I hadn’t heard about the new Fox reality show, More to Love, until the beginning of the week, when a couple of students in my women’s history class asked me if I had any thoughts about it. I looked up the previews online, and read Samhita’s pre-show analysis at Feministing yesterday. Reluctantly, but in the vague hope that I might be pleasantly surprised, I watched the show last night.
Designed, as Fox claims, to be an “inspirational new series”, More to Love follows a 26 year-old former offensive lineman named Luke (whom we are reminded at every opportunity weighs over 300 pounds) as he chooses a mate from a group of heavy young women (ranging in age from early twenties to early thirties). It was painful to watch. The set-ups were of the sort familiar to anyone who has watched reality television, but the insecurity of so many of the young women involved was all too real. And that’s what was so monstrously infuriating to me; rather than being inspirational, More to Love simply disguised its cruelty behind a guise of compassion; exploitation masqueraded as empathy. The very real low self-esteem of at least some of the women involved was carefully emphasized, reinforcing the idea that a woman whose body mass exceeds the ideal has no real right to either happiness or self-confidence save that that might be bestowed through great good fortune and the magic of Fox television.
But not everyone judged the show as harshly. Kate Harding, a noted activist for fat acceptance, remarks that the show “does little to dispel the myth that fat people’s lives are built around dessert and desperation.” On the other hand, she’s encouraged that the show is willing to present heavy women as desirable:
For all the show’s flaws — and they are legion — and for all the obvious issues every show like this raises about the objectification of women, I couldn’t help being a little flabbergasted by seeing a real, live heterosexual man on television repeatedly extolling the hotness of these particular women, one of whom was wearing a dress I’m pretty sure I’ve tried on at Lane Bryant. Even if a portion of the audience is tuning in to point and laugh at the fatties — and let’s be real, they will be — the bachelor in question won’t be laughing with them. “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type,” Luke drools.
There’s plenty of excellent feminist criticism of the show appearing in the blogosphere this week, but what Kate says here resonated with me and helped me to rethink some (by no means all) of my initial response to More to Love. As awful as the format of the program was, Luke wasn’t presented as particularly odd for his stated interest in larger women. His interest was not framed as a fetish to be analyzed or mocked (there was enough mocking of the female contestants to take up much of the program). The show did imply that Luke’s taste was rare, which reinforced the notion that most men don’t find heavier-than-culturally-mandated-ideal women to be particularly desirable. But as Kate writes, the fact that Luke was there at all, unshamed for his stated preference, represents at least a tiny degree of progress.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the degree to which young heterosexual men’s desires are shaped by culture and by their peers. The homosocial principle makes it clear that young males measure their manhood in comparison to other men, whose approval matters more than that of women. In the homosocial equation, dating a thin/pretty/young woman is a way of signaling masculine cachet to other men; dating an older, plainer, or heavier woman will be read by other men as weakness. At its ugliest and most destructive, the culture of what Michael Kimmel calls “Guyland” is a culture in which women’s bodies are trophies to be displayed. If a fellow is genuinely attracted to women who are heavier than what his buddies or his culture declare is most desirable, he faces ridicule as a “chubby chaser” and for lacking the masculine chops to attract someone “hotter” (read = thinner.) If Luke is in any way rare, it is not in his preferences, which I think are quite common — it’s in the confidence that he has to make those desires known. To the extent that he represents the possibility that heterosexual male desire is broader than previously allowed, this is a good thing.
On the other hand, Luke himself is heavy, and I think that largely undercuts the potentially revolutionary aspect of the show. Of course, some heavy men are attracted to heavy women. But how much more radical might it have been to have a leaner man saying, as Luke did, “Every girl in this mansion is totally my type?” There’s an analogy to race here. Films and television programs showed people of the same race kissing years before they showed interracial romances. The “hot slender guy who is attracted to thicker women” barrier is yet uncrossed; a taboo remains in place. While men as well as women suffer from fat-phobia, we already have an extended cultural history of depicting overweight men as desirable. (Think how often, for example, folks tend to say publicly that Bill Clinton looked better when he had more meat on his bones.) What we don’t yet cop to — and what we all would benefit from seeing on television — is that one’s own weight is not in any particular way an indicator of one’s own desires.
In my own life, I’ve never had a particular physical type, having dated (and married) women across the spectrum of weight and height. My wife’s body, like the bodies of so many women, has been transformed by childbearing in the predictable way, a change that hasn’t had the slightest impact on my desire for her. (I ought to note that my own weight has crept up a bit, as the happy obligations of fatherhood have meant less time for working out.) But I’ve certainly sensed undeserved approbation come my way from other men when I’ve been with women who met the cultural ideal for beauty and thinness, and when I’ve been with women who deviated from that absurd standard, I’ve been on the receiving end of homosocial ridicule. I’m not alone in that.
In April 2006, I wrote a post on a similar subject: Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. An excerpt:
For many American men raised to see women as a yardstick with which to measure their own masculinity quotient, a partner’s weight gain is going to be perceived as a very real threat to their own standing. We all know men who get turned on when they realize that their wives or girlfriends are objects of desire for other men. One key question we need to challenge men with: is your partner’s weight gain really turning you off, or are you worried about how other men are reacting to her as a result? Do you miss being able to use other men’s sexual desire as a crutch to stimulate your own libido?
Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.
Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.
