Cultural Attitudes to Weight

Posted by : Alan Bracken | Saturday, February 6, 2010 | Published in

Why is it that some people do not mind a bit of weight while others get so worked up by it? I usually visit parts of Africa where women seem to enjoy themselves even if they have some weight. There it seems that the fatter you are, the better it is. I even overheard some men who say that they would never marry a thin woman because they believe that she would not be able to have children. When someone overweight walked in, people would compliment them on their figures and then generally look at them with admiration. As for the thin ladies, there were no such things as people often asked them whether they were ill or they had specific problems that were stopping them from putting on weight.

I don’t know whether it is just a cultural thing because even in sports, there are some people who are considered to be fat by European standards but on African standards they are absolute babes. A case in point is the tennis super star, Serena Williams. People keep saying how out of shape she is, yet in Africa she is considered to have an exceptionally good figure. It seems that the issue of whether you are fat depends on where you are standing. If you are in an area that does not like fat, then it is easy to be classified as overweight whereas if you are in an area that accepts thin as being the best then you have to work to get to that figure. It can all get a bit confusing.

It would be a terrible thing if people could not live in their own culture because the fat fascists have taken over. I mean what right do people have to tell others that they do not want to see them fat? What kind of nonsense is that? I think it is just common sense to be able to reduce some excess weight whenever you can. However this does not give people the right to be cruel to overweight people. I get so annoyed when people who seem to be thin by the grace of good attempt to put down other people who just happen to be heavier than them. There is a kind of arrogance that believes that everyone has to resemble them in order to have any kind of value or to be worth looking at in any shape or form.

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