Rubens et al would like a few words.
Here’s 30,000 words by him.
But that is true of many people … When growing up, I had always considered myself ‘girl next door pretty’ -my face is more or less symmetrical, oval, and adheres to nice proportions for eyes nose and mouth placement shape and size. Not drop dead gorgeous nor really plain. I have full hair, and on the curly side of wavy - not thin and limp, and a good rich brown. I was for many years 5’7" and a fairly solid 135 pounds from being very active and also working heavy labor jobs [not sitting around doing clerical work] and had an hourglass figure. But, and big bit here, I also never had parents that body shamed me in any way, no need to gain weight, lose weight, dye the hair - the only thing I had done was braces, because when I was younger I had an overbite that would have damaged my teeth if left unmodified. [I had it better than my brother, he had to have a couple teeth removed and the kind of braces that spreads the jaw, but I really don’t remember much about his braces offhand.]
I still don’t have any real issue with having gotten fat, to 315 pounds, losing 2 inches due to joint and back damage, and dropping back to 190 pounds [yay chemo?] Yes I would love to get back to 135 pounds, but I happen to actually LIKE myself, fat, scars health issues and all … I will die, looking back on a good life, with people that loved me for who I was, not what I looked like.
I just wish everybody could grow up with supportive friends and family, and people could be free to go for that singing career despite being ‘fat’ if they have the voice for it.
This has puzzled me my entire life. It’s a small chunk of the population that looks like media stars, so not every guy is only sleeping with <insert media star name> types - indeed, not most of them. I’ve seen women drowning in male attention that considered themselves unattractive, writing off all the guys attracted to them as “weird.”
I had an eye-opener about this when I began watching “My 600-Pound Life” on TLC. Most of the women featured on the show have boyfriends or husbands, many of whom love them enough to stick around and do some pretty disgusting tasks because their wives/girlfriends need help. Sure, some of them are duds (like the one who was actively hostile to his wife’s weight loss efforts even though they were saving her life, because he was only attracted to super-obese women) but most were just normal guys. Many of them said they barely noticed the weight when they met the woman, instead being attracted to her personality.
Hey, it beats dense ! 
Guilty as charged, yer honor. 
My ol’ Granny used to say there is someone for everyone in the world. She famously announced at one family dinner that my cousin ( guy with no prospects, ever ) would make her change her statement to " There is someone for everyone except, Jimbo!"
It’s really hard **not **to have an obese beagle.
We had a beagle when I was in high school and once on a walk she glommed on to an old top part of a carrot. It was at least 2" in diameter and about 3" long, and it was gnarly and dirty. We could NOT pry it away from her. She proudly took it out the backyard when we got home and proceeded to eat the whole thing.
Beagles…
Depends on what you mean by confused. Sure, I get intellectually all the pressure to be thin. But, at an intuitive level, I have to double take when someone calls someone fat when they are just thicc. Or when what appears unhealthily thin to me is considered normal.
And then there really are times when someone just looks normal to me, and someone calls them fat. This is most common in two situations: talking about celebrities, and women who want to lose weight. It still weird to me that people consider themselves fat when they aren’t actually wider. No, having a little protruding tummy doesn’t make you fat. Sure, if you want to lose it, fine. But you’re not fat.
I do remember a study where it showed that women assume that the thinnest woman will be considered more attractive, but guys consistently will consider some women too thin. At the time, the go-to “too thin” woman was Nicole Richie. Women would assume she’d be more attractive to men, but the men would think she was too thin. For men, what mattered more was the hip-to-waist ratio, not pure thinness.
It makes sense: media promoting female beauty standards would have a bigger effect on women.
I thought ‘Kissin’ Cousin’s’ were acceptable in R-Kansas.
Not to pick on you, but “thicc” is just another negatively comparative term. I’m sure you mean no offense but “just thicc”(who came up with that dumbass spelling?)would seem to be the opposite of “thin”.In today’s parlance, that doesn’t feel complimentary,
Any old way, getting back to the topic at hand, seeing a variety of physical types (male and female) being represented in the media has become noticeable and is welcome. Ditto the representation of interracial and same sex couples. I guess that’s how things get “normalized”; constant exposure.
Every usage I’ve seen of “thicc” has been complimentary, used by someone that likes that body type (a friend of mine is often described as having “a sickness for that thiccness”). And while I’m not a fan of the phrase, I much prefer it to “heavy,” which my sisters use describing women of their stature.
Thick/thicc started out as black slang. No idea what its connotations are now that it’s more mainstream, but it was enthusiastically complimentary when we coined it.