HSG

At the Judgment of Paris, we are fond of illustrating points via analogy. Often, the media-induced brainwashing related to women's body image is so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that only an analogy can bring the insidiousness of anti-plus indoctrination into relief.

Whenever possible, we prefer to use analogies from high culture, because doing so introduces readers to elements of Old World heritage of which they might otherwise be unaware.

But sometimes, an example from popular culture, even from its lowest substrata, can be helpful in illuminating the modern predicament of plus-size beauty.

Comedian Chris Rock is popular for a brand of humour that is very R-rated and highly profane, so please give the following link a pass if you (understandably) do not care for foul language and vulgarity. However, in this routine from one of his shows, he makes a darkly amusing point about the field of medicine and its inability--or unwillingness--to cure disease that is well worth considering:


The term "comeback" refers to a practice in drug dealing whereby a dealer will offer small samples of a narcotic to hook a potential addict, who then feels compelled to come back to the dealer for more of the narcotic--at which point the dealer charges a hefty fee.

Mr. Rock likens this scam to the deliberate unwillingness of car manufacturers to make cars that last:


Now, perceptive readers will immediately draw an analogy between these examples and the diet-starvation industry, which sells women a product that is rigged to fail, so that the victims (a.k.a. "customers") keep coming back for more.

While it is true that such an analogy would be quite apt, Mr. Rock's comments actually suggest an even more insidious way in which curvy women are being victimized by starvation-torture profiteers--as we will soon illustrate.

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Following a recent plus-size fashion show in Australia, a male fashion writer slandered the full-figured models as being "over"weight and supposedly unhealthy.

This was beyond ludicrous, not to mention staggeringly hypocritical, given that (a) the entire fashion industry mandates a clinically underweight standard size, (b) minus-size models have literally died of malnourishment, and (c) the waifs' corpse-like appearance triggers epidemic levels of eating disorders in the general public.

By any sane medical standard, it is the full-figured models who have a normal, natural, healthy physique, while the straight-size models are abnormally underweight and clinically ill.

But in attacking plus-size models, this Australian fashion apologist used a shrewd (and contemptible) tactic to deflect criticism from the industry's toxic, androgynous aesthetic.

He pathologized normality.

He mendaciously referred to actually healthy body sizes (full-figured physiques) as being unhealthy, and by implication assigned the status of "health" to an appearance of illness (minus-size starvation).

This was a case of inverting veracity and falsehood, pretending that lie is truth and true is lie.

It would be like calling a shrivelled, dying prune a "healthy" fruit while calling a fresh, perfect plum a diseased abnormality.

Imagine such a world: a world of agriculture where every ripe fruit were discarded as being abnormal, while only the sickly, withered husks were called "normal." It would be utter madness--yet that is exactly what this fashion apologist attempted to do when he rebranded healthy, well-fed normality as illness and sickly abnormality as health.

* * *

If this malicious inversion of normality and abnormality, of health and illness, were simply confined to the fashion world, it would already be sufficiently harmful and offensive. But it is not.

In fact, it represents how the body image of women in general has been inverted and distorted.

Curvy women the world over, whom embody the true condition of health, have been libeled as being "over"weight, though their bodies are actually at the normal, natural, optimal, healthy size, while the truly unhealthy women--emaciated, minus-size walking cadavers--have been falsified as the medical ideal.

Why?

The explanation brings us back to Chris Rock's comedy routine. Mr. Rock jokes that the medical industry has a financial interest in keeping sick people sick so that they keep paying for medicine.

But in pathologizing normality, the profiteers and exploiters have devised an even more insidious scheme than the one that Rock suggests.

While companies do make more money by keeping sick people from getting healthy, they rake in even bigger profits by making healthy people think they're sick.

They make the healthy want to look ill. They make the normal want to be abnormal.

They make a fortune by duping people into thinking that "normal" is "sick" and "sick" is "normal."

After all, while there are many sick people in the world at any given time, there are even more healthy people. It's a bigger market.

If someone is ill and trying to get better, the body will sooner or later attain that condition of health (if it can). At that point, the struggle is over. The medical profits have a terminus.

But if someone is healthy and trying to look ill, then the body will never stop fighting against this condition of sickness. The profiteers' exploitation continues forever.

The body intuitively knows when it is in an unhealthy condition and always tries to right itself. If it has a cut, it works to heal that cut. If it has a broken bone, it attempts to mend the break. If it is underweight, it cries out for more food so that it can attain a more robust condition.

When confronted by food deprivation, the body intuits: "You're starving me. I'm not going to be abused like this. I'm going to save our lives and make us better by compelling us to eat the way we're supposed to."

The body always comes back to the right course, just as a modern airplane left on autopilot will automatically pull out of a dive and return to level flight.

Therefore, at some point, the profiteers and exploiters realized that the slickest way to bilk women out of their funds was to pathologize the condition of normality and health--the condition to which the body naturally returns.

They set about indoctrinating women to think that the natural, robust body is wrong and that the unnatural, cadaverous, sickly body is right.

Imagine: they created a scenario in which women actively resist the look of full-figured health (the ideal condition to which the body innately seeks to return) and pursue a look of starvation (a look that the body innately resists).

It is no different than if women had been brainwashed into resisting normal breathing and actively sought to be tubercular. The truly criminal minds who concocted this scheme put women perpetually at war with their normal physical state. They indoctrinated women to fight against their own convalescence, to strive to keep themselves in a condition of sickness and ill-health.

They pathologized normality.

To amend Chris Rock's point: There's no money in healthy people who know they're healthy. The money's in making healthy people think that health is illness and to want to look perpetually sick.

A more harmful assault upon the populace one could hardly imagine, and yet this is exactly what has befallen our society, and still goes on, unchecked and unchallenged.

Let us hope that in the future, the robust, hale attractiveness of plus-size models will help women recognize their addiction to sickly emaciation as the true pathology, and to embrace as normal and healthy the full-figured beauty to which their bodies naturally incline.

Radiantly beautiful Shannon Marie--the true natural ideal:

- Shannon Marie Galleries