Sunday, October 12, 2014

Fat Girls Losing Weight

I see an awful lot of fat younger women today. It was in college that I first noticed some thought they were attractive and entitled to guys way out of their league. And yet they were hostile and unpleasant.

Recently, at one coffee shop we frequent, I ran across a young woman I did not know. When I asked whe she started, she relied, "A couple years ago."

Turned out she had lost a lot of weight, gotten contacts, and taken her hair down from the bun on top of her head.

I hadn't recognized her.

Her face lit up and she looked very pleased with herself at the fact she had changed so much I didn't recognize her. The weight loss in her face had transformed her. I had praised her, not shamed her.

In college I knew a girl she showed me a picture of her at 12. Pudgy, glasses, goofy-cute.

Over the summer the weight went away of its own accord, she got contacts, and when she came back to school in the eighth-grade all the girls who had ignored and ostracized her now wanted to be her friend, and all the boys wanted her to be their girlfriend. She ignored them. That was her revenge.

She told me in college she was not interested in "handsome" men and preferred what she described as smart, funny, "unusual-looking" men. When she told me this I was sitting on the floor in her room. She completely ignored the rest of the guys in the house

Shaming someone is trying to humiliate someone, and you're most probably going to get some revenge because of that. That's a female tactic, and one of the reasons so many of them are big, immature children who, when that revenge comes their way, don't have a clue. The male tactic is praise and "Attagirl!"

What's that old saying? You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar?

3 comments:

Anders said...

More often than not, they don't. All the fat girls I have ever met stayed that way.

Unknown said...

True. I was shocked this girl lost so much weight. She said her brother didn't recognise her.

Lucian Lafayette said...

More often than not, what these days is called "shaming" would have been called "an honest concern for someone's well-being" only a few years ago.

Luke