If Kate is right, there may well be one small redemptive aspect of More to Love. But though I’m heartened to see the potential for a new discussion about the ways in which culture shapes male desire, I’m not sure it’s worth the heartache and the humiliation we witnessed last night.
Hugo
The homosocial principle makes it clear that young males measure their manhood in comparison to other men, whose approval matters more than that of women.
Well, you’re the first google hit for “homosocial principle”, so I suppose you really do buy into this idea. Perhaps this really does match your experience, but I have a lot of trouble believing it applies to very many men. Your essay here (the aformentioned google hit) certainly doesn’t come across as very convincing. Your own experiences are what they are, but they don’t outweigh my own experiences in my own judgement, which go more or less in the opposite direction. I certainly can’t remember the judgement any of my male peers have made of the appearance of any of my ex-girlfriends (or current, singular), but I’m still bothered by a remark a girl in my grade 11 computer science class made with respect to my first girlfriend, along the lines of “I never thought you’d date a girl like here” (as a judgement of me, not the girl involved, though I never quite figured out what she meant, and it bothers me extensively to this day). (Sorry, that might be slightly off topic, more reflective of it bothering me than of relevance. If so, I apologise.) I’ve dated women of a variety of appearances (okay, they probably all had broad hips, but nonetheless), and have never gotten much flak or praise over it. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say a man with be better looking with more “meat” who didn’t mean “muscle, but not fat”.
It certainly is the case that my experience has shown that most young men (and maybe just most men) have little to no idea of how to gain the approval of women. Certainly I don’t. They do seem to try a number of foolhardy ideas. This isn’t comparable to saying they don’t value it as much as (or much more than) the approval of their male peers, who they probably have a better grasp of how to win the approval of.
It may well be the case that some young men pursue the women they think they’re supposed to find attractive, rather than those they really do. (Certainly I’ve heard this, though I’m not sure I’ve every known anyone who’s actually done it.) That’s not the same as trying to win the approval of their peers, and certainly not the approval of their male peers.
Usually I quite like your writings, because so often feminist-oriented writings seem to miss on a lot of how the describe the male experience, and you rarely do that (not surprising), but here it really seems like you’re generalising from your experience to men in general where it’s not warranted, or (at least) needs a much better justification than just assuming you audience will buy into it.
Brian, read Michael Kimmel’s “Guyland” and “Manhood in America”; Kimmel, our foremost sociological observer of American masculinity, is the one who uses the term homosociality. I got it from him.
Hugo
Well, fair enough. It’s not a hard idea to understand, it’s just a hard idea to believe, given how strongly it flies in the face of experience. We must go where the evidence leads us, of course. It certainly could be that my experiences are just bizarre, but the whole idea seems awfully implausible.
I dunno. I’ve been reading a fair bit of feminist-oriented internet writings of late, and I find it so incredibly frustrating when the presented “male experience” seems so obviously wrong. Maybe I’m just terrible at my gender role (though I’m unpleasant to look at and treat all injuries and illnesses by walking them off; what else is there to being a man? ;) ) I may be taking my frustration out on you unfairly here.
I agree with Brian completely. Even though television tries to sell us a certain vision of what is attractive, people’s desires are motivated by something that goes so much deeper than the fleeting cultural conditioning. Millenia of evolution play a much bigger role in establishing what we desire (as opposed to what television tells us today that we should desire).
Homosocial aspects of patriarchal culture influence what people SAY they want in response to polls, but are powerless in the face of actual physical desire. When a person desires you, s/he will believe that everybody desires you as well, and no amount of TV programs will change that.
As a woman who happily lives with size 14, I find the idea that we need a show to convince anybody that women like me can be desired laughable. This doesn’t require proof, it’s such an obvious fact of reality. :-)
Clarissa and Brian, let me recommend Martha McGaughey’s “The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science”, a marvelous scholarly take-down of the popular notion that all of our desires (and many of our subsequent behaviors) are hard-wired.
If we weren’t malleable, the advertising industry would be an abject failure.
Every time I saw an ad for More To Love, I kept hearing a song refrain from West Side Story: “One of your own kind, stick to your own kind…”
Which, complete with its implications of avoiding heartache by not hoping for too much, we fat women know all too well.
I agree, the taboo is still intact though the show is starting to lean on it. Society has been willing, after all, to let freaks be happy with other freaks.
“a marvelous scholarly take-down of the popular notion that all of our desires (and many of our subsequent behaviors) are hard-wired”
-Nobody hates the idea of “hard-wiring” more than I do. :-) Still, in real life - as opposed to reality TV - there is no indication whatsoever than it’s in any way more difficult for a woman size 18 to find love than for a woman who wears size 2.
I just wrote about it on my blog: http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-to-love.html (I hope you don’t mind, Hugo).
As to advertisement, I believe that there is no way you can get anybody to buy what they don’t have a previous, albeit subconscious, need for.
“Still, in real life - as opposed to reality TV - there is no indication whatsoever than it’s in any way more difficult for a woman size 18 to find love than for a woman who wears size 2.”
I can assure you that fifteen years of teaching college students and a decade of youth ministry with young people has brought me into contact with hundreds of young women who would say otherwise. But as we say, your mileage may vary.
That’s exactly my point, Hugo. What people SAY about this issue is conditioned by the media. What they do, feel and desire - as opposed to what they narrate - is a different thing altogether.
