Sixteen Volts

One of my favourite Finnish bloggers and a former chum at the university go boardgame club, Markku Jantunen, once aptly noted (my translation):

A woman who decides to forgo swilling on burgers and chocolates but instead exercises regularly to maintain her looks, gives the other people a signal that she considers the preferences of men to be important. This means that she is in touch with reality, is considerate towards other people and understands the basic principle that you can't just always take and never give. Such an attitude is a sign of inner beauty.

On the other hand, a woman who swills and scarfs herself into a pig and believes that all ideals of beauty are an "insult against women" and yet dares to demand that she is entitled to a great husband regardless of what she is herself like, is also internally ugly.

In this spirit, it is always refreshing to see female writers who have at least some common sense and who understand certain facts and realities of life. The post "False Advertising" of "Morphing Into Mama" explains why the poster doesn't think that it's a good thing to let yourself go once you are married. This post predictably caused a very angry reaction so that the poster had to clarify her message in the follow-up post "It's Like a Really Bad Game of Telephone". But it didn't seem to help much: the damage had already been done with the obesity-worshipping progressive crowd.

For me, there is really nothing controversial in this whole issue. A typical husband will not find his wife's significant weight gain to be a wonderful thing, even if he has to good sense to keep these thoughts only to himself. And I seriously doubt that most wives would have a very much different attitude if the situation was reversed. Once again, we should remember the endless complaints about hot and slender sitcom wives paired up with mediocre-looking and fat sitcom husbands. This setup is unrealistic for the very reason that male obesity is repulsive for most women, especially to women who care about their appearance, who thus have a choice of better men and "could do better".

When you marry somebody, you naturally expect that the person that you originally fell in love with will essentially remain that same person (with the exception of the age-appropriate changes due to unavoidable entropy), instead of surprisingly revealing him- or herself to be something completely different altogether. A wife who decides to gain weight (oh yes, overeating is a conscious decision, unless you are literally force-fed) and claims that her husband should just accept her fabulous choice instead of selfishly thinking about what kind of wife he would like to have, is really not much different from a husband who tells his wife that he is going to quit his regular job and just lounge around the home every day drinking beer, watching television and playing with his toy train set, and the wife should just accept this choice instead of selfishly thinking about what kind of husband she would like to have.

Marriages should be about love, and when you love somebody, you want to make sure that their needs are fulfilled to the maximum extent possible. What kind of act is it to balloon up to become a fat revolting obscenity on chubby legs and thus give your spouse much less satisfaction that you would give him or her by remaining slender, and while you're at it, make him or her a pitiful laughingstock in the workplace and other social circles. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't exactly describe doing that as a "loving" act. "Selfish" would be a lot more appropriate word for this situation.

In a system of assortative mating, the choice of one spouse to make him- or herself drastically less attractive physically or otherwise can sometimes lead to the other spouse starting to look around for a better deal, especially now that divorce has completely lost its social stigma. (I have to wonder whether the crowd who was so intent on destroying the institution of marriage is now happy about this.) Marriages between two people who have a massive disparity of attractiveness are inherently unstable, since it is likely that the higher-ranking spouse will soon "grow as a person" and "now really know what s/he wants from life" and all the other similarly standard excuses. Options equal instability.

There is still some stigma in a divorce when it is done with an obvious intention of dumping your anchor and trading up for something better, but this is only for men. If a non-ugly man divorces his ugly wife, he has to deal with the stigma of being a selfish and nasty jerk, and who is probably a wifebeater, rapist and a child molester too. However, a woman is allowed and even encouraged to dump her unattractive husband, and the rest of the society will mostly cheer and congratulate her for being such a "strong woman" who "knows what she wants" instead of settling to be chained to a "loser". Oh hypocrisy, thy name is truly woman.

Having said all that, I have to say that the blogroll of "Morphing into Mama" is kind of interesting, as it opens up a whole new (to me) branch of blogosphere of hip mamas and urban girls who should, like, have lunch or be in a novel or something. After randomly reading a few other posts from the archives, it's hard to argue with the observation made in the post "A money-back guarantee with every marriage certificate" of "Delusions of Mediocrity":

[...] it's fairly clear that MIM has an agenda, and that agenda is getting picked up for print publication, in the spirit of Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox and Stephanie Klein. Her oppressively spunky "I can take anything as long as I have a cappuccino in one hand and a gold card in the other!" style of writing would fit perfectly in bookshelves between Sophie Kinsella's interminable Shopaholic series and The Devil Wears Prada. You can almost picture the candy-colored book cover, with a cartoon drawing of a stylishly dressed, perfectly in shape MIM stepping off a cable car and into an awaiting taxi, a smiling baby attached to her hip and a handful of bulging shopping bags hanging from one hand, with a slightly askew caricature of the Golden Gate Bridge behind her.

Funny because it's true. Perhaps one day, a book like that about my life will be published. If it doesn't have to be realistic but can involve fantasy elements, I could be the Queen of the Old West. "Don't worry, boys, you can both marry me!" Yee-haw!

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 3:08 PM