperate or unable to get anyone else. Because the Beauty Myth tends to be stronger for women than men, the whole “fat people are ugly and undateable” thing tends to be harsher against women, but men get a lot of it too.
Women are supposed to be skinny. Skinny women are hot. It is possible to get “too” skinny, particularly if like many skinny women you have small breasts, at which point people will make all kinds of absolutely hilarious “eat a sandwich” jokes. (Yep. Never heard that one before.) Nevertheless, in order to qualify as conventionally attractive, a woman MUST be thin, and thin women experience a lot of privilege. Skinny men are (except, apparently, among fangirls) looked down upon as being ugly.
Men are supposed to be muscular. Once again, “too” muscular gets you all kinds of absolutely hilarious steroid jokes, but you have to have six-pack abs and good arms to be considered conventionally attractive. In fact, some studies suggest that muscularity is linked to masculinity. Muscular women are looked down upon as being ugly dykes.
My pet theory is that all this is rooted in the beauty ideal’s great fondness for sexual dimorphism, but that’s not really a falsifiable theory. But regardless of the cause, we shouldn’t be pressuring people to have any particular body: whatever is healthy for them (or as healthy as they can achieve, given life circumstances) is a good body.
aliarasthedaydreamer
Ami Angelwings
Hershele Ostropoler
Cheradenine
jlandrith
kaija24
2020
noahbrand
Cliff Pervocracy
ozymandias
Shora
sirgabe
figleaf
John Hawkins
No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? 
“De gustibus non est disputandum” should be applicable here, and shoud come with human beings’ operating system as well…
Right now I’m more worried about the asshole who made up a lie about his girlfriend trying to rape him and accused r/MensRights of being evil women-hating misogynists for actually offering him advice rather than assuming he was lying. Not to mention all the other assholes who backed him up, including your friend David Futrelle. (And to be clear here, by “rape” I mean using the threat of violence to try and coerce him into sexual intercourse.)
Great post Ozy. I couldn’t agree with you more. I wouldn’t say either of these two are particularly unattractive, I will say they look a bit young for me, but a bastion of ugliness they are not. This post couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m not sure if you are aware of the furore surrounding the Vogue (US) article of a mother putting her 7 year old on a diet. In a lot of forums and blogs it has brought up a huge argument over what is and isn’t attractive – mostly pertaining to women I’ll admit. Jezebel did a piece on it if you are interested. http://jezebel.com/5895602/mom-puts-7+year+old-on-a-diet-in-the-worst-vogue-article-ever
“But regardless of the cause, we shouldn’t be pressuring people to have any particular body: whatever is healthy for them (or as healthy as they can achieve, given life circumstances) is a good body.”
I agree. While I’m all for encouraging people to be healthy, trying to force “Your body should look like this” rules is anything but healthy.
I found myself to be a much happier person when I realized that not all media was for me.
In a world of functionally unlimited bandwith, there is as much room for Twisty Faster as there is for Reddit. I pick and choose what I want to read and I don’t judge what other people find funny as long as they treat me with respect.
People have preferences w/r/t which body types they prefer, and that’s OK. Some preferences are more common than others. If you are one of those people who share the set of preferences implied in the Reddit post, you may find it funny. I don’t and neither do most of you. And that’s fine – the joke is not aimed at us. Along those lines, I don’t go to furry message boards to get worked up when someone snarks on someone else’s fox suit. Because I’m not a furry.
And let’s finally put to rest the obligatory “everyone is beautiful” language that comes along with every anti-bodysnark post. If everybody is beautiful, then the word means nothing – what you mean to say is that everyone is human and deserves to be treated with a baseline level of respect.
We should also put to rest the notion that everyone is beautiful/attractive to someone. That has never been reconciled with the standard gendersphere dismissal of men who are not successful daters (a.k.a. “Nice Guys ™”), which is that the world doesn’t owe you a girlfriend or a sex partner. People have preferences and the world doesn’t owe you appreciation of your body type. They owe you the basic respect of not disparaging you to your face for it*, but not a whole lot more.
