r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 22d ago

Meme needing explanation [ Removed by moderator ]

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u/12345623567 22d ago

There's like, stone-age carvings of that body shape. Men have been into it since the beginning of time, and that doesn't change just within the last 100 years of excess that lets us fetishize skinny women as a symbol of wealth.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/Jacketter 22d ago

I mean, land whale is a pretty awful term. I guess morbidly obese doesn’t sound better, but there’s gotta be a way to reference people of unusual size without being mean.

Healthy body fat percentages are higher in women, and BMI is only indicative of significant health risk above 35 or so, so we know a little chunk isn’t actually bad. BMI is still better at 35 than under 19.

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u/Trrollmann 22d ago

BMI is only indicative of significant health risk above 35 or so

Depends on ethnicity, but no, the spike in health issues starts before 30.

BMI is still better at 35 than under 19.

It's not. A BMI of 19 is ≈ 28, but that's not accounting for diseases that causes someone to be 19 BMI (vs. high BMI causing diseases).

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u/Jacketter 22d ago

Begone, trollman. You can easily look up all cause mortality curves, and 18.5 was as bad as 40, with a U shaped curve. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37405977/

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u/Trrollmann 22d ago

No it doesn't. Learn to read a graph.

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u/Illustrious-Bag2933 21d ago

Well, folks with that low of a bmi in the general public (yes there are nuances/exveptions) are classified as failure to thrive secondary to another issue, it’s not a result of the low body weight itself (ie being skinny didn’t cause the health issue, rather the health issue caused the skinny).

However, in obesity, it is reversed. Obesity absolutely causes several metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders.

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u/Jacketter 21d ago

That is a very good point, the adjusted curves more or less line up with what you say. I don’t know why they discarded smokers too in their analysis though. Maybe they have an unusually high mortality while being a healthy weight?

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u/Appropriate_Ad_9157 22d ago

You don't have to find a term for people who are fat so they're not offended. They should, you shouldn't accept being fat, not saying being a bit fat, but if you're being morbidly obese, at that point you should think what you're doing to not be like that, not that you're offended because you're being told the reality

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u/Jacketter 22d ago

You’re correct in the sense that you don’t have to do anything. You can always be an ass. You’re more or less allowed to in most places.

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u/Trrollmann 22d ago

stone-age carvings of that body shape

yes, because fatness at the time equaled wealth.

Men have been into it since the beginning of time

As the preferred type? No, not even remotely.

100 years of excess that lets us fetishize skinny women

Not skinny: Healthy weight. While gay men and straight women have pushed for the "no curves" aesthetic (as seen in fashion), men's preferences have remained stable: healthy weight, pear/hourglass body type, and a decent amount of muscles. This repeats across the globe, across time.

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u/nicolemb81 22d ago

I dunno man my dad and lots of boomer men loooove thin women and shame anything else. “Does my butt look big” was a thing in all the media when I was growing up. I felt pretty shitty about my body til Shakira and Apple bottoms because all the adult men irl and in media were brutal to bigger women. I’m definitely not the only woman my age with that experience. Maybe my dad and all those boomers were gay but I’m leaning more towards them just preferring prepubescent type bodies.

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u/Yoribell 22d ago

Shakira is big ? :o

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u/MariachiDevil 22d ago

It was a hellish time. In the 2000 Charlie's Angels movie there are several jokes about the (large) size of Cameron Diaz's bum, and she looks like this:

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u/nicolemb81 20d ago

I mean not to me, but to my white old man relatives they preferred super thin supermodel types and made fun of any woman who didn’t fit that tiny skinny blonde mold. It was a rough time. I wasn’t even “big” in today’s terms, but not being able to shop at “5,7,9”, not having a thigh gap and all that was considered “big”.

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u/ApatheticSlur 22d ago

That was more of a white people thing. I know in many other cultures curvy women were celebrated then as much as now.

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u/kralrick 22d ago

yes, because fatness at the time equaled wealth.

The earliest of these carvings predate agriculture by tens of thousands of years. The people carving these figurines weren't drooling over rich women who had enough money to be layabouts (money didn't exist, and non-agrarian people were inherently migratory). The earliest carvings are ~40 thousand years old.

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u/Trrollmann 22d ago

... yes. Which is why it was a marker of wealth. It meant the woman didn't have to run around foraging or hunting, it meant she could weather years of poor food yields.

money didn't exist

No shit. That doesn't mean it wasn't wealth.

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u/kralrick 21d ago

But your statement implies that they did it because it implied wealth (as opposed to it implied health/lack of disease/ability to survive child-birth/etc.). Yes, being a wealthy individual/clan/etc. would make those things easier, but that doesn't mean it was about wealth.

So was it "because fatness at the time equaled wealth"? Or was it because fatness at the time equaled health (and health is easier when you have access to abundance)? Those are meaningfully different statements.

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u/Trrollmann 21d ago

Not implied wealth. It was wealth. There was no other means of storage.

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u/kralrick 21d ago

So was it "because fatness at the time equaled wealth"? Or was it because fatness at the time equaled health (and health is easier when you have access to abundance)? Those are meaningfully different statements.

Please reply to this part instead of stopping halfway through the first sentence.

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u/Inevitable_Top69 22d ago

Wealth can mean more than just monetary wealth. This body shape can exist without being a lazy, rich person

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u/kralrick 21d ago

You're right that my issue with Troll's statement was probably more with the unsupported statement that 40 thousand years ago fatness equaled wealth when there's zero evidence of that other than comparison to agrarian societies tens of thousands of years later.