Why? If you accurately identify yourself as an asshole, why would it bother you that other people agree with you? I’d say you’re doing a great job of presenting your true self; congratulations.
If you recognize that there’s no altruism or beneficence involved in your desire to make fun of fat people, then as I said, you may be a mean and rude asshole, but at least you’re not a hypocritical or self-deluded one. Congratulations again.
Well, you’ve identified exactly what the process is and why I don’t join in.
You start with the assumption that I need to comfort myself (which we all do to some extent, but not the way you mean or to the extent.)
Then you idea of how one goes about finding comfort is by identifying someone else they think they are better than, and heaping scorn on them.
Which is what all of this is about.
The existence of people I believe have it worse than me in some respect only works when I feel whiny about not being able to have whatever I want and remind myself that literally billions of people in the world can’t come close to having what I consider not enough. Then I am not comforted so much as ashamed and chagrined, but it does help me stop feeling sorry for myself because I can’t have an iPad.
But as far as who I am, what my challenges are… the things I’m not happy about in myself aren’t lessened by finding and focusing on people I think should be even less happy with themselves than I am. It doesn’t change my truth, and in fact it would only make it worse - because in addition to whatever it is about myself I’m unhappy with in the first place, I’d also be unhappy with myself for falling into that behavior as well.
Yes!
Because you believe there is One Universally True Way Everyone Always Reacts To Pictures Of Girls With Their Asses Exposed…or
Because you have known me to react to such a thing in a way different than what I’ve represented here?
Why is it so easy to believe I’m some out-of-step freak when it’s something you think is negative about me, but completely impossible to believe when it’s something that might be, well, not so negative?
Whatever you think about it, it’s impossible to argue against the idea that I’m an odd duck and I for sure don’t follow the crowd. So if I don’t react the way YOU react to something, that’s pretty much in keeping with who I’ve established myself to be, across the board. I’m true to my school, and I’ve taken enough shit for it that it should be the one thing that’s a given.
All your posts in this thread have collectively led me to the conclusion that you’re full of shit. In fact, the very response I’m quoting is demonstrative of how full of shit you are.
Just read some of this shit again:
There are stupid pictures of fat and attractive people on that site. You don’t think ANY of it is funny. But here you are, saying that it’s wrong for us to laugh at fat people. Why isn’t it wrong for us to laugh at attractive people? Because you don’t think the pictures of attractive women on the site are funny? But you already fucking said that you don’t find the fatties funny, either. What a crock.
I seriously do not understand the point you believe you have made. I get the ultimate belief and attitude, that’s clear, but what you explained as your reasoning I do not grok.
But I do know you have some details wrong. I didn’t say I didn’t find any of it funny, for one thing. Nothing is especially funny, nothing made me emit any noises involuntarily, but a few things caused my mouth to twitch:
This
this
this (My doctor would love it, I expect her to whip out a triquarter one of these days, she’s that seriously into it.)
and this
Most of it is pretty lame and petty and not really funny, just weird and dumb and sometimes sad.
But I don’t have as big an issue with the “Ew! Look at the icky person!” pictures because the person depicted was either anonymous or posing in public. I I feel less need to defend people who volunteer, or people whose anonymity is preserved. The girl in the waiting room picture was was unacceptable, along with a few others.
From the way you present this, you weren’t offended until they showed a fat person. It was all ‘innocuous’ until they hit on a sensitive spot with you personally.
The reason these types of sites exist is because people are amused by photos or vidoes of people acting stupid in various ways. Sites like failblog are essentially extensions of this idea, and I agree that sometimes posting these things to the internet comes off as meanspirited, and often I don’t personally think they’re funny, but it’s hardly something to get so bent out of shape about.
I would never, ever make fun of someone to their face about their appearance, but I think it’s human nature to think things about other people based on the way they present themselves. Sure, some of those things will be assholish, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. It’s not like these photos were taken through someones living room window. Every time a person leaves their house, with everything they chose to wear and say and do, they are making choices about how they present themselves to the world, and those choices are going to be interpreted by other people. That’s sort of the nature of living in a society.
Incidentally:
Everyone feels like they are an individual and are not just following the crowd. Sure, we all have our own idiosyncrasies, but you are not a super special unique flower who is immune to the effects of societal influence. I thought most people figured this out by the end of high school.
Meyer summed it up pretty well.
Here’s the kicker tho’, your eating habits are usually given to you by your parents, don’t ya think? By the time you have control over your own food intake, you’re probably well on the way to being a chubby.
That’s a good point. But that doesn’t stop us from cracking jokes about the religious despite their having likely been indoctrinated by *their *parents.
That’s a good point, too. Did you know heroin was harder to get unaddicted from than amphetamine, because it gives you a physiological as well as a psychological dependency? I think food would be harder to get off than religion.