Perhaps a better formulation would be to say that more people than those with a narrow view are attractive/beautiful to someone.
*My biggest problem with the Reddit post is the use of photos, which I can’t imagine were used with the subject’s permission. If you put your photo on the Internet, you can’t expect to control how it’s used, but that doesn’t mean that people who use it in nasty ways aren’t a**holes.
Rhubarb
Everyone has the right to their preference, man and woman and other alike. That is not the same as publicly humiliating everyone who does not conform to that preference. This second obligation applies to man woman and other equally.
Is voicing a preference the same thing as publicly humiliating everyone who does not conform to your preference? I agree that the two individuals in the image were humiliated, but the message – which seemed to be Ozy’s concern – is nothing more than the expression of an opinion. Nobody is telling the person on the right to lose weight or the person on the left to bulk up.
I don’t think it’s funny either, but there is a correlation there:
Skinny guys ” have abs”(that you can see) because they ARE skinny. The abs aren’t necessarily particularly well developed, they’re just visible because the guy has so little body fat.
Fat girls(some of them) have big boobs because they ARE fat. The extra body fat which makes them big everywhere else also makes their boobs bigger.
In both cases, the ‘desirable’ feature (visible abs, big boobs) is a consequence of the ‘undesirable’ feature (too skinny, too fat).
Personally, I wouldn’t rate either of the individuals pictured as unattractive (to the extent I am any judge of male attractiveness), but I do see the purported comedic logic there even if I personally am not amused by it.
But… there are lots of skinny guys that don’t have abs. o.O There are a fuckload of skinny men who look more like this.
So your definition of ‘skinny’ means ‘neither obviously fat, nor obviously muscular’, like the guy in your photo, rather than ‘gaunt’? There are a lot of nearly synonymous adjectives available that carry different connotations: slim, slender, slight, lanky, boney, rangey….
Dunno, how would the guy in the Reddit pic look if he were standing up?How woud the guy in your pic look lying down ?
I’m not defending the Reddit thing, and I’m not asking you to find it funny.
To crying in the bathroom: that article is terrifying.
To Rhubarb “Nobody is telling the person on the right to lose weight or the person on the left to bulk up.”:
Not explicitly, but they’re implying it.
To ozy: 0_0 are you in… Bandom?
unDeleterious: If that’s true, then how can you express a preference without “implying” that everyone else should fulfill it?
We’re getting to the point in the fat wars at which it’s impossible to talk about bodies at all without being accused of “implying” we hate everything else. Some well-meaning fool says something along the lines of “real women have curves,” and the angular types say that you’re denying their femininity. Use a skinny guy on an ad for a piece of fitness equipment and the HAES people are all up in your grill.
Sometimes I think the only way to win the fat wars is to never show images of human beings. Ever.
Nice article Ozy, but I find the objection to sexual dimorphism odd. It’s the way that most every species do things, whatever the case may be for who’s the dominant one. Hell, the deep-sea lantern fish has those parasitic, tiny males. I don’t think it has much at all to do with “culture” that humans are attracted to exaggerated displays of our already existing sexual dimorphism. The idea of this strange nebulous culture I find strange, too. It always sounds like there’s some string-puller or like an Illuminati that determines what the culture is. Really what’s meant is “consensus opinion.” Now, that consensus opinion may disadvantage some people, and the problem of acting like a dick because of it is indeed something which should be and is being addressed. However, saying that we have to change culture to better suit those who don’t conform to body image standards is ridiculous on the face of it. How are we to change the consensus as to attractiveness if attractiveness is a subjective thing which each person decides for him/herself? One can say “fat girls are hot” and such until blue in the face, but it won’t change the opinions of those who disagree, and attempting to change those opinions is itself oppressive.
