The following was promoted from the comments on Anna's 'Size, the final frontier' post last week. The writer, identified as Penny in the comments, wrote a thoughtful and funny comment that we thought worthy of a repost. Keep those comments coming, folks, and maybe YOU can be next. Thanks again, Penny!
As through as I am with the "thin is in" movement, I can't really get down with thick being the fashionable new black. The fact is that this tabu secret of sexual attraction is part healthiness, part confidence, and part good sense of humor. The remaining 95% is humanity.
We need to check ourselves. We have already wrecked ourselves. We need to step off from this creepy shallow preconception of who we are. It's a wicked scheme inflicted through manipulative social engineering resultant of the intrusive overbearing impulses predicated on the dementia experienced by the undernourished, chemically dependent, bipolar fashion editor in Prada shoes and a retro Thierry Mugler dress. It should have been obvious that this poor man had some issues. Instead, since the Ike Administration in the 1950's, America has allowed this same idiot, who places these absurd social mines in the already outrageous cultural minefields of mass acceptance, to also initiate tearse healing and fraudulent restoration at the close of every fashion fad's season. And, that's just stupid on a level I don't have enough space here to go off on.
We are most attractive to others when they see that we are the best at being ourselves. So , why have we just let go of all the most necessary attributes of character, personality, and wit that are far more important than our physical appearance? Tall, hungry, bottle blonde, and nakedly clad means nothing when it lacks the enticing ability to carry on a coherent conversation about the focuses of the day beyond Dancing with the Stars or American Idolatry. Fat ain't where it's at when all it knows is the direction to every restaurant in town. The day we come into the light of the truth that we are not our looks, the designer advertisements we wear so proudly, or any other ignorance we are told about ourselves in Cosmo, People, and O, the Nation will be SAVED!
What about being interesting, intelligent, funny, hell, even a damn smart-ass as a defense mechanism to covertly mask your otherwise coy shyness? Can we cook, work the grill at a picnic, tat a quit, give a great back massage, or whip a piano in a way that shames Jerry Lee Lewis? Are we into Tai Chi or damn good at the Electric Slide, especially when Frankie Bevery is being spun? What about being able to defend your love for your political party, Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Monkey, your favorite food court sushi bar, that downright nasty cherry licorice thong collection hidden under your family Bible in your sweater drawer, and the crush you had on your 4th grade music teacher? Can we please be more than cookie-cutter pretty?
As you've probably noticed, I am freaking sick and tired of living in an America obsessed with that deviantly illusive and irrationally impossible desire to remake the whole of humanity into a deranged definition of beauty poorly paraphrased by the likes of Paris Hilton on her grainy sex tape. What is more irritating is that, when we can't be Paris, we become so Baptist, repressive, and insanely critical of the part of us that makes us attractive one to another. We take it another step further by setting goals that no human being in the history of man was ever capable of achieving, a hell beset with standards no mortal can ever meet. We call this idiotic fantasy our perfect sexual encounter, because we are crazy. Okay? Straightjacket CRAZY!
Now, I am not into narcissism. That notwithstanding, a little compassionate humanity in the form of self love is in order here. There is nothing wrong with appreciating the person you are. When we can do this, we just might come to know, appreciate, and love someone else just as much, no matter what we all look like.
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