So the overweight young woman who claims to feel rejected is making it up? Or the folks aren’t really teasing her? Or the boys really are telling her that they desire her? Countless students of mine really have high self-esteem, but are playing a media-driven part by feigning self-loathing? Sorry, I’m just not following, and what I am following, I’m not buying.
I do agree the media conditions us — and the media frequently comes to us through our fellow consumers of the media. We watch what our friends watch, when we’re young. Young people consume media in packs — and when boys consume sexist media, they enforce those sexist media messages on each other through homosocial conditioning. We’re on the same page on that point.
Hugo
I’m not sure I’m advocating that. Just because I’m rejecting (or, at the very least, questioning) where these attraction preferences come from, doesn’t mean I’m saying these’re hardwired. Just whether it’s the desire to be approved of by other men which’s driving it. The “Beauty standard”, so far as I experience it, is mostly being communicated amongst women. Maybe men are communicating it to women (this I wouldn’t personally experience much as a man, obviously enough), but they’re not communicating it to me.
Certainly is society is supposed to be imprinting a set of beauty standards for men to find desirable that include (I dunno, I often see it stereotyped as thin and blonde with large breasts) then it’s failed in Luke’s case, failed in my case, and so many others, that we can’t really think of it as having succeeded. Yes, a lot of women seem to have internalised this standard, (far moreso than men, I’d guess), but then if anything, those men who try and force themselves to be attracted to thin, blonde, large-breasted women are trying to meet womens’ expectations more than mens’.
Of course, I don’t want to write off any responsibility we as men may have. But I don’t see us valuing men’s esteem of us higher than women’s, and I certainly don’t see it in who we find attractive. I’ll try to get to the books, but not today. (Sorry).
How rejected we feel, and how rejected we are, Hugo, are not the same thing.
I have a lot of the male gender role conditioned into me, including viewing myself as (more or less) an n/a in the “sexual appeal” category. My non-platonic cohabitating lady-friend claims she says things contrary to this all the time, and that I just dismiss them as obviously wrong. (For what it’s worth, I have no recollection of this ever happening, but her model predicts that, so it seems to work.) For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone could convince me they were genuine if they expressed such a sentiment, it’s just too obviously wrong to work into a coherent picture. I see no reason why girls who’re being conditioned to believe they’re not attractive are failing to notice signs to the opposite, and dismissing what they can’t fail to notice. What we experience is really strongly coloured by our expectations.
Men communicate the beauty standard when they label certain women as hot.
For example, it was boys — not girls — who taught me that Farrah Fawcett was a fox. I wasn’t convinced, as I had a thing for Kate Jackson, but I certainly felt pressure to say that Farrah was more of a babe, or “finer”, as we said back in the late ’70s.
But the kind of social circles we travel in, even when young, have a huge impact on how we perceive homosociality. Do read Kimmel and McGaughey when you get a chance. I’m not assigning ‘em, fear not.
I just wanted to comment that this idea that men date certain women primarily to gain the approval of other men isn’t true for me either. I will admit that I do have certain “types” that I am attracted to. Some of the feminine physical qualities I like agree with our current culture and some don’t. (For example, I do prefer thin women, but could care less about big breasts.) But for me it is very clear that female beauty is intrinsically rather than extrinsically valuable. I enjoy looking at and being with a female I find attractive because it makes me feel good inside — and I could care less what other men think. I would happily –VERY HAPPILY– volunteer to live in a world where my ideal female was broadly considered undesirable as that would make my dating life much better! I wouldn’t get much validation from men in that world, but I’d have lots of choices when looking for a girlfriend. And I’d be perfectly okay with that.
Brian, I honor your experience re: perception. But when a girl hears “fat pig” from the boys, she’s not misunderstanding their intention.
“So the overweight young woman who claims to feel rejected is making it up?”
-Of course not. She just isn’t rejected because of the weight. Weight is waht we are taught to blame. Besides, the show was promoted as featuring size 12-18 women. And that’s not overweight.
“Or the folks aren’t really teasing her?”
-We aren’t talking about teasing or about the high school environment, are we? The show that started the discussion is about women who are in their late 20ies and early 30ies.
“Or the boys really are telling her that they desire her?”
-Of course, boys (as opposed to men) can’t verbalize desire. In 5th grade, boys show interest towards girl by tugging on their pigtails and things like that.
“Countless students of mine really have high self-esteem, but are playing a media-driven part by feigning self-loathing? ”
-Now, this is the real cause of the problem. Low self-esteem is not attractive. But do you think that thin women suffer less from low self-esteem than bigger-sized women? Really?
So men don’t reject women because of weight? The “No Fat Chicks” bumperstickers that are ubiquitous mean what? This was one of the most celebrated posts as Ask Men a few years ago:
http://www.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_100/144b_dating_advice.html
I’d love your comments on what that’s “really about” if it’s not about male fat-phobia.
And while I’d agree that size 12-18 women aren’t overweight, the perception that that’s “fat” is widespread. Do a news search for articles on the show; virtually everyone uses words like “fat” or “overweight”. Perception creates reality here.
“So men don’t reject women because of weight?”
-Of course, not. :-) My grandmother who was what they call “morbidly obese” was beating men off with a stick. :-)My mother, who’s size 18, constantly has men hitting on her. I have only experienced being adored and celebrated because of my body.