Essentially, I’m agreeing with the vast majority of what @rhubarb said, especially “the world doesn’t owe you appreciation for your body type.” I get a lot of body anxiety and until recently was subjected to a lot of disparagement for my body (by both women and men) but cannot get behind getting mad at people for their preferences. “Why don’t you like fat people, you’re being oppressive,” is, to my mind, just as bad as “Ew, why are you dating that fatty?!”
Is it me or does the guy in Exhibit A look like Jason Dohring?
“Do more people find thin ladies than fat ladies attractive? Probably!”
According to many studies, the sweet spot on the weight bell curve of what men find attractive US size 14, which includes the average american woman, the average for internet pornstars, and such actresses as Christina Hendricks and Scarlett Johansson. Basically Hollywood and Women’s Magazines have it wrong.
The fat girl in Exhibit A has limp greasy hair, and her clothes hide her curves instead of accentuating them. If she had nice hair, brick lipstick, and flattering clothes that show off her curves (flared skirt maybe?), she’d probably attract way more men. Maybe that’s just not her best picture, though.
“Muscular women are looked down upon as being ugly dykes.”
Men != hollywood.
When I search for “muscular women”, the 2nd site that comes up is about “Female bodybuilders with big muscles and strong muscular women that wrestle or crush men.”. Even the ads on the site are NSFW.
Quoting from a forum:
“Unfortunately most pictures that you see of them are when they starve themselves for competitions; to reduce as much body fat as possible and increase muscle one. After they eat again, their bodies regain a more feminine appearance.”
Plenty of men find this woman attractive: (safe pic)
@dancinbojangles:
“The idea of this strange nebulous culture I find strange, too. It always sounds like there’s some string-puller or like an Illuminati that determines what the culture is. Really what’s meant is “consensus opinion.” Now, that consensus opinion may disadvantage some people, and the problem of acting like a dick because of it is indeed something which should be and is being addressed.”
Our culture has a “consensus opinion” that doesn’t reflect the actual consensus of what most men and/or women actually find desirable, to the detriment of most of the population. That needs to be addressed. I’m tired of the mainstream media telling normal men and women that their desires are wrong.
“Our culture has a “consensus opinion” that doesn’t reflect the actual consensus of what most men and/or women actually find desirable”
Is that, in fact, true? I don’t think we should be making that assumption. Certainly, those who are not content with the current paradigm are most likely to speak up, but I’m not convinced that they make up the majority of the population. At the very least, it seems to me that those who do conform to the current notion of attractiveness possess a controlling interest. Then again, I don’t know. Are there metrics for this sort of thing?
We used to call that nebulous string-puller “The Patriarchy,” but then feminists discovered POCs, the disabled, transfolk etc., so now we call it “kyriarchy.”
How come some people are considered unattractive by a majority of the population: Because Kyriarchy!
How come not everything in the media is tailored to boost my personal self-image? Because Kyriarchy!
With so many real issues out there, the fact that navel-gazing has been reduced to actually gazing at navels is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic.
Also, after examining the comments section I think I can safely conclude that a lot of Redditors are not exactly great fans of the body hate. Other conclusions from the Reddit comment section there: men’s standards of sexual attraction do not align with the media’s claims, and apparently a reasonable number of Redditors think that men who work out should keep their butts in good shape too for the benefit of heterosexual women that like that kind of thing.
@daelyte: Sorry, didn’t read your first couple paragraphs very carefully.
“According to many studies, the sweet spot on the weight bell curve of what men find attractive US size 14, which includes the average american woman, the average for internet pornstars, and such actresses as Christina Hendricks and Scarlett Johansson. Basically Hollywood and Women’s Magazines have it wrong.”
I don’t understand, this would seem to contradict your point. Scarlett Johansson is practically the definition of conventional attractiveness, and is a household name in media. Hollywood and women’s magazines are really stupid and sexist about a lot of things, but how can it be said that their opinion on attractiveness falls outside of current consensus if their poster children for attractiveness are the very DEFINITION of that consensus?
