phyco126 wrote:Alunissage wrote:
On the other hand, I am so bloody fed up with the ideas that 1) people, especially males, feel they have the right to make rude, judgmental, cruel remarks about other people, especially females, who they deem to be too large for the quite narrow (so to speak) parameters of "acceptability", especially when skewed by immersion in anime, and 2) people who are fat should not be allowed to participate in activities that might involve them actually being seen. Because, you know, if they aren't "hot" then they don't deserve to play too.
Oh please, women make the same kind of judgments against guys. May not be about weight as much as looks, be believe me, women make unfair judgments against guys too.
Besides, the problem is you can see rooooollllllls. That is NASTY. PERIOD. I don't hate girls and guys like that. I am acceptable of obese people, but rolls are nasty. Period. If you are gonna be fat and have rolls, please put more than a damned bikini on. ESPECIALLY if you are a male! ARGH!
I don't know many men's costumes that emphasize showing off skin. Typically objections to men wearing scantily clad costumes are for more reasons than their showing rolls (like crossdressing, for example). So... I don't think you're wrong to point that out, phyco, but simply because of what's available, women have access to more scantily clad costumes, and given the same number of fat people in both genders, there will be fat women in scantily clad costumes more often.
If someone is wearing a costume and it's unflattering for their body shape (whether they have "rolls" or whatever), of course I'm going to react to it. I might comment on it to friends, point it out, so on. But I'm not going to turn it into a confrontation or a voiced objection to them. People don't need that crap, and they probably know exactly how much skin they're showing, so my correction won't help knock "sense" into them. And otherwise, I don't really care. It's just an image, and I deal with it. Why can't people just deal with unattractive people without objecting so loudly to them? (Does attractiveness matter that much?) It's like they're our version of the medieval leper (look it up).
So the issue here is the emphasis of attractiveness being a prime determining factor in how we deal with people, particularly between people of opposing genders. And women get the worse deal in most of media, particular body forms favored over others. (Not that men get a great deal either... just that they have more people who don't fit the handsome stereotype in prominent roles.)
(By the way, there are images that are tough to deal with, but it's not people unflatteringly scantily clad. It's a squirrel I saw a couple of weeks ago at my school. It was climbing up a tree with a bagel, but on its shoulder or side, there was a flap of skin, and... I don't know how to interpret it, it was so odd. Like an eye was growing in its shoulder, or the bone was poking through, or it was an oozy spot or something. It nearly made me sick today just thinking about it, and I'd suppressed it until then. I've never seen any cosplayer that bad.)