“The “No Fat Chicks” bumperstickers that are ubiquitous ”
-How ubiquitous can they be if this is the first time I even hear about their existence?
“I wasn’t convinced, as I had a thing for Kate Jackson, but I certainly felt pressure to say that Farrah was more of a babe, or “finer”, as we said back in the late ’70s. ”
-My point exactly. People feel pressure to say certain things while the reality of what they feel and desire is completely different. If all of your male friends keep admiring somebody that you don’t feel physical desire for, would you really start experiencing actual desire (not the need to voice it but actual physical desire) for that person?
Clarissa, I think we’re talking past each other here. How about this: do you acknowledge that a great many women BELIEVE that they are rejected for their weight?
Of course. But believing something doesn’t make it real.
Wow. Clarissa, let’s leave it there. That’s so outside the framework of what I understand as feminism (and I take you for a feminist writer), that I don’t think we have any common ground on which to proceed.
I hear victim-blaming, frankly.
The desire to see women as constant victims who have no agency whatsoever in anything is feminist? But it’s your blog and if you want me to leave I will honor your wishes. :-)
You’re welcome to comment as you like. I’m just not interested in continuing the discussion because I hear women’s very real, very bitter experience being invalidated. I appreciate much of what you write on your fine blog, and look forward to reading more. But there’s a huge epistemic gulf here, a way of thinking about women and men and society that is so vast a comment thread can’t bridge it, I don’t think.
I’ve heard your argument made many times before. It’s just that it’s usually made by men’s rights activists. Hence my surprise.
Hugo
No probably not.
But if she internalises that, but fails to internalise the boys who’re telling her she’s attractive (heteronormative, I’ll plead no contest and pay the fine, yes), then her overall picture is very different that if she hears and believes both. In very rare cases, I can believe the latter don’t exist, but I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the main case, but much more towards the case where I threw myself on the mercy of the discussion as an example.
Context here is really powerful. One boy calling her fat (which she probably already believes) is likely to be more influential than a hundred saying she’s hot enough to sustain the CNO cycle, because she already expects that she’s fat, and not hot.
Which means, I guess, that it’s probably true that putting men out in the spotlight saying they find women of appearance X attractive is probably a positive thing, everything else aside, since it probably enhances the plausibility of it for other girls/women.
Anecdotally, most of the young women I know who are called fat don’t have a 100-1 ration of compliments to insults. Heck, they don’t report a 10-1 ratio. Perhaps they’re getting it wrong too.
I’m just very, very troubled by the line that many of you seem to be taking: that the essence of the problem is how women think ,rather than the way in which society influences all of us — especially men — to behave.
Hugo,
While I disagree that men date certain women primarily to gain the approval of other men in all cases (my own specifically – see my post above), if it is true for some men, is it also true for some women? Do some women choose males, not based on whom they really prefer, but to gain social approval and status amongst other women?
Of course, Percival. In a world in which women have historically had less access to wealth, for example, many women have chosen to pursue men for reasons of material necessity, even survival, rather than desire. And as we see with the whole engagement ring thing, and the notion that money spent equals devotion, this continues to play a part in the lives of some women.
But now we’re drifting very far O/T…
As someone that has spent the majority of my life with predominantly male friends, I can attest that many men, especially younger men, do date based on their peer’s approval in my experience. I remember a few male friends that were nervous about introducing their GF to their friends- not because she wasn’t a nice or intelligent person, but because she was heavier, or she had some aspect of her appearance that was deemed less acceptable to their peers. They didn’t allow that to stop them from dating who they wanted- but the confidence they had in introducing GFs that were “hot” and thin were markedly different when they were introducing GFs that were not considered so by their larger social circle. When the guys ended a relationship with a girl, the consolation from other men often circled around the fact that she was not good enough for him- not because of her personality or behavior, but focused predominantly and heavily on her appearance. “You’ll totally bag a hotter chick next time” was a pretty common expression of consolation. I rarely saw that in female circles- a lot of the consolation of a female post-breakup circled around the fact that the guy was not treating her well enough, not so focused on his appearance. “You’ll find someone that treats you better” was a more emphatically repeated consolation than “the next boyfriend will be hotter.”
I can be a bit neurotic about my weight as a result of having spent some time working in the fashion industry. However, I do see a different level of anxiety in many single women that are heavier than society deems “attractive.” When my friend recently divorced after a long separation, her anxiety in re-entering the dating world, in the end, often circulated around what she considered an unattractive body for herself. She was in no ways what I would consider heavy- 5′7′, size 12. And no, her neurosis was not unfounded. My friend was a very busy woman, and used online dating as a way of meeting new people. She posted very realistic photographs of herself including full body shots on her profile. However, she would often call in disappointment after a first date, when her date would, sometimes in subtle terms, other times in blatant terms, allude to her weight, and not return for a second date- or act like they were doing her a favor by “giving the chubby one a shot.” Maybe southern California is a bit neurotic and blatant about unrealistic body image being the goal compared to some other parts of the US. The anti-”fat” brigade here is pretty blatant, and I have seen the “no fat chicks” t-shirts, bumper stickers and the like frequently enough.
It really depends on the social circle- I’ve found the less mainstream social circles can be *more* flexible in this matter, but to say that people date who they want, their desires are not shaped by society, and do not have any anxiety over peer opinion is untrue.
