(no subject)

[eirias]

Tangential to an experience one of my friends is having with weight and weight loss, and inspired by some cool sculptures I saw at our campus art museum the other day, I want to mention something: I don't think attractiveness bears a simple monotonic relationship to weight. This is true even when you exclude the obviously-scary anorexics. I think that whether or not a body looks good has a lot less to do with size than it has to do with its having nice lines, for lack of a better way to put it. This is going to depend a lot on the particular frame your body has, and (when clothed) on how you dress it. Some people don't look great carrying any "extra" weight around, but some people do, and some of those people would look worse, IMO, if they got down to a "thin" size.

This is independent of health, of course -- people should think about that first, not about how hot they look at a given weight, and I think the health benefits of serious overweight are worth noting (though they are not, perhaps, the reason it has become an Issue in modern America; but I digress) -- but I think it bears mentioning.

EDIT: Err, make that health problems associated with serious overweight. Righty-o...

Comments

[jmmartin19.livejournal.com]

I'm a little late to the game here, but I totally agree with you Erin, and so does J. Oliver, author of "Fat Politics". If you're looking for anything to read, I'd recommend it. He talks about the history of beauty and also where the BMI came from and then basically asserts that the steps our country has taken to make "healthy/thin" people is cause a "dying to be thin" reaction--in a literal sense. It's pretty interesting! I can't say it's a watertigiht book, but I really liked it and it gave me all the ammo I need to tell people to shove their BMI indexes where the sun don't shine.