STEP ONE: Get naked.
STEP TWO: Stand in front of a big mirror
STEP THREE: Assess whether you are too fat, too thin, or in what I shall call 'The Goldilocks Zone' and you are 'just right' in terms of weight.
Ok so now it gets a little bit complicated as there are different versions of STEP FOUR depending on what the outcome of STEP THREE was.
If you're too fat: eat less food, and maybe try to do a bit more exercise.
If you're too thin: eat more food. Or fattier foods, like chocolate. I hear that women like chocolate.
If you're in The Goldilocks Zone: keep doing what you're doing.
Nearly forgot to include STEP FIVE: Put your clothes back on.
There we go. That's it. This was not that hard, was it? What people don't seem to get is that to have 'the perfect body' when you're a girl, all you need to do is not be fat, and not be too thin. And this can be entirely controlled by how much food you put down your throat. The exercise bit is kinda optional.
Let's now consider what exactly 'the perfect body' is for men. Here's a clue:
And just how, we must ask, did he end up looking like that? Loads and loads and loads of exercise. Look at that. How much time do you think he spends doing repetitive boring exercises? A great deal of time.
Now I do not mean to whine about my physique, but I am a long way away from looking like that guy. And this is acceptable for me. I don't like exercising enough to think that I will ever look like that. It's boring. It takes up loads of time you could be doing fun stuff. And it makes you achey. And it turns you into a nutritional weirdo, fussing over protein shakes and eating loads of chicken, instead of eating real food like a real person. Someone I know with a ridiculously gym-hot body tells me 'it's all about the protein', and in order for him to get enough protein to keep his abs in check he drinks more than four pints of skimmed milk a day. Admittedly he is pretty nice to stare at but the boy eats like a fucking freak.
If I was a girl and wanted to look super hot in a bikini then all I'd have to do is not overeat. Whereas being male, if I want to look super hot in a noticeable way then I'm supposed to spend my life doing loads of sit-ups and planning meals and not eating bread. It's not fair.
The disparity between the amount of physical effort that is required to look like extremely hot for each gender is an example of how actually, come to think of it, there are a few advantages to being a girl.
And don't get me started on 'oh, we've got to wear makeup', cos first of all, you don't have to wear makeup, except maybe sometimes if you want to get really dressed up, but there are basically only three bits of makeup a girl ever needs:
Lipstick
Mascara
Eyeshadow
And that is it. This should take five minutes absolutely tops, and if you're stressing out doing loads of other stupid shit like false eyelashes or foundation then fair enough if you want to, but don't expect any sympathy from me. Admittedly, boys are not ever expected to smear colourful stuff over our lips and eyes (admittedly some still choose to) but you know what? Putting on a bit of lipstick is not that tiring. It does not compare to doing a fuckload of press-ups.
And women who wanna do a fuckload of press-ups? Well good luck to you. You'll look like this:
As a member of Team Homo I'm maybe not the best person to comment here, but if we compare the woman in the photo above to the one below, which looks more appealing?
Women stressing out about their weight is the most boring subject ever, because at the end of the day if you're dissatisfied with how heavy you are then you do have the option to change it.And come to think of it, other things women fret about they can also get 'fixed' by a surgeon if they really want to.
I really think that women considering getting breast enlargements should first go to see a therapist about the fact that they want bigger boobs, because if you're dissatisfied with your body then it might have a lot more to do with your brain than it does your tits. But hey - if the therapist can't get you to 'love your body' as it is, then you can always go and get some silicon stuffed in them.
Compare this with things a bloke might worry about, such as if he was lacking in height, or if he had a really tiny penis. And when I say really tiny, I mean like the tiniest one you can imagine on an adult human. There is no cure for either of these. These blokes just have to grin and bear it, and get on with their lives. And actually, short guys have the added stigma of sometimes being told that their height has adversely impacted their personality and that they have 'Small Man Syndrome'. And nobody ever seems to call this out as something that's actually really unkind, in a way that a lot of people would were they to hear someone say another person had one of the following 'syndromes' that I've just made up:
Big Bum Syndrome
No Bum Syndrome
Ugly Lesbian Syndrome
Knobbly Knees Syndrome
Spotty Face Syndrome
Supposing whilst bitching about the personality of someone who has a spotty face, I was to rationalise that the reason they weren't nice was because their spots had had an impact on their personality, then you'd probably think I was being a cunt. But this is said about short men with horrible personalities all the damn time, that they can't just have a horrible personality because they have a horrible personality, the reason they have a horrible personality is because they are short.
So basically, quit bitching about how hard it is to be a girl. And if the magazines you read make you feel shit, stop buying the damn magazines. If your boyfriend makes you feel shit about your body, dump his ass. If the photos of models at Milan Fashion Week make you feel insecure because they're all a lot prettier than you, then get real. Get fucking real. They're models, it's their job to be prettier than you, if you were as pretty as them then you'd be on that catwalk as well, stupid.
Oh god. Even as a male of the species, I can see that this misses the point by bloody miles. If it's satire I suppose it's OK, but it doesn't really seem as though the substance of what you're saying is meant tongue-in-cheek. Not up to your usual standards.
