Staring at me is a busty, full-figured (whatever that means) redhead (most likely dyed, but who cares as red is red to me even if it’s deception) girl holding a camera while she smiles somewhat lustful at me. She’s in pale pink and white underwear—her bra doing its best not to let her voluptuous breasts spill over while her boy shorts (that’s the term, right?) keep her lower region in check. And—oh my!—is that a navel piercing I spy? My eye scans down, following the trail of this busty beauty to see the words Ugly Girls Need Love.
I’m pistol whipped into reality, an Eminem song gone awry. I scroll passed the image—one of those spam-ads that promise you hook-ups for a one-night stand with a local girl—I have other nefarious things to do than seek a booty call. Besides, those websites always relocate me to a city in another county. But it nags at me like an ex-girlfriend wondering why I didn’t try harder.
It’s the caption that holds my attention, not the busy vixen that would’ve slithered into one of my wet-dreams as an adolescent—not that had any. “Ugly Girls Need Love” reverberated in my vision. So I screen captured the page and cropped it down to just the ad, tucking it away for this sort of thing.
I hate myself for connecting the dots, but somewhere along the lines we made ugly synonymous with “fat,” and “fat” synonymous to something higher than a size zero. I’m a thirty-year-old man with a Tumblr account and not a day goes by that I don’t come across an image of barely legal, scantily clad teenage girls obsessing about “thigh gaps.” “Dat gap, tho,” captions read in bastardized English. We’re creating standards impossible to live up to, confusing healthy with eating disorders. (Note: This is not an attack on those with a naturally fast metabolism, or those who have a daily regimen of exercise that doesn’t border on weight obsessive. That remark was solely for people who induce vomiting, starvation, and have an unhealthy outlook on exercise. In no way am I “glorifying” an unhealthy lifestyle or saying that skinny/thin girls should eat a cheeseburger every now and again.)
We’ve lost the empathy in our society. Irony aside, technology has created monsters out of us. A woman isn’t sexy unless her stomach is flat, her tits are above average, her pussy is shaved, is willing to call herself a “piece of fuck meat” in the bedroom, is willing to alter her features to better suit our image of modern-day beauty. And if she isn’t any of those, she isn’t allowed to feel proud of herself. She shouldn’t get her naval pierced (this is an real complaint by skinny women). And if she has an ounce of positive self-esteem, it’s our job by snuffing it out by calling her fat. Rip her a new one until she has the razor and a warm bath ready. And when she’s crushed, we can move on to the next one. We’ll pity her later.
We haven’t hit rock bottom, we slammed into it like anything in a Michael Bay film. We’ve erupted and the collateral damage isn’t the shell of an expensive foreign automobile, but our daughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces.
There’s more that needs saying on the subject. At a later date, perhaps.
Chapin City Blues 