Hugo
I have no doubt these women report their experiences as they experience them. This is made extra-easy because it matches so well to my own experiences. But yes, when we talk about men’s behaviour, how well it matches how it’s experienced by women does matter.
Simply put, you can’t ask me to stop engaging in behaviour I’m not engaging in, right? How do I do that? On a personal level, if fat women don’t think I find them attractive, what do I do? I have certainly told them as much on occasion. How society is making women think about themselves is a huge part of this problem. If they don’t think anyone could find them attractive, they won’t experience it, and I don’t think anyone’ll get through to them (certainly, I can’t imagine anyone convincing me they find me physically attractive, I always get angry with them because they’re obviously lying, even though I’m imaging this person. Not a small barrier to overcome!)
In real life, men’s behaviour pretty clearly does indicate that we find a wide variety of women’s appearances attractive. In media, this is far less represented (especially with respect to being fat). I have to suspect the latter is playing a large part in this. (I am, of course, open to the idea my own behaviour is a problem, but I have to be able to connect what I’m accused of to what I do, and valuing men’s judgement of me over women’s (or quite frankly, even on an equal level) ain’t such a thing.)
That’s a good question, Brian, and one of the answers is to continue to do what you’re doing and look for opportunities to hold others accountable for the language they use about women, men, and weight. And overcoming the suspicion that everyone’s lying to you (or that many people are) is difficult; I honor that.
Maybe southern California is a bit neurotic and blatant about unrealistic body image being the goal compared to some other parts of the US. The anti-”fat” brigade here is pretty blatant, and I have seen the “no fat chicks” t-shirts, bumper stickers and the like frequently enough.
This is a fairly interesting comment. I’ll confess I’ve never seen a “no fat chicks” bumper sticker/t-shirt/whatever else in the field. For what it’s worth, I live in Toronto, and have lived in southern Ontario my whole life.
Yes, I’d agree that fat acceptance varies widely. Brutal in some places (like Manhattan and Southern California), slightly but not entirely less brutal in others (like, say, Mississippi, or, apparently, Ontario.)
Hugo, Thanks for the reply. Sorry, my last post did stray from the topic. I do think there is a need for a forum *somewhere* to discuss the flip side of the issues raised in this thread — how the media and the culture present some men as sexually desirable and effectively neuter others, and how that effects some women’s choices, very possibly to the detriment of both men and women. I am open for suggestions as to where best to find a thoughtful discussion of that issue (very possibly outside this blog altogether).
I recently saw an old episode of “Friends” that explored alternate histories for the characters on the show. One of the stories was about Monica, who supposedly had been fat as a teenager, but slimmed down (obviously) before the series began. In this alternate history, she stayed fat, and the writers of the show decided to portray her fat self as obsessed with food and, not coincidentally, a virgin.
In (I think) a different episode, someone speculates that Chandler wouldn’t have been dating Monica if she had stayed fat.
“You guys really think I’m that shallow?” he asks.
“No, she was just that fat,” they (whoever it was) said.
Hardy har.
Obviously most men do prefer slender women, for whatever combination of reasons. But I thought the suggestion that she would be a virgin in her 20s was ridiculous.
But I think a lot of fat women buy into that. My mother is certain nobody would want to date her because of her weight, and once tried to tell me that my weight was the reason my boyfriend of the time was not in love with me! (She also told me I’d never have a good job, which has also proven completely untrue.)
So, yes, there is huge discrimination against fat women, but I also think people imagine/fear it as being worse than it is, particularly woman. So in that respect I think “More to Love” could be positive, but so are a lot of other reality shows that include fat mothers, fathers, boyfriends, girlfriends, aspiring cooks, and so on. You see a lot more size variety in those shows than you do in scripted shows.
And of course “More to Love” is going to be awful. Every one of those “The Bachelor”-type shows is awful and the women on those shows are universally pathetic and contemptible, or at least portrayed as such.
Clarissa, you seem to want to be denying reality in an effort to insist that women aren’t perpetual victims. I admit I’m not following your argument here; are you really claiming that (at least in American culture) ‘fat’ is seen as undesirable and there is no fat-shaming directed at women by men? That men do not use the perceived hotness of their mates as a means of seeking status from other men?
Brian, I first heard the term “moped” from men who lived in southwestern Ontario.
I think that two things are being badly conflated here. The first is essential heterosexual male desire, the second is the desire for homosocial approval that may affect dating behavior. They are not the same thing. I disagree with the proposition that inherent desire, what sexual feelings and arousal a man feels towards a particular woman, whether he feels free to act upon them or not, is that affected by or predicated upon homosocial approval or cultural messages, but having that out is like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or Monty Python’s argument clinic. We won’t come to a definitive answer here any time soon.
I can speak to my own experience. I’m currently seeing a woman who is outside the hegemonic or culturally-approved or whatever term we use body type. My ex is a size 2. In a sense, I’m seeing both of these above-mentioned phenomenae and the difference between them. My own desire is my own, and I don’t predicate that on a demand for a particular body type. At the same time, I have had to consider, if and when things get that far, how her meeting certain people who know me is going to go. (I really hope she never meets my bitter, size- and appearance-obsessed ex, who would go for the sharpest dig she could find. If anyone thinks that the cruelty directed at women who are physically outside the norm is something that come exclusively from men, there’s an education to be had there.) There’s a regional thing too, being from California while she’s originally from another part of the country. It’s something I’ll manage, and ultimately won’t care what anyone but me thinks. If anyone has an unsolicited opinion in front of or behind my or her backs, then they won’t be a friend.
