“People should fall in love with their eyes closed”?

This image caught fire on Tumblr and got so many reposts that it went viral as supplemental clipart to dozens of other websites and blogs.

I couldn’t find the original artist to discover their intent, but the intention of the masses reposting it is clear: Fat Chick celebration. Which is whatever. I don’t see any wisdom in fat-anyone celebration but don’t care what people want to idolize as far as body type, really. Although it highlights a double standard for males, who are more likely to be shamed for being attracted to women who are in better physical condition than they are while women with a more fit man are heros and trailblazers or something.

That’s how I keep seeing this image get reposted as, which is interesting to me. The drawing is not merely a fit stylish dude intimately embracing an overweight gal to these people – it’s a pro-fat rallying cry.  After all, “People should fall in love with their eyes closed” just like Andy Warhol said, right?

It’s a nice sentiment and everything. Just an often anti-male one. Considering love often involves sexual intimacy and males are biologically stimulated overwhelmingly by their visual sensory input to a degree so disproportional to women – it is actