InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Hoopla, Denton!"

Selina (bloodbeat) wrote,
@ 2008-01-08 18:10:00

Current mood:

distressed

I can't even begin to say how horribly, horribly disturbed I am by the girl posting her "weight-loss comm" in asylum_promo. Does she really think that she's going to lose 90 pounds in just three weeks by fasting for three days and then eating a bowl of soup and a sugar-free treat? If she actually does that, and keeps doing it past the three weeks, then she won't have to worry about being thin.

She'll be dead. And she can look like a beautifully dressed rail whilst lying embalmed in her coffin.

It's attitudes like that, people who think that the old saying "you can never be too rich or too thin" is true, that make me want to vomit. Are the values that society is sending younger people today, especially young girls who should be giggling over their first crushes and enjoying life, so misguided and fucked-up that they actually think starving themselves to the point of death will make them attractive?

No, I have never had a problem with my weight. I am an even 6'0" tall in my bare feet, and I weigh 170 pounds. I've gone up the scale by 15-20 pounds at certain times, and I've fallen back down again to a little over 160. But it's never been because I've actually tried to lose weight. I recoil at the thought of dieting. To me, the word "diet" is just DIE with a T spliced onto the end of it. I'm happy with how I look, and I don't have to mangle/mutilate my body to like it.

Why does our society focus so much on how much people weigh? Yes, people should be healthy, and being grossly obese/overweight is definitely not healthy for anyone. But at the same time, being anorexic and starving yourself to death simply to try to fit some unattainable goal of "beauty" is utterly and absolutely ridiculous.

Who sets these "standards," anyway? They certainly aren't held up there by any "normal" person, the average Joe (or Josephine) Blow on the street in Everytown/city USA, or anywhere in the world for that matter. These "ideals of beauty" are set by people who want to make money, to hawk their wares at any costs, and they don't give a farking TINKER'S CUSS if their bullshite "standards" hurt people irreparably as long as they have the almighty dollar going into their bank accounts.

It literally makes me feel sick to my stomach when I see diets being advertised, or anorexic, unhealthy, drug-addicted models set up as being the height of beauty for the female form. I'm a woman. I have breasts, hips and an arse, and I'm proud of them. No, I'm not what these small-minded, idiotic, judgemental people would call "perfect." I'm not rail-thin, and I never will be. Nor would I want to be.

But I'm happy with how I look. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a healthy (if overly tall for my tastes) female form, and I'm proud of it. Yes, I may not fit in a size 0. But my god, why would I want to? Why on earth would I give up an attractive, full-figured, real womanly shape so I could look like a sexless 10-year-old boy? I really don't think any of the men I like would be attracted to that.

I really don't understand what this societal obsession with being thin is. How did we come to be so hung-up on what we look like on the outside? It seems to me that with all the problems going on in the world we live in, we should all look to improving ourselves on the inside first and foremost. Because, judging from the state of society, we've obviously done pretty much a shite job of that.

Thin is not beautiful. Beauty does not come from having the "perfect" figure or the "perfect" weight. Beauty comes from who you are. It radiates from inside. Beauty is a person who exemplifies happiness, well-being, kindness, generosity, and loving. It doesn't matter if you weigh 100 pounds, or 300. If you are a truly beautiful person, it shows. Without you having to slowly kill yourself so that the world can see it.

All right, so I'm certainly not the world's most beautiful woman, and I probably never will be. But I'm working on it. And I know one thing -- I'm a good deal closer to being beautiful than any of those misguided little girls who starve themselves in an attempt to live up to someone else's standards of what they "should" look like to be considered an attractive female.

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leianora
2008-01-09 02:26 am UTC (link)

Hugs you! I have to keep reminding myself of that, because I've been having this problem with food ever since I can remember. For me, it isn't a question of image or how I look since I can't see. Instead, it's the idea that food is yucky sometimes, and I hate eating because it's a waste of time. I'd rather be living inside my head or creating something new. Also, if I can control my food intake, then I can learn to control other things, like my fear of being alone in a silent room, or my horror of insects. Does that make any sense at all? I do agree with you about the utter stupidity of people wanting to be thin because it's pretty. WTF is so pretty about looking like a walking skeleton? Nothing! I say.

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bloodbeat
2008-01-09 02:45 am UTC (link)

I just simply cannot fathom the apparent need that our society has to affirm people's worth through something as superficial as how they look. Yes, most people are attracted to pretty faces and bodies. Unfortunately, that's one of the less attractive sides of human nature. But that kind of attraction doesn't last, because it isn't at all real. It's surface and superficial, and in the end, it means absolutely nothing. So I fail to understand why people are so hung up on something that, in the end, has no bearing on who you are as a human being.

Yes, what you said makes perfect sense to me. In a world that often feels like it's spinning rapidly out of our control, sometimes it's comforting to know that there are things we can control in our lives.

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_finaldecember
2008-01-09 03:06 am UTC (link)

As much as I don't like talking about it because it's a part of my life that desperately needs to stay locked away in the past, I have to admit that I used to be one of those people who worried over societal standards of beauty and came close to crying when a store I got quite a bit of my clothes at stopped carrying anything above a size 10. I only stopped when I discovered that I'm severely anemic -- or was at the time. I haven't gotten blood work done in a while.

That's something a lot of people don't realize about dieting. Without proper nutrients, your body WILL start doing strange things. Anemia, which leads to migraines and heavier-than-normal periods.... And like someone said in a comment to that post in

asylum_promo, for someone who might want to have kids, dieting could ruin it. Neither of us do, of course, but that's another point entirely, I think.

I can't remember where I saw it, but there was an article and accompanying video that was talking about these so-called "standards" society has set for women. Really, it was disgusting. They took this absolutely beautiful woman, gave her a "makeover", and then put pictures of the "after product" through a computer. A lot of tweaking later and the photo looked nothing like the original woman. Essentially, the article was saying that it doesn't matter what you see in ads. There's a very high chance that it's not even real.

And it gets worse depending on what facet of the entertainment industry you're looking at. With acting, there's very few notable women who would be considered "plus size" or "full figured". Nikki Blonski, the leading actress from the remake of Hairspray, is about the only one I know of that I actually like. Music.... same thing, unless you're looking at opera. Actual songs about women aren't much better. It's all about impossibly thin waists, big asses, and big tits. Sorry, but that's just disgusting. Give me songs like Queen's "Fat-bottomed Girls" and Mika's "Big Girl, You Are Beautiful" any day.

If there are any statements we should be holding onto, please don't let it be something like "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes all the way down to the bone". From what I've seen, they perpetuate the idea that, if society sees a woman as being ugly, there's nothing she can do about it -- unless she radically changes her appearance until she no longer looks like herself.

While we're on this subject, this ridiculous idea of beauty is even seeping into the rp world and making it a bad place to be unless you can find a group like ours to play with. In the time I was at gj, a little over a year maybe, I came across no less than 30 characters in radically different games who all had some kind of eating disorder because they "weren't pretty enough" or whatever excuse they were using that day. I understand that EDs are a real and very dangerous thing, but these people were doing it because they thought it would be FUN to play their character as if they're committing a very slow form of suicide.

If nothing else, I think society as a whole needs to work on shaping up FAST before we dig ourselves into a mass grave. That looks like where we're headed at this rate.

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bloodbeat
2008-01-09 03:27 am UTC (link)

I think what most people don't realise about dieting is that it has to be undertaken with a health care professional guiding you. It can't just be something you decide to do on the spur of the moment because you don't happen to think you have the skinniest thighs on the block. It needs to be done with the help of a nutritionist, and you need to stick to a healthy regiment. It absolutely disgusts me that women are willing to sacrifice their health for society's superficial standards of what is beautiful.

I've never had a problem with my weight, even though a lot of people have told me things like "you would be so much prettier if you were thinner." No thank you, I have no desire whatsoever to look like an animated clothes hanger. Skeletons are only attractive if you're Jack Skellington. Or if you have a serious case of necrophilia.

I really find it obnoxious that I've also been told that since I don't have weight problems, I shouldn't say anything about people who want to be thin. Oh, so I'm not allowed to express the opinion that women who are obsessed with looking like cadavers are unhealthy? I wasn't aware that being happy with myself means that I have to shut up.

And I can't help but agree that it's spilling over into the rp universe. I hate the fact that I've been in so many games where people treat ED's as something very simple and "fun." It's not something to be done as a lark, and it's not something that a person can "get over" within a day or two and then be perfectly all right, mentally and physically. These are deep-seated neuroses that often don't go away even after years of counseling.

Unfortunately, I think the mass grave is silently waiting for society to jump in en masse.

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	wheresmyhookah 2008-01-09 03:16 am UTC (link)
	To be honest, I don't have much to say to this only because I pretty much agree with all of what you said. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	bloodbeat 2008-01-09 03:29 am UTC (link)
	I'm glad that people agree with me. That's actually one reason I decided to make my journalling home here, away from the nastiness and immaturity of gj. The people there would be calling me "fat" and telling me to STFU, or some shite. (Reply to this) (Parent)

classifieds
2008-01-09 05:56 pm UTC (link)

I've never understood the whole thing with grown WOMEN wanting to look like little boys. It's like they're trying to deny the fact that they have girl parts like hips and boobs and just want them to go away, and I don't get it at all. Yeah, I'm another person who's never had problems with weight, but that's more due to a high metabolism than anything else. I can understand people wanting to look their best, but being a skeleton and looking so skinny that you're HAGGARD like an old sock is NOT healthy and it's NOT attractive.

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bloodbeat
2008-01-09 11:39 pm UTC (link)

I don't understand it, either. I simply don't think that most men who like women are attracted to skeletal bodies that have nothing there for them to hold on to. The men I know all say they prefer women who actually look like women, who have bodies and curves. So I don't understand why it's constantly being shoved into our faces that we have to be rail-thin and look like little boys to be beautiful. It's a shame we can't revert back to the Renaissance, when full-figured women were all the rage and the women who were thin were considered scrawny and looked down upon because they couldn't afford to feed themselves.

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