A six feet tall and extremely thin young man is asked by a young woman if he was deliberately losing weight to look sexy and attractive. I look disbelievingly - his present state can only invite parents of capable young women to offer him meals and daughters with a certainty that his state of health is due to being unable to feed himself, being single. What makes them think this level of bone-and-skin is attractive? The said young woman is thin, but talks non stop about how she needs to lose weight, and has loose hanging flesh. She looks like another candidate to be fed by someone with maternal or paternal instincts, at her level of thinness, unless one believes women ought to starve to a level of weak physical state so they would work for very little for others on demand, with no strength to think or resist, so society can function as it did for millennia. Yet I am unsure these people are speaking thus with sheer agenda of hidden message to tell someone else (well over twice their age) to begin starving, as various others with assumptions of right to do so would; these youngsters genuinely think they are overweight, when in fact in US they would be taken for new arrivals from a starving nation.
Then I see some photographs, and while I do not contest mine, theirs look healthy in comparison to themselves, and the photos are hardly a moment old. That explains it - the young and especially many around have substituted not only media propaganda for thinking but photographs for a look in the mirror or around.
Anyone with a little thought and looking realistically at people who might not be dressed in designer absurdly priced rags would see how real people look and what impression they create in one's heart. There is much starvation in the world, and Vogue et al cannot be confused with photographs from news or National Geographic, however similar the body sizes. If those starving saw their own images in the latter and the expensive models in the former and saw how identical the body shapes were, would the pain of starvation go away, would health miraculously be restored by a mere thought of being a fashionable shape and size zero?
Do the ill effects of starvation on the young women in US or any women in any poor nation disappear merely by being able to wear the slightest size clothes on sale in stores? Do their brains receive enough blood? Their hearts, their wombs even, the one part they are identified with by those telling them to eat less forever and look pretty?
If anyone thinks it is not a misogynous agenda - when was the last time a sport jock was told to eat less, be size zero, try fitting into clothes half his size for sake of peer pressure? When does a male covered reasonable thouroughly get taken automaticallyfor fat rather than for well built, working out, strong et al?
Once it was understood women needed to work to contribute physically to society, not merely as baby ovens (which assumes their genetic contributions are unimportant, as are their will or any other factors granted by right to males); there was housework, and possibly farmwork, quite possibly work for others to support their own family by the wherewithal earned with physical labour. This is now true of much of the world but not of those middle class and above in societies not desperately poor. So poor starve from necessity, and middle class aspires to rich society fashions and calls their own women to starve in name of "looking good".
What is worse, sometimes it is given name of health.
Yes, there are problems of various sort - cholesterol, diabetes, ... - associated by most people, by media and by medical profession, with overweight; and a large size woman is naturally taken as unhealthy, fat, because women cannot possibly have muscle can they?!!!! Out of question, since the starving skin and bone women don't.
Yet - the strange part is, most people I have personally seen suffering from cholesterol and diabetes and so forth, have never been large or well endowed, on the contrary - they have on the whole been not only very thin as far as looks go, but genetically so, since early age.
Obviously it isn't the fat one sits on but the fat flowing in one's veins that is the dangerous part, and the ability or inability to convert food into health that ought to begin early with nutrition rather than fried treats to make up for an otherwise insufficient and unhealthy diet.
Wait a moment though - what about the problems of ill health associated with low weight or worse, loss of weight? No concern funnily enough, and a joke if brought up in conversation supposedly about health. Why is that?
Because health is not what it is about in the social fabric where peer pressure substitutes for hard work of one's own thought and perception, and media can easily, successfully tell everyone what to think, manipulating facts by hiding health and highlighting needs of fashion industry to make more profits.
Once, you bought cloth by the yard and your tailor made it to fit your body. Now, you go to a store and try on for size and pay the same for a particular style, whatever your size. Obviously the industry can only make more profit if all women are pencil thin with almost no figure. And women are easy to manipulate, just tell them to ill treat any women who won't starve herself, never mind health. They will starve themselves, feel guilt, never complain about fashion industry leaving reasonable figures of wrong gender with no fashionable clothes to wear.
Males of human species won't be manipulated so easily into starving themselves, but then males are less of a problem after all, with washboard shapes diversified only by size, and willing to pay for clothes fitted better. If they see women starving to fit into small clothes, not their problem; if they see healthy women dressed not in the latest fashion, they couldn't care less. Women are lucky if their men notice any part of the pains to dress taken for a special occasion - and rare if a man notices more than merely an occasion or so. Fashion industry has no problems with making profits in dressing males, as long as it is appropriately subservient, and it is.
And so the young women in US go on with anorexia, bulimia, et al - while those in poor nations, poor societies, poor communities eat less than their great grandmothers and never mind nutrition or health, as long as they fit in clothes off racks in stores as well as the hangars in the stores do.
After all no one told the women they could try defending themselves against physical assault, abuse, or more - they are not only the weaker half but ought to be so, else how do they get controlled and paid pittance for work that society couldn't survive without? If assaulted, abused, or worse, well it is their own bad luck or worse, their own fashion and improper deportment (as is their being abandoned their own fate and their own lack of being attractive or taking trouble to make themselves attractive with all the help fashion and cosmetics offer), and they cannot expect to be defended, police can't be everywhere and watchers are not legally allowed to interfere in most civilised societies!
As for a woman being strong enough to defend herself, how horrible, tell her no man would every marry her, hurry and starve! Eat an expensive treat from a store occasionally, but not milk or fruit or vegetables or any other nutritional food that might actually give strength, no, that might change your figure from a zero pencil to a womanly shape, and then what would fashion industry do if every woman ate and became healthy and they all had various shapes as their great grandmothers did once?
........................................................................................................
No, let the women starve and be weak, so they obey as silently as possible. And if starvation or abuse damages their health, dump them and go for a luxury cruise, after all society will only have sympathy for a bereaved male who bravely goes on with his cruise and does not spoil fun for others with tears for a dead wife.
.........................................................................................................
