Toward the end of August a few years back, a good friend remarked to me: you're not missing much here in Princeton, though the campus is looking more master-race-like than ever.
We both chuckled. The athletes were back.
Tall and fit, often blond and beautiful, broad shouldered and flat tummied—these were the people that looked as good and were as poised after a three mile run, sweaty in the Jersey humidity, as they were chatting with friends in seersucker or a slinky summer dress while sipping a gin and tonic.
Though we had such high expectations—they carried the weight of the world. They had to beat Harvard and Yale.
Soon it would be Goldman Sachs or Teach for America—any highly competitive program for the ultra-ambitious.
The world must be won—changed—made ours—for better or worse.
(WSJ: New Research Suggests Extra Pounds, Large Waists Undermine Perceptions of Leadership Ability)
So I felt less bad if I could only manage a four pack against their perfectly toned six—behind the curve like every wayward graduated student.
Each year a new class entered and whether on a team or not, they had "leadership" experience, had been active in high school, possessed some strategic thinking skills, must have been liked well enough—or feared, Mean Girls style—such that they gained distinguished recommendations over their peers.
More than SAT scores or backpacks full of books, these IVY admits embody their admission. By and large, they're a good looking bunch. Such visually appealing characteristics have helped them get ahead in innumerable ways—part of The Beauty Bias, as Stanford Law Professor Deborah L. Rhode has argued.
Just do some compare and contrast. Visit a community college campus or even a big state university. They have fat people. Ugly people. The vast cross-section of our great democratic humanity.
Then try Yale or Dartmouth or Amherst or Williams. Quite a slimmer upper crust crowd. And at those places, if you do spot a chubbier one, I bet you'll find a very strong inverse correlation between pounds on the body and dollars in the family's bank account.
Where do they come from? Try Andover, Exeter, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville... one needn't look far. They have an early start.
So yes. We can all find our many healthy weights. But rotundity may well have replaced religion as the opiate of the masses. In our class-based capitalist world, skinny = success and fat = failure. Personal, ethical, professional, moral, spiritual, you name it.
Read the websites of a few women's magazines:
Self (Emmy Rossum's Stay-Fit Secrets) or Cosmo (Tone Up: Sneaky Ways to Burn Calories) or Seventeen (New Stuff: 17FitClub Video!)
OMG.
Guys: for more tips on less tummy: Men's Health: 5 New Moves to Reveal Your Abs.
(And all this time I thought I was trying to reveal my true, kind, emotional self...)
Not to say this is good or healthy or anything like that. Not at all. But it's true.
So lets at least weigh our arguments more truthfully and rather than avoiding the issue, put a thumb on the scale so that the privilege of looking good doesn't limit the opportunities of those less worthy of cover-model conquests.
In a future post we wcan fix the hollow calorie crisis amongst the poor, and add truly useful physical education programs to our nation's schools.
We both chuckled. The athletes were back.
Tall and fit, often blond and beautiful, broad shouldered and flat tummied—these were the people that looked as good and were as poised after a three mile run, sweaty in the Jersey humidity, as they were chatting with friends in seersucker or a slinky summer dress while sipping a gin and tonic.
Though we had such high expectations—they carried the weight of the world. They had to beat Harvard and Yale. Soon it would be Goldman Sachs or Teach for America—any highly competitive program for the ultra-ambitious.
The world must be won—changed—made ours—for better or worse.
(WSJ: New Research Suggests Extra Pounds, Large Waists Undermine Perceptions of Leadership Ability)
So I felt less bad if I could only manage a four pack against their perfectly toned six—behind the curve like every wayward graduated student.
Each year a new class entered and whether on a team or not, they had "leadership" experience, had been active in high school, possessed some strategic thinking skills, must have been liked well enough—or feared, Mean Girls style—such that they gained distinguished recommendations over their peers.
More than SAT scores or backpacks full of books, these IVY admits embody their admission. By and large, they're a good looking bunch. Such visually appealing characteristics have helped them get ahead in innumerable ways—part of The Beauty Bias, as Stanford Law Professor Deborah L. Rhode has argued. Just do some compare and contrast. Visit a community college campus or even a big state university. They have fat people. Ugly people. The vast cross-section of our great democratic humanity.
Then try Yale or Dartmouth or Amherst or Williams. Quite a slimmer upper crust crowd. And at those places, if you do spot a chubbier one, I bet you'll find a very strong inverse correlation between pounds on the body and dollars in the family's bank account.
Where do they come from? Try Andover, Exeter, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville... one needn't look far. They have an early start.
So yes. We can all find our many healthy weights. But rotundity may well have replaced religion as the opiate of the masses. In our class-based capitalist world, skinny = success and fat = failure. Personal, ethical, professional, moral, spiritual, you name it. Read the websites of a few women's magazines:
Self (Emmy Rossum's Stay-Fit Secrets) or Cosmo (Tone Up: Sneaky Ways to Burn Calories) or Seventeen (New Stuff: 17FitClub Video!)
OMG.
Guys: for more tips on less tummy: Men's Health: 5 New Moves to Reveal Your Abs.
 |
| Fitness / Sex: The Muscles Women Love |
Not to say this is good or healthy or anything like that. Not at all. But it's true.
So lets at least weigh our arguments more truthfully and rather than avoiding the issue, put a thumb on the scale so that the privilege of looking good doesn't limit the opportunities of those less worthy of cover-model conquests.
In a future post we wcan fix the hollow calorie crisis amongst the poor, and add truly useful physical education programs to our nation's schools.
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