I do think that the self-esteem issue has something to be said for it, and again, shows the difference between homosociality and desire. Low self-esteem is undesirable in anyone, and people tend to live up or down to their self-conceptions. If women are told, from the time that they are young girls, that they are ugly (homosocial cruelty in action), then they’ll come to believe it and likely either won’t pursue what they might otherwise have had or will fail to attract it. Low self-esteem also causes people not to take care of themselves (aside from basic size and body-type, there are aspects of appearance that have an impact on attractiveness that people can do something about). So the concepts can work together or be related, but, again, I believe there is a distinction.
Mythago
Don’t get me wrong, despite what’s usually believed, we have TV, radio, printing presses, etc. here, and yes, there’s a strong mythology that fat people are undesirable. I just said I’ve never seen anything emblazoned with “No Fat Chicks”, which I’ll stand by. It’s certainly my experience that the main vector of communicating the message “men aren’t attracted to fat women” is women speaking to other women, though I acknowledge my experience of men communicating to women is strongly influenced by my experience of me communicating to women, which may well skew it horribly.
If I understand Clarissa correctly, she’s mostly arguing that fat is seen as undesirable much more than it’s treated as undesirable, which jives very well with my own impression that the media message overwhelms the practice of men in this regard. And Tam remarks So, yes, there is huge discrimination against fat women, but I also think people imagine/fear it as being worse than it is, particularly woman., which is more or less the same point again. This, again, may be my experiences of men’s practices being horribly skewed. While I don’t fancy myself a flawlessly typical man, no one would ever mistake me for a woman, not in a letter, not over the phone, not at 250 paces.
And so I come back to analogising it to the “men have no attractive value” idea which is culturally imprinted. To some extent, this is re-enforced by people’s behaviour in the field, but is far more strongly re-enforced by cultural indoctrination and media. (Hugo has an excellent discussion on the subject here: Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men. I fit the archetype described there to about the limits of what’s possible (figure that the mismatch is somethink like Planck’s constant), and I certainly think it’d be impossible for J. Random Lady to convince me she’s think I’m attractive (frankly, even writing something like that makes me feel uncomfortably like a liar), which brings me back to:
If it’s the behaviour of straight men that’s driving this idea that fat women aren’t attractive, what can we do? Obviously it’s something. If, however, the idea is driven by cultural indoctrination, then what can we do? Maybe it’s nothing? So far as I can see Hugo suggests only The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men., (which is him in the past, but I think he’s re-iterating this point. Hugo, tell me off iffen I’ve misread you.) But I say “I don’t think, by and large, we’re doing this. Certainly, no one seems to have told me I ought to be doing this. Whether or not we can stop doing this does depend on whether or not we are doing this. I’m more than happy to tell fat women I think they’re desirable (okay, this is a lie, as I’m spoken for.) But I don’t think this’ll help anything while the societal discourse is telling her I’m a liar. Maybe I’m wrong in that, but it certainly is my expectation.
I’m not sure the viewpoints here are necessarily incompatible.
Hugo, do you think that many heavier women have active sexual and romantic lives? Because I think that’s the only point of disagreement between you and Clarissa and Brian. I think it’s possible that because of your role as a mentor you’re more likely to speak with women when they are going through a more difficult time.
I remember very vividly a blog post I once read by a woman who had assumed all her life that she was less attractive because of her weight about her surprise when she actually sat down and added up all of her romantic entanglements and realized that she had rarely been without male attention. I think that’s one of the points that Brian and Clarissa are making, that often, in real life, fat women have a comparable number of admirers and suitors and lovers. But! It’s true that no one talks as if that’s true.
I also think that Clarissa is correct in that self esteem plays a key role. I think a fat women with terrible self esteem will have a harder time finding a bf than a thinner women because of societal expectations but I think both are going to have a hard time finding someone decent. The self esteem isn’t the woman’s fault no. And it’s grounded in something very real, an unending barrage of media and cruel words by others. However it’s not necessarily accurate about one’s chances in bed or romance. It might also be worth mentioning that not all fat women have self esteem issues.
Also in line with both Clarissa’s and Hugo’s point, I think that asshole with ‘no fatties’ t-shirt isn’t wearing it because he could never find heavier women attractive but because he’s an asshole and is responding to and showing off to society. Him wearing that shirt is real and it’s effect on women is real but it’s not necessarily a reflection of what a lot of men would do when alone.
I do think men absolutely care about what other men think and do and may both say things about women and date women primarily for the purpose of homosocial approval. However, I think your personal experience might be skewing you here, as is Brian’s probably, in that not all men and not even necessarily the majority have that kind of circle of male friends and acquaintances. The kind of pressure you’re talking about requires a guy to be fairly popular among a fairly specific and generic, socially acceptable group of men.
It’s kind of a peeve with me, tv and movies and magazines would have you believe all people, male and female have a tight little (if dysfunctional or whatever) circle of friends they gossip with. In my experience a lot of people I know don’t really have that. They have one or two good friends, family (who can definitely have their own affect but it’s a slightly different story), significant others, a variety of arrangements, I don’t mean to say that they are lonely or ostracized. It’s just a different experience. Not to mention, that for many people that kind of circle of friends is something that comes and goes during different circumstances and times in your life. When it exists it’s a very powerful force but let’s not assume it always exists.
