One of my local cable channels is replaying The Tyra Banks Show where she dressed up in the fat suit (which I talked about a couple of days ago).
On the show, she shows up on these blind dates as a 350lb woman, tapes the men being mean and awkward, and then at the end she's like "Oh buuuuuuuuuuuuuurn, I'm Tyra Banks BITCH!" Then she has the guys on the show and lets them hem and haw about why they acted like dicks and there's these two overweight girls on her couch who are like those Japanese girls that follow Gwen Stefani around...they just sit there and cry and every once in a while she points to them and goes "Seriously girls, isn't it awful being you?"
And see, I have a couple of issues here.
First, Tyra is acting like a lunatic bee-yotch on the blind dates. The first thing she says when she sits down is "So, do you usually date big girls? How do you feel about big girls? Would you feel strange walking down the street with me because I'm so big?" I mean, she's a total freaking psycho!!!
Second, *I* would be very uncomfortable if one of my friends set me up on a blind date and the guy who showed up was 350 pounds. That's (in my opinion) outside the norm as far as being overweight...I think there's a big difference between being morbidly obese and being simply overweight in any of its various permutations. I would be DOUBLE uncomfortable if the guy spent the whole FIRST BLIND date quizzing me about how attracted I was to him and how I felt about his weight. Those are issues that I just wouldn't be comfortable talking about with a date I knew, let alone someone I had just met. It doesn't excuse the guys being outwardly dickish about it, that's just a matter of good manners, but at the same time, I wouldn't have expected them to be totally comfortable and want to take the 350lb woman straight back to their apartments for a roll in the hay. Once again, no excuse for these dudes being assholes...but I would be willing to bet they are assholes all the time and what we saw is their true personalities shining through, which has nothing to do with the issue of how they feel about overweight women, but how they treat the entire human race.
And here's the thing. No 350lb woman would ever walk into a blind date situation without knowing for sure the guy was attracted to larger women. *I* am only slightly chubby (really slightly these days) and I wouldn't be caught dead going on a blind date (at all probably), but definitely not unless my friend really thought the guy would think I was physically attractive. No one is more attuned to the imperceptible, nonverbal (and sometimes very verbal) judgments that people, especially man people, make about women than a woman who is overweight. No one.
So, not only is the show stupid because it "exposes" a problem that no one in the world was unaware existed, but it's done in such a way as to make it even LESS insightful and interesting. I mean, in the end, everyone in the world has something about their physical self that makes them uncomfortable or unhappy.
Anyway, I could go on and on about how incredibly ridiculous these pretty girls in fat suits are, but I will spare you. At least I'll spare you from here on out.
