Today's image is this stunner:
Are you ready? LET'S GO!
- "Every guy thinks" BZZZZT. Guys are not a monolith. They do not all think the same thing. The idea that guys all think the same thing in this case is based on the assumption that all guys are straight, cisgendered, and thinking about girls. Hello patriarchy, how are you?
- "that every girls' dream is to find the perfect guy." BZZZZT. As above, girls are not a monolith.
- Also, calling women "girls" is infantilizing. There are many things to recommend girls! Small children can be really fun! However, adult women are not small children! They have significant differences in their mental and physical capacities. Using the same term for six-year-olds and thirty-six-year-olds erases those differences and builds a base of support for treating women as if they just don't know their own minds, they aren't logical, they can't make decisions on their own, they just need someone to take care of them... see also the recent push of anti-choice legislation surrounding mandatory ultrasound before abortion. It's predicated on the opinion that IF ONLY WOMEN KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING! LET'S GIVE THEM MORE INFORMATION! Which ignores the fact that um, yeah, people getting abortions? Know what they're doing. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE DOING IT.
- Women do not exist for men, or to find men, or to date/fuck/sleep with/marry men. Many women do these things! They are not the end-all, be-all of women's existence.
- "every girls dream is to eat without getting fat!" Hello fat hate my old friend!
Leaving aside the repeated use of "girl", leaving aside the non-standard grammar, leaving aside the assumed monolith, we're left with "women dream of eating without getting fat." The thing of it is, I have known people who have actually yearned for this. The question becomes, why? Oh, perhaps it's because we live in a society that clearly privileges thin-ness, conflates it with health, and are awash in messages that fat kills. I'm not even talking about the subtle messages here, I'm talking about the blunt messages that fat kills.
Thanks for your FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, Google.
So again, leaving aside the subtle messages about "increasing your health" and such, when you are told that fat kills, and you see fat people made fun of and stigmatized (see: every fat joke, ever), it's adaptive behavior to not want to be fat. It is! It lessens the stigma you face, and if you buy the message that fat will kill you, then clearly it'll keep you alive longer.
Flaw number one, though is, you're going to die anyway. You are! Fact of life!
Flaw number two is that a lot of the science on weight and fat are pretty fucking wrong! If you haven't already, I recommend reading Junkfood Science. There aren't super-recent updates, but there are a lot of takedowns of the common things we're told about fat and weight there. I also strongly recommend Fat Nutritionist. No, really, go read her blog NOW. It's amazing.
So yeah, this is actually a common dream. However, it's not universal, and it's straight up fat hate.
It also plays in to sexism - if you're obsessed with how you look, and making sure you don't eat too much and don't get fat, you literally do not have the brain power to deal with other things, like ohhhhhhh fighting the good fight against restrictive anti-choice legislation. (No, really - when you're hungry (and if you're on a diet so you don't get fat or become not-fat, you're hungry, since you're literally starving yourself) your capacity for thought is diminished.)
And like we've detailed here before, images like this just propagate these memes. How many people see this and laugh because well DUH, of course it's true!
It's really, really not, though.
So yup, BINGO.
