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zachi

Diana Sirokai

By zachi, in Plus-Size Models

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Guest An Optimist   

Guest An Optimist
On 9/27/2016 at 6:07 PM, maurice_deux said:

On the Curvy Kate website, she says that she was bullied because of her body and told she was ugly and fat. So sad. In many cultures and during a very long period of time in western history, her figure would have been considered ideal.

You are wrong. Yes, women in Rubens' paintings were kind of flabby, but these were a bit of an exception and the vast majority of art from the same era shows body types that can't be described as fat. Even the pre-historic venus figurines don't invariably depict obese women. You should also note that people who made those are extinct now - when Europe was colonized by first farmers, those hunter gatherers largely ceased to exist and their contribution to European genome was slim - because they and utter majority of their progeny died. Very few interbred with the newcomers.

So, the statement that obesity was often seen as aesthetically pleasing in the past is simply not true. There were a few cultures in which female obesity was seen as desirable, primarily in Africa. 

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Fnord    35

Fnord
On 12/11/2016 at 1:24 PM, An Optimist said:

You are wrong. Yes, women in Rubens' paintings were kind of flabby, but these were a bit of an exception and the vast majority of art from the same era shows body types that can't be described as fat. Even the pre-historic venus figurines don't invariably depict obese women. You should also note that people who made those are extinct now - when Europe was colonized by first farmers, those hunter gatherers largely ceased to exist and their contribution to European genome was slim - because they and utter majority of their progeny died. Very few interbred with the newcomers.

So, the statement that obesity was often seen as aesthetically pleasing in the past is simply not true. There were a few cultures in which female obesity was seen as desirable, primarily in Africa. 

If it were just Rubens, you might have a point there. (cf. Renoir, Titian, Domenichino, et al.)

It's more than a little bizarre how broadly you're using the term "obese" here. Diana Sirokai is not exactly the Venus of Willendorf. I'd say a woman proportioned like the latter has a dozen or more points on the BMI scale and upward of a hundred pounds on her. While the number of cultures that idolized women the size of the latter was small (though hardly nonexistent), the number that did the same for women who looked like the former was pretty substantial, and included many European and Middle Eastern cultures in various historical periods, which have not died out and are often among the ancestors of various modern ones (though beyond some pretty skeevy social darwinist ideas about evolutionary fitness, I'm not sure why the question of whether those cultures survived is even relevant here).

Really, I'm just perplexed that you posted this point on this particular thread. I could at least see why this outburst would be germane to the topic of various of the heavier women featured on this forum, though it would remain factually wrong in various respects, but in this case it doesn't even pass that test.

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