Re: more on bigorexia

From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri 27 May 2005 - 02:25:04 GMT

  • Next message: Derek Gatherer: "last issue of JoM"

    --- Kenneth Van Oost <kennethvanoost@belgacom.net> wrote:

    >
    >
    > ----- 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.
    >
    I think I detect some lyrics sung by Freddy Mercury of Queen in there somewhere.

    Anyway you might want to consider the possible divergence between what women think men desire and what men actually desire. When things get out of kilter, the woman might make herself so skinny as to be less attractive to the men who actually prefer more robust appearance (at least more robust than the extremely skinny appearance of someone starving themselves for their self-perceptions).

    It could be that others are, on average, less critical of an individual's appearance than the individual is. The acne scar on the chin might seem to the individual looking at themselves in the mirror like a crater on the moon, but to someone else it's barely noticeable if at all. One person's ugly mole is another's beauty mark.

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