Totally the latter is the dominating presence. Of course, the "leaders" of the movement (self-appointed, de-facto, and otherwise) carry themselves well. Camryn Manheim is classy.
Cass Elliot was classy. Mae West was classy. Queen Latifah is classy.
While these women are the quickest media examples of "fat girls", they are also hardly the dominating pressence of "fat acceptance", if they were, the blooming rate of "anorectic tendancies" occuring in the overweight* would probably be a little less prevalent. The overacheiving "fat girl" is an oddity in the entertainment media, and the most common image of fat people are rotund "trashy" types squeezing their poundage into leans that barely fit while the rolls spill out over the waistband and out from under their too-tiny t-shirts and "babydoll" cut tops.
Fat guys don't have it much better -- Kevin James has made his career out of being the self-lampooning fat slob. Drew Carey wasn't a slob of "Doug Heffernan" proportions, but he was unpoised, lacked confidence, and his fictionalised character on
The Drew Carey Show wasn't exceptionally bright, either.
Reuben Studdard publicly went vegetarian and dropped about 70lbs to control his hypertension and diabetes -- he carries himself with poise, but at the same time, his runner-up, Clay Aiken, is the one who has remained in the spotlight. The message is clear -- if fat guys want attention, they have to be slovenly and dumb. And unfortunately, that too is the dominating population of fat men.
There's this "lie of self-esteem" taught in Amerikan public schools. Everybody is taught that, no matter what, they are beautiful and special and valid and deserving of respect. Wrong. First off, respect is earned -- it is *courtesy* that is automatic. You earn respect by acting respectful; in other words, treating others with the same courtesy you would like to have shown to you, recognising talent without a bias, and so forth. If you listen to more than the refrain of Aretha Franklin's "Respect", you discover that she's speaking as a woman who very much deserves it from a man who is showing her none -- she's not demanding it just for being there and doing nothing deserving of more than mere common courtesy.
A person "acts fat" when they miss that point. They're acting and dressing like slobs and demanding to be considered attractive. They have no apparent talents or other attributes that set them apart, but demand to be seen as "special" and "unique". They'll bitch for hours about skinny people and then expect any woman wearing smaller than a size 20 to just give them "respect" as an automatic.
And it's mostly women doing this shit. It's largely viewed as "unmanly" to act like one notices or at least cares about how one looks. Fat men are a very small portion of the "fat acceptance" crowd, and likewise, it's generally hard for weight-loss programs, even ones that emphasise health over sizes, to reach men simply because "that's vanity" and "vanity is effeminate". While men aren't targeted by such advertisers and therefore are criticised less by the general public, the assumption that this means "men are favoured" is false -- in fact, it's one of the underlying reasons that men are more prone to diabetes and heart failure than women are; the message is very clear that one must sacrifice their health for the sake of "masculinity".
*interesting fact: you're not "officially" anorectic until you're more than twenty-five pounds underweight.
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Re: Do you think people have stopped dressing up (in the gothic way) like they used
Originally Posted by Michelle Aston
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