Big Women Revisited

When I set out to write about big women I was quite clear about what I meant and that was certainly nothing to do with glorifying obesity. Unfortunately my page has attracted the attention of some people who do in fact glory in mounds of blubber and women who are eating their way into an early grave. There is nothing attractive in that.

There is nothing attractive about extreme fatness and obesity. This is not contradicting what I wrote earlier it is clarifying. An attractive woman does not become ugly because she is a little fatter than the currently accepted idea of perfection. Neither, and this is very important, does an ugly woman become attractive because she has got the shape of a palaeolithic Venus figurine. Fat is not beautiful. Fat is not ugly. Fat is fat, beauty is beauty and ugliness is ugliness.

The message that I want to oppose is the idea that a woman of average attractiveness is going to radically transform herself into a beauty or a beast by putting on or losing a little bit of weight. It is difficult to walk into a supermarket these days without seeing rows of magazines with pictures of B list celebrities showing how they have gained or lost weight in the last few months. Do we really care?

Has a woman who has lost weight by exercising three hours per day and eating nothing that she enjoys in order not to be described as overweight by small-minded jerks in the tabloids really got anything even approaching a healthy lifestyle? I suggest not.

If anybody is exercising in order to lose weight something is wrong. The idea of exercise to stay fit is entirely new and it comes from our sedentary lifestyle. We don't want to put ourselves out, to make any effort, so we don't. Our bodies are not built to cope with this lifestyle, our bodies are designed for hunting and gathering. A hunting and gathering lifestyle automatically involves physical effort, you get an exercise program thrown in for free with the tasks of food gathering. No hunter-gatherer needs to exercise to stay fit, any superfluous physical exercise will be for a specific purpose, such as fun. Dancing, competitive sports and shows of strength and bravery exist in hunter-gather communities but the idea of jogging, aerobics or weight training is totally alien. The one part of natural apeman living that I can identify with is the idea that expending energy for no good reason is just wrong and unnatural.

I suppose the trick is to find physical activity that is fun to do even when you're not particularly good at it. The concept of sport for all is a sure-fire loser, as are most fat people, that's why they don't do sports. Nobody likes to lose. In school physical education is taught by people who enjoy sports and were once reasonably good at doing at least one sport, but not good enough to make a more lucrative long term career of it. Of course there is one form of physical activity which is usually fun even if you are not especially good at it and not capable of competing at county level and that is sex.

Modern life would be a lot healthier if we could devise more painless ways of being active that don't feel like work. One of the best innovations in recent times has to be the Nintendo Wii. Of course I started off sceptically seeing it as just another toy but in fact it is something entirely different. The Wii and especially the Wii Fit appear to be designed up from the user's requirements rather than down from what the latest bangy-flashy hardware can do. People want to interact with a game and it obviously makes more sense to have a boxing game that uses boxing moves rather than nipple-tweaking moves and a snowboarding game that actually requires a person to balance. Hopefully the Wii is just the first of a new generation of games that will enable people to find more ways to move their body that feel like fun rather than work. What kind of a buffoon fancies a workout when they can play out instead?

Recent photographs of Madonna have shown a woman with arms so muscular she resembles an anatomical diagram or a dissected corpse, of a man. This is not at all attractive in a woman. While rolls of blubber are not attractive a layer of fat is, it smooths out contours and makes the skin look healthy and youthful. Any woman whose diet or exercise program has advanced to the stage where a life drawing would require a whole stick of charcoal to show her all her separate curves and bulges has been doing it all wrong. Beauty in the female form requires a simplicity of line and form, if we can see muscles, bones, veins and sinews the beauty has been lost.

I have noticed that the navel can be a really good indicator of whether a woman has enough fat. Women who have no fat at all in their bodies have navels which look like creases in leather, which spoils the look.

A good woman should be good enough to eat. A carcass with no fat on it has no flavour. I like a good bit of crackling and I don't think I'm alone in that. What kind of a man wants to sleep next to a xylophone in a leather bag?

Zaftig

The word is zaftig. It's a Yiddish word derived from the Middle German word for juice or sap. It refers to a woman who is slightly overweight in an entirely good way. Just as the word petite suggests a small woman in a positive connotation zaftig suggests a larger, plumper, rounder woman in an entirely positive connotation. Zaftig simply cannot be used as an insult. Of course it is possible for a woman to carry surplus weight badly so that she just looks bumpy and frumpy, I would be a fool to deny it, but our modern culture has been totally blind to the obvious point that many women can carry extra weight in a way which is sexy, alluring and thoroughly admirable. Those women who have the ability to carry extra weight well and look sexy while they do it should not be hounded into starving themselves into a smaller body size which not only does not make them more attractive but actually makes them less attractive.

If your lifestyle is giving you gallstones, diabetes, high blood pressure and raised cholesterol while restricting your movements and leaving you with no energy you are clearly overweight and unhealthy. But if you are healthy and attractive to men don't let some chart or some bitchy comment make you think that you're hideously fat. Also don't expect that whatever you look like all men will find you attractive because they won't. Men vary in their tastes (while not as much as women vary in their appearance) there is a big difference in the kind of looks that certain men find attractive so you can never make all the men happy with your appearance or be attractive to everybody. Relax. Stop trying to do the impossible. No physical pain need be caused because some men don't find you attractive, how many men lusting after you do you need? All of them? What happens if you starve yourself down to a weight so that you appeal to a narrow-minded anti-fat bigot? You might find yourself married to a jerk who hates the kind of woman nature wants you to be.

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hahaha! Good for you Martin! I suppose some of the difference in opinion has to do with culture, because here in the U.S. women are killing themselves with liposuction, diet pills, and other weird and mysterious techniques to be thin. Its interesting to see that though studies report that the highest rate of overweight/obesity in the US is amongst Black women, we also have the highest rate of self-approval and best body image of all women here as well. Which means Black women are happy with their curves and don't really care to look like a stick figure with a big head and no boobs or ass.

Cimone

Now that's what I'm talking about.

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