@Rhubarb: “If that’s true, then how can you express a preference without “implying” that everyone else should fulfill it?”
You can wait till its relevant to the conversation, and say “I like ABC, I’m not attracted to XYZ”.
I dont think we can reasonably compare what the person posting the picture did to simply “Expressing a preference”. Not only did the person who made/posted the picture attempt to use their opinion (that skinny guys = bad and overweight girls = bad) to shame others, they invited others to join in on the shaming. That’s pointedly disrespectful and humiliating, and was not (as far as I can gather) even relevant to any ongoing discussion.
Not only that, but the point was to strip the “undesirable” people of the things they may actually like about themselves. So it’s not just “Hey lets all laugh at these ugly people” its “How dare they try to find things about themselves they like, instead of judging themselves as harshly as we do? Lets shame them for doing that!”
Makomk: do you have a link to that thing about the false rape claim?
@dancinbojangles:
“I don’t understand, this would seem to contradict your point. Scarlett Johansson is practically the definition of conventional attractiveness, and is a household name in media.”
http://www.wwtdd.com/2011/04/scarlett-johansson-isnt-pregnant-just-fat/
http://www.hollywoodgrind.com/scarlett-johansson-is-fat/
http://www.celebjihad.com/celeb-jihad/scarlett-johansson-is-fat
“Hollywood and women’s magazines are really stupid and sexist about a lot of things, but how can it be said that their opinion on attractiveness falls outside of current consensus if their poster children for attractiveness are the very DEFINITION of that consensus?”
Hollywood considers these actresses to be PLUS SIZE, tolerated because their “exotic curvy look” appeal to a “small minority” of men who have an “obesity fetish”.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/most-models-meet-criteria-for-anorexia-size-6-is-plus-size-magazine/
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/01/11/new-magazine-editorial-highlights-shocking-differences-between-plus-size-and/
http://www.examiner.com/hollywood-culture-in-national/culture-of-hollywood-celebrities-what-is-the-average-size-of-a-hollywood-actress-history
http://www.ivillage.com/unwritten-weight-rules-hollywood-actresses/4-a-214527
daelyte: Hm! I… Guess I didn’t know precisely how stupid women’s magazines were!
@makokmk:
“men’s standards of sexual attraction do not align with the media’s claims”
Exactly.
“men who work out should keep their butts in good shape too for the benefit of heterosexual women that like that kind of thing”
Sounds like good advice for men seeking to improve their attractiveness.
@dancinbojangles:
How many men and women get their impression of what the opposite sex wants from such sources?
Yet another subject for a gender-egalitarian seduction site. What do real men and real women actually find attractive? We could have a whole section on it.
Reddit, for all its avowed liberalism, is actually quite bigoted and sexist. Film at eleven.
Funny thing; I’ve hear certain SJAs complain about prejudice against fat people, while simultaneously claiming thin people are never oppressed because they’re thin. I’m old enough to remember the tabloids musing whether Calista Flockhart was anorexic every five minutes.
Sounds like good advice for men seeking to improve their attractiveness.
Yet when men suggest what women should do to be more attractive to men, it’s often considered chauvinist and/or sexist. It’s a weird double standard.
@monkey: I’ve kinda given up hope on the whole thing and to be honest there isn’t one good link that explains it, but this is a good description of the problem (though the rest of the discussion there is mostly pretty awful). Also, these were linked in the Reddit post and say a lot: before and after pictures of the comments section on the original troll’s blog when someone tries to call them out for rape apology.
@daelyte
Your girlswithmuscles link made me think of Io, from Wonder Woman canon
Awesomesauce.
At least some of that has to do with the fact that men inform random women passing them on the street what they should do to be more attractive. I imagine that sours a lot of women on the subject.
I think there’s also a subtle but important difference between “should” and “could”.
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