From my experience I can offer the explanation of two different attractivity scales - one that conforms to assumed common standards, and one that is individual, and likely heavily influenced by things like psychological lovemaps. I think Hugo’s Kate Jackson experience is indicative of this effect. I think a lot of men will end up with a clear idea of what is “generally” considered sexually attractive, but they will also have a personal scale that may look very different.
The difference is that Hugo seems to believe that men are mostly interested in the first scale because that’s the one that allegedly scores points on the homosocial approval scale, while Clarissa and Brian are trying to explain that men’s individual attractivity scales are ultimately more important for their actions - I agree with this understanding.
Kate Jackson was totally hot.
Tam, I’m a bit of a Friendsophile, so I must note that, in the episode you mentioned, Monica and Chandler DID still get together, and that part of the reason Monica was still a virgin was because she was kind of a late bloomer, not because she had totally lacked opportunity.
Also, I think Chandler had only slept with one other woman in that alternate reality.
Also, I watch too much TV. :)
while Clarissa and Brian are trying to explain that men’s individual attractivity scales are ultimately more important for their actions
Well, for a certain value of “actions”. For example, a man who is attracted to a heavier woman may date her but not introduce her to his friends.
Mythago
Such men may well exist, I have no idea. But it’s certainly the case that most of my male friends have introduced me to fat girlfriends (and the only example I can think of who has not has gone on two dates in his life, so I don’t think he’s hiding fat girlfriends). Again, anecdotes, not data, but that’s all any of us have brought to the party.
Nav
You’re right in all those details, but Monica’s weight loss in the main storyline is strongly associated with her confidence blooming and her becoming both a subject of mens’ interest and a lot more forward. In flashbacks, Chandler refers to Monica as Ross’ fat sister one thanksgiving, and breaks his jaw on the kitchen tiles the next thanksgiving after her weightloss. Friends definitely re-enforces this “men only find skinny women attractive” idea, at least in the preponderance of cases. It certainly plays both ways, when Chandler was an economically unsuccessful writer, he had only slept with one woman, yes (on a single occasion).
Victoria
I think Hugo and I disagree a fair bit about the main mechanism for propogating the “men aren’t attracted to fat women” meme. Hugo has pretty squarely laid the blame at the door of men’s behaviour towards women, while I’ve put it far more on media, with some on men’s behaviour, and some on internal communication among women. We all have perspective problems here, and all our experiences are colouring our expectations. Hugo was apparently pressured by his friends to find Farah Fawcett more attractive than Kate Jackson (a bit before my time, so I can’t comment much on the subject), while what springs to my mind at the moment is a good friend of my complaining about the dearth of pornography with fat but not morbidly obese women. These, uh, calibrate our expectations differently. The truth of this matter does affect what we can do about it. I don’t think it’d be effective to just line a bunch of fat women up and have a bunch of men tell them they’re hot enough to emit thermal X-rays, or whistle at them from construction sites, Hugo may well disagree. (Fun fact: when four young ladies stopped at a traffic light propositioned me for oral sex, I stared uncomprehending at them until well after the light changed. I sort of believe they were making fun of me, I guess, not sure what else it might’ve been. I suspect our hypothetical fat women would respond about the same.)
Brian,
Maybe I’m reading both of you wrong but my impression was that Hugo lays a fair amount of blame on media and that you agree that cruel comments by men, either personal or general, play a part.
I think that many men who find themselves attracted to non standard ‘hot’ women still retain the idea that these women they are attracted to aren’t hot, because that’s what society has told them and this gets communicated fairly clearly to their gfs. It seems like a weird idea that a man might think a woman his own body and hormones are wild over isn’t ‘hot’ but I think this is actually common.
Gee, Clarissa, thanks for pointing out that fat women experience no disadvantage in the dating scene whatsoever and it’s all their own fault for not having better self esteem! I can’t think of *anything* that would have hurt their self-esteem more than a thin woman’s, can you? Obviously fat people have no clue what their own experience is. We can’t trust anything they say because they are so depressed and negative all the time! Except the ones who say everything is fine. They are credible. It’s just like how women would get paid and promoted the same as men if they would stop worrying so much about imaginary pay differences and glass ceilings and do their jobs instead!
Also, this is the second time I’ve heard that a size 18 is not fat. I’m a size 18 and whenever I see a doctor not of my own choosing they go ZOMG UR SO OBESE LOSE WEIGHT NOW. “Obese” is the BMI category *above* “overweight” so I guess technically I’m *not* overweight! And I’m a bit on the tall side too, so I think your cutoff for “fat” is too high.
To the guy who asked what he should do when fat women don’t believe he finds them attractive (but he does) my advice is: don’t take it personally! They are receiving hundreds of messages every day about how ugly they are. I know it is frustrating, but getting angry at them for not immediately believing you over the billions of messages they have been receiving since childhood does not help anyone. It isn’t fair, but undoing that damage even a little takes patience.
To be fair, most of these issues affect women of all sizes in different ways or to different degrees, and it can be easy to lose sight of how thinner women than me are also considered ridiculously fat by some people and just assume they have no weight-related discrimination because hey, they look totally thin to me, and given the individual variation within women many of them could be affected much worse than I am by similar degrees of discrimination.