ReplyDeleteI'd be delighted if you were to deconstruct what I wrote that you find objectionable so i can defend myself ... as to this not being up to my usual standards perhaps this is true but I'm a bit out of practise having been basically lying in bed most of the time for the past few weeks
DeleteSloth is always the most seductive of sins so it's probably excusable. But yeah, I'll give you a quick run-down of what I think was a bit off about this little doozy:
DeleteBasically, I think the problem comes in at the start. In what we might term the Oakley Programme for the Betterment of the Female Physique (5% of royalties if it becomes a self-help book, please), you say that women should look at themselves and assess whether they're too fat/too thin/just right, then eat more/less/the same according to where they fall. But the whole point of the female body image debate is the recognition that female perceptions of themselves are very strongly coloured, from an early age, by a pervasive and very narrow definition of what is "just right". So women are taught, both by the media and by social expectations, to dislike their bodies if they're not the Platonic "ideal" - and since women are, socially, judged way more strongly than men by their status as objects of sexual attraction, to dislike themselves by extension. PLUS it's really not a matter of just eating more or less if you're a girl; you have to have a very particular set of genetic characteristics for it to be even remotely possible to achieve the "ideal" figure (vaguely hourglass but basically very slim, big boobs, narrow waist, shapely legs etc etc), whatever your diet.
So no, women don't have to do quite the amount of strenuous gym work that men do if they want to achieve what's considered the "perfect" body for their gender. But they are just about constantly defined by how they are viewed sexually by men, in a way that men aren't by women. Hence the makeup thing: it's much less about the time and effort required (which, by the way, I do think you're underestimating a bit) as it is about how bloody exhausting it is constantly trying to make yourself acceptable to the opposite sex. Why should women have to pay for therapy/surgery to solve these problems when most of those who have them are perfectly healthy? Shouldn't we have a look at changing our society so they're not conditioned towards what is a sort of body dysmorphia? The fact is they experience it a lot more than men, so I don't really think we can get all, "you don't know the half of it, love".
Although I do agree about the small man syndrome thing.
I didn't intend to come across as "you don't know the half of it, love" as I do understand women face a lot of pressure to look good all the time, and basically I think I meant to make this about the topic of physiques only but then as per usual wandered off-topic. But then forgot to rewrite the first coupla paragraphs to take this into account.
DeleteI was suggesting therapy for those women who are so convinced that there's something wrong with their bodies that they'd otherwise be getting surgery. I wasn't actually advocating boobjobs. If a woman is really unhappy with the way she looks then I think getting some help with how to deal with this is a perfectly sensible idea.
I'm also aware that women come in different shapes and sizes so when I said 'just right' I meant what's just right for an individual. Kate Moss and Nigella Lawson both look amazing in very different ways and if you were to starve Nigella down to Kate weight or force-feed Kate up to Nigella weight, then you'd obviously not have two women with identical physiques.
The other thing is - how much of this pressure that women feel to look good is actually down to trying to be attractive to men, and how much of it is down to competing with other women? Women don't only put on makeup when they're looking to pull. The girls I know who went to an all-girls secondary school used to put makeup on in the morning, this surely wasn't just so they could flirt with their male teachers was it?
Also, who are you? I'm assuming you must be someone I know as nobody else read this shit go on please tell me who you are I'm dying to know :) xxx
Can't tell if this is meant to be satire or you've just completely missed the point. Either way you manage to come across rather sexist (ironically) and rude.
ReplyDeleteok you are person number 2 to tell me I've missed the point - what is this point that I've missed? WHERE IS THE POINT
DeleteOk well my mum thinks this post is awful so I'm gonna come back to this. And actually reading it back it is kinda awful, I was trying to make a point but made it a bit wrong
ReplyDeleteCor Blimey leave Tom alone he's just expressing his opinion. Cuh
ReplyDeleteWell none of the comments here were particularly nasty, i think people were just saying they thought my opinion was wrong. And that I'd MISSED. THE. POINT.
DeleteNo I have nothing against Tom, he's got every right to express his opinion, but if he's going to criticise vast swathes of the female population for whingeing about something he thinks is not worth the bother, then we also have the right to criticise his argument. I said that he comes across as quite sexist by doing this, which I think is ironic because I have a feeling this is what he was trying to avoid, especially since he considers himself to be feminist.
ReplyDeleteOh also (I am anonymous 2, by the way) - you can't say 'women don't have to do exercise to look acceptable' and then also say that if you do do exercise, you will look less desirable anyway. That's ridiculous and makes it impossible to 'win' in your eyes - we will never have it as hard as men because we don't need to exercise. But if we DO exercise, then we won't look as good.
ALSO you're definitely wrong about the makeup. Some girls don't like to wear any, others feel the need to wear loads but it's not fair to criticise girls who apply different makeup to your 'all you need' list. For me, for example, it's foundation, blusher, eyeliner, mascara. That's pretty standard.
Re: looking hot at the beach. How about waxing every part of your body apart from a small part of your eyebrows, and also maintaining a well-conditioned, thick head of long hair, of precisely the right texture. And skin tone! Cover up all those rough patches, have the right shade of tan, and absolutely don't have any dimples in your skin. Boobs close enough together in your bikini? No? Shame on you.
(But for the record I do kinda see the point you're trying to make, men have to face body image issues too).
naaaahhhhh I didn't mean women don't have it as hard, I just meant achieving the 'ideal' physique is not as much effort.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, my mum said I'd totally missed the point as basically men's appearances are just not put under as much scrutiny as women's. They just aren't, maybe sometimes they are but not to the same extent. But yeah she's right.
With 'looking good at the beach', damn totally forgot how women are expected to be entirely hairless all over and if they're not then they're somehow disgusting or manly.
I would disagree about bringing up having an even skin tone and not any bald patches on your head, as generally these are just as important for someone of any gender.
Basically this whole article is a whinge from the viewpoint of a boy with an alright physique that it isn't fair that when I went on a beach holiday with some girlfriends who were all attractive through luck and all had enviable physiques, mine wasn't as enviable as theirs was, despite the fact they don't spend loads more time exercising.
this post failed because I didn't keep my tone of voice in check and I also didn't make the subject matter well-defined enough. Overall I would say that women definitely have it harder than men in terms of expectations on their appearance.