Re: more on bigorexia

From: Kenneth Van Oost (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Thu 26 May 2005 - 18:57:18 GMT

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    ----- Original Message ----- From: Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> I wrote,
    > > Even though it could finally mean that the disorder is ' really ' part
    > > of what Ronald Fisher calls the ' runaway sexual selection ', where
    > > thus the desire to get slimmer all the time is part of men's
    evolutionary
    > > selected desire for slender females ( by which their desire for youthful
    > > looking females is expressed).
    You wrote,
    > What evolutionary selected desire for slender females? Isn't it
    > preferable for the mother of a child to survive a famine? (As far as her
    > and her mates genes are concerned.) Take a gander at ancient female
    > figurines and at premodern art. Isn't the modern preference for skinny
    > Ginnies cultural?

    << I think there are 2 seperate things here, one is memetic ( the desire) and the other is genetic ( evolutionary selected and which is cultural expressed). For the kids / offspring it is perhaps better for their survival that the mother is fit/ healthy and full of energy, indicators that are more likely to be seen within a more stout female. But the desire, wishfull thinking no doubt, is there! It is NOT that the marker we end up with finds its origin within an evo- lutioary selected lineage, that the desire ( a memetic stronghold) doesn 't exist or should be counted as being the cause for the former.

    The desire has no direct continuation within culture although 1_ if we count in cases of rape/ abuse as being results of extreme desire and 2_ if we count in with what we are getting bombarded all the time in the media as being the perfect body, than we can IMO say, yes the desire is getting expressed. And thus we can say that there is an evolutionary selected desire for slender females although it is not recognized as such within culture.
    ( Why should that be do you think !?)

    Men prefer the skimmy ones to look at, we desire all our women to be like Pamela Anderson ; the Rubens- like figures we hold for sur- vival purposes. The former is memetic in origin, the latter is eventually genetic driven. Somewhere down the road from child over adolescent to grown up man, they overlap and from there on they go on their seperate ways. The desire lives on within our nutshell (and sometimes in extreme cases it falls out and little girls are getting hurt ) and we all get wet dreams; the cultural expressed effect of the genetic evolutionary selected tendency to survive ( to have kids) ends up as those fat bottom girls where we 're all so fond of, but also into divorce, pain, sarrow and really having no life at all.

    Regards,

    Kenneth

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