But then there aren’t many people laughing at 10 year old chubbies, are there?
I’ve not been paying much attention to the ratings, tbh.
Pending evidence to the contrary, I’ll assume this is a photo of Rand Rover.
Yes she is. Wearing a shirt that says “I’m your upgrade” explicity invites scrutiny.
The fact that she’s fat is not what makes it funny. The fact that she’s fat and wearing a shirt that declares her hotness is not what makes it funny.
What makes it funny is that she’s wearing a shirt that declares her hotness when everything about her is the antithesis of what is generally considered “hot” in our society. She’s wearing horrendously ill-fitting shorts that make her body look way worse than it might otherwise. They’re unreasonably short and expose a full expanse of cellulite. Her posture is entirely un-feminine and slouched. Her hair just looks greasy. She hasn’t done anything to enhance her appearance with makeup or jewelry. I think very few men would consider her an “upgrade” from whatever woman they’re with, or even from being alone.
Most people don’t point and laugh at someone just because they’re fat or bald or skinny or ugly or have acne. They laugh at people who look ridiculous by choice. That site is about the choices people make, not their physical looks.
That picture wouldn’t have made the site if it wasn’t for that lady’s *choice *of clothing.
That would be because there wasn’t anything offensive in the site I was looking, which, as noted, was NOT the site posted here. It wasn’t the same set of pictures, and it wasn’t coming from such a fundamentally rude point of view to begin with. There wasn’t a single shot that was “Ew! Look at the gross/ugly person I stole a picture of” - they were all goofy costumes, silly poses and photoshop.
Would you make fun of them in such a way that a hundred million other people might be able to enjoy it?
I wasn’t ranting about a person’s private thoughts, and you know it.
Like I said, not my “feeling”, my established experience everywhere, but here especially. Clock attitude that it was thoroughly beyond belief that I would fail to think “slut” and laugh at a woman with her ass displayed, because (I assume) that is the universal response and for me to fall outside the universal norm was fundamentally unbelievable. I have years of demonstrating that that’s pretty much guaranteed to be the case a good percentage of the time, whether it’s my embrace of prostitution, my crusade for “male abortion” or the fact that I find poorlydressed.com more dumb and sad than funny.
Admittedly, I haven’t read every post, nor have I seen the picture in question.
However, to me, the funniest thing in all of this is that the Woman In The Waiting Room/Wal Mart may very well see that picture of herself and think, “How lovely! A photo of me in my favourite outfit!” and may not be embarrassed or humiliated in any way at all.
I do like the moral posturing though. And the yelling. LOVE the yelling…
Carry on!
Does “scrutiny” mean stealing her photo and posting it on the internet?
And I don’t believe you or anyone else believes that she believes she’s hot shit. She is in no way whatsoever, as you took the time to describe ( 
) making the slightest effort to come across as anyone’s “upgrade”. Given the circumstance and the photo, it’s not at all a stretch to think this girl is from a very poor family, her clothes what she can buy for a dime or have given to her for free, and she’s sitting in an evening clinic waiting to see a doctor. And if the person who took the photo found her that knee-slappingly, gut-bustingly hilarious that the only possible way he could process the hysterical amusement was to steal her photo and share it with the entire planet, he had no excuse whatsoever for leaving her face in it.
It was out of line. Period.
On the topic of poverty, obesity and clothes…after Katrina, thousands of men and women had no clothes and there was an urgent call for plus sizes. Finding something reasonably decent to wear when you are fat is hard enough when you can pay - when you have nothing to begin with and have to depend on the kindness of strangers…who are all size 10 when you’re 24? Think about it - when clothes “don’t fit” because they are baggy or ill-fitting, that’s one thing, but when you literally cannot don them at all? One Katrina volunteer I spoke with who was coordinating the collection of plus size clothes told me that many women were reduced to wearing plastic trash bags. 
That was one time I was glad I was heavy, and when Katrina hit I’d actually lost enough weight that I had a lot of very large size clothes that I no longer wore because they were too big. That felt good, because I totally knew the pain those women were having.
And shopping thrift stores when you’re fat is almost beyond human endurance, because the clothes are so abundant and such a complete jumble, that digging through to find anything at all that fits to start with is a three-hour experience, and unlike color, style, and fabric, it’s not at all easy to eyeball quickly. Which I really don’t understand, given the huge percentage of fat people in this country. But maybe that has a lot to do with the fact that I live in L.A - I do seem to recall thrift store shopping being a much more rewarding adventure when I visited my mom when she was living in Oklahoma.
Obligatory xkcd comic. 
I don’t believe this, but if even if it were true, I’d place “people too obese to fit in normal clothing forced to wear trash bags” way, *way *down the list of post-Katrina tragedies vying for a slice of the sympathy pie.
