Just this month, Fugues the local free gay mag, is “celebrating” 20 years of a spa-type place here where pretty little fags go and get shaved, plucked, moisturized, electro-stimulated, peeled, and irrigated up the poop chute, so you can be gorgeous and hairless and buff and look like everyone else when you collapse drunk and stoned from dance floor exhaustion at the $85-a-ticket circuit party of the season to which you’ve traveled only to see the same crowd, or at least they look the same, how can you really tell, hey, did I do you in Boston?
I have nothing to add, but all day long, the words “A Great Big Un-Fuck You” have been going through my head to the tune of “A Very Merry Un-Birthday” from the animated Alice in Wonderland.
No shit? I coulda sworn it was Carlin. Hell, maybe it was, considering how common thef… er, homage is in the stand-up comedy world. Hell, everyone and their grandmother lifted material from Lenny at one time or another. Anyway, I still think it’s a weak routine, and I still think Carlin’s literalism schtick is lame, even if this wasn’t part of it.
If you think that being fat is grotesque, that is because you are conditioned by modern society to think that. At other times and in other places, the standard for beauty may be quite different. (Hey, haven’t you ever watched The Twilight Zone? One of the episodes addresses this very issue.
Even in my lifetime the standard has changed. Fifty years ago being “skinny” was an embarrassment. Forty years ago, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14-16. Jackie Kennedy was considered “a perfect size ten.” The first time that I saw dress sizes marked “Size 0” it freaked me out. What have we done to ourselves?
Now models in magazines get their tiny waists and flawless skin by computer enhancement. Imperfection is not tolerated even if it means having a standard that doesn’t include real women and men.
There is a wonderful book on this subject. I think it is called The Beauty Myth. What an eye-opener on the ways we are manipulated!
A healthy body is what’s really important, not shifting standards of beauty.
Without having read it I will grant you that Out Magazine may be uber fluff for pretty boys but this notion of decrying the emphasis on thinness as some unobtainable and dangerous standard is somewhat beside the point. Compared to the problem of hard to meet body standards the problem of pandemic obesity is 100 times more pressing. We are becoming a nation of obese (not just “fat”), waddling hippos swathed in rolls of lard, sweating our way from one meal to the other while comforting ourselves that we aren’t falling victim to Madison Avenue’s entreaties while we gorge our way to our next heart attack.
I say this confident in the knowledge that I know fat. I know what being fats all about. Intimately The pressure on the feet and knees. The stetching skin. The bulging flesh. The weight. Fat people mad at Madison Ave. and “thin culture” are kidding themsleves. Being obese is a miserable, disgusting and dangerous condition and no hand waving about being “manipulated by the media” is going to change that.
Fine, but take it to a thread where it is relevant. We’re not talking about obesity here, we’re talking about Out magazine, and as I said before their articles about losing weight are not directed at obese people but at people who are at a normal, healthy, and unfashionable weight.
Surely, because one thing is a problem, that doesn’t mean we should ignore problems at the other extreme of the spectrum. The solution to obesity is not anorexia, it’s education about exercise and nutrition.
The problem the OP is complaining about and the problem you’re complaining about are one in the same. Wether it’s gorging themselves at McDonalds or starving themselves with dangerous fad diets, people just don’t know how to take care of themselves.
Might I suggest, Mockingbird that you cancel your subscription. You won’t be out any money and it will keep your blood pressure down. Unless you can give us a good reason for keeping it, I think this thread shows that it’s just fluff and you’re wasting your time reading it.
I trust that we’ve clearly established that Out is a waste of trees, ink, and glossy coating by now.
I did pick up a couple of copies – one when I was first getting into reading about gay issues, and a second two months later because I figured I must have gotten an “off” issue when nothing important was being covered. And while I suffer from a mild case of inability to see male beauty in most of what appears to get gay men hot (I can see clearly what you/they might see in some men, e.g., Orlando Bloom), I cannot conceive of any reason why the magazine continues to survive – are those guys truly a turn-on to you gay men?
Mockingbird has an extremely valid point–gay culture in general, not merely Out, peddles the pernicious idea that every gay man must be thin, young, and hairless and wear the latest oh-so-trendy designers or they might as well not exist. Every gay lifestyle mag, The Advocate, Out, Instinct, Genre, Hero, dictates a boring, homogenized group identity to gay men, and it is really annoying.
I think that has a very great deal to do with the economics of publishing a magazine for that particular market niche – most of your advertisers are clothes designers interested in keeping alive the stereotype that has made their merchandise profitable. (Matt_mcl, whom I know agrees with me and PIC on this issue, will probably have a great deal more to say on the subject.)
Personally, as a fairly sheltered and naive individual prepared to give you folks respect, I was greatly surprised (though I suspect this sounds slightly homophobic) to find the breadth and diversity of personality and viewpoint among gay people that does in fact exist. – And maybe that is what needs to be trumpeted – that you are not cookie-cutter Castro clones but men and women just like the rest of us, save for the only fact that the people you find attractive, fall in love with, and want to marry are swapped gender-for-gender from what the rest of us straights would choose.
I would disagree, but only to the extent that it’s not just the GLBT community that’s doing this, but society at large. I’m not saying the GLBT community is faultless here. It’s only one aspect of a larger problem of visual conformity within the larger society; all women must look like super models (btw, how in the world is a “super model” different than a regular model?) and all men must look like action heros.
Freyr is right in that it’s generalized. Just that on the het side there is an ever louder voice calling for an acceptance of people that are healthy and fit within their genetically-predisposed body-shape. There’s even the whole “BBW” phenom (ok, so in the gay community there’s the so-called “bears”… but they don’t seem to have made it to fashionability).
Mind, we’re not talking obesity – I’m glad I lost those excess 30 lbs, but I’m not going for either the heroin-chic or the steroidal look.