Okay, that first paragraph of mine was snarky and sarcastic. It is true that fat people often feel less desirable than others find them! But when you say this, it would be much less victim-blamey to say “It is too bad they don’t realize they are totally attractive enough to achieve the romantic relationship they desire because the media has barraged them with so many images of people like them as worthless and ugly,” rather than, “Fat women’s disadvantages in dating are entirely due to their own poor self-esteem, which affects thin women just as much so actually they are not disadvantaged at all!”
I admit I have much more experience with the media representation of men than with real men, though. It is more omnipresent.
In any case, there are advantages to screening out people who only want a status symbol by being too fat to be a trophy girlfriend. But the opposite side of the coin is that thin people have a larger pool of men to choose from. Yes, there is more variety in men’s tastes than the media tells us, but I would be very surprised if there were more men who exclusively preferred fat women (and were not creepy feeder fetishists) than men who exclusively preferred thin women (and were not looking for a trophy). (Men who date women with a wide variety of body types count for both pools.)
But it’s certainly the case that most of my male friends have introduced me to fat girlfriends
Anecdotes aside, it isn’t in any way contradictory to say “men gain status with other men based on the ‘hotness’ of their female SOs” and “men’s personal preferences in women do not necessarily run to the superthin”.
mythago,
“men gain status with other men based on the ‘hotness’ of their female SOs”
I think the mechanism is a little different - it’s an expectations game that’s essentially based on a simple and usually reliable marriage-market model “like will to like”. So people are assigned value on this scale by their peers as well as their potential partners and themselves. So, if you have a guy or girl who’s marriage market value is considered high by his or her peers his o her status won’t change if the partner he or she chooses (and is chosen by) has a perceived similar marriage value. This is where the public and the private scales come into play for his peers and her peers because they can only work with the common/generalized beauty scale, not their private ones.
Their status perception will only rise if they “make a good deal” on the marriage market, but it’s not because of the partner, but because the partner’s choice indicates that their own evaluation of his/her value may have been wrong if they are chosen by someone of perceived higher value. And of course, this can also work the other way around.
So while the marriage market model may work perfectly for the subjective preference scales, it may look like a disequilibrium to the outside world only usign the publicly available scales. And the outside world will then try to adjust their assessments and reality by readjusting their marriage market value estimates. That’s how status is won and lost in this thing. So, well, yeah, if you’re an outkast and the queen of the highschool takes you to the prom, your status will increase, as well as hers will decrease in her peergroup, and vice versa.
In a nutshell. Nice.
“Anecdotes aside, it isn’t in any way contradictory to say “men gain status with other men based on the ‘hotness’ of their female SOs” and “men’s personal preferences in women do not necessarily run to the superthin”
No, of course not. But I don’t see any evidence that the hotness of female SOs actually improves mens’ social standing. That men hide fat
girlfriends was proposed as evidence of this, but seems to have the fatal flaw of not being true.
A reader suggests that an excellent explication of the connection betweeen a thin girlfriend and a man’s social status can be found in http://www.amazon.com/Weighty-Issues-Fatness-Thinness-Problems/dp/0202305805 I have not read it, but have heard of the authors; if you use the Google books previw you get this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=rU2lVB_gjwkC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=men+overweight+girlfriends+social+status&source=bl&ots=LYtMHdtHk7&sig=t5oYYbXMF5ge9L7dMS44szpZNrE&hl=en&ei=7VB4Sv3FHpCssgPX1pzXBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Brian, YMMV, but the weight of the evidence (sorry) is on the side that says that a great many men do consider the impact on their own social standing when it comes to the weight of their female partners; that you are a happy exception to this rule doesn’t outweigh the evidence to the contrary.
Hugo
Don’t go exonerating me so quick, of course. It’s been a long time since I was on the shy side of 100 kgs, and I don’t think I’ve ever dated a woman who could say the same. (No, maybe that’s not true. But definitely no more than 1/3 of the women I’ve dated have ever broken 100 kgs, and the same’s probably true of an even lighter 200 lbs; (though my girlfriend claims to weigh 195 lbs, I’m fairly sure she forgot to take some cinderblocks out of her pocket before stepping on a scale. Even then, at 2″ taller and 50 lbs heavier than her, I’m not exactly modelling fat acceptance.)
But the preview comes back to the same point that Clarissa and I have been arguing, I think. That women expect men to be concerned about their social standing due to dating a fat woman isn’t the same as saying men are concerned about their social standing due to dating a fat girl. (And is even farther removed from saying that our social standing actually is affected by dating fat women.) The book (at least, the preview) only makes the first point. Jumping to the second (and then the third) remains quite a leap.
No one’s mentioned health. Whether you’re fat or skinny, health should be the issue. More likely, the fat people on this show will get heart disease, diabetes, have joint problems, digestive problems and so on and so on. Rather than talk about sex and desirability why not focus on the health of this country, which is in dire straits.
Claire, are you for real? Three out of four obese people will never develop diabetes, and everything else you listed is already quite common among people of all weights. Furthermore, being thin comes with its own health problems (including increased risk of osteoporosis, infertility, compromised immune system, anemia, hypothermia, and all sorts of other wonderful things). On average, a moderately overweight person (BMI 25-30) will live years longer than an underweight person and just as long as a “normal” weight person. You can’t see how healthy someone is based on a single number, and the “obesity epidemic” is just a particularly obnoxious moral panic.