Daily Archive

Can you feel the cultural acceptance?

Usually I start with the text and add the pictures later.  Not today, the image via Sociological Images, pretty much tells the entire tale by itself, but I will add my two cents anyways.

Short version: Life is not worth living unless you are skinny.

Everyone wave now, let us bid good bye as the culturally accepted norms of fashion and beauty leave the real world and enter into the magically untouchable Platonic ideal.  The story, philosophically speaking,  would end here because Platonic forms are  just that; a interesting story and a fascinating thought experiment.  Unfortunately for us the dictates of fashion and beauty transcend the theoretical with grievous consequences for the typical imperfect-Platonic being.

The culture meme that thin=sexy, healthy, desirable etc. and fat = ugly, gross, repugnant is perpetuated daily by the fashion and beauty industries (and of course the weight loss industry).  These spheres of intent are completely invested in the theme of “your body is grossly imperfect, but if you buy or do “X” from us we can fix it”.  Let us examine some of the more hurtful motifs that arise from these industries:

People who do not fit the cultural norms of beauty hear this ALL the time.

Sadly, I was going to preface one of my paragraphs with that little nugget of wisdom in the lower right hand corner(*).   Why is that on the fat hating bingo card?  Why are any of the responses there?  They are there because they are used to shame and discriminate against the outliers of cultural normalcy.  These phrases are crucial to the “othering” process and establishing the in-group/out-group distinction that is so profitable for the fat-shaming industries.

Observing fat-shaming in action one can see how artificial and contrived the entire process is.  The consequences though are far from artificial as peoples’ lives are destroyed as they desperately try to conform to some manufactured cultural ideal that they will almost never achieve.

* sometimes I forget that people are not me and my experiences.  The bottom right corner square is generally true for me: When I increase my activity level, I tend to lose weight.  However, this is not necessarily the case for everyone as everyone brings  a distinctly different package of genetics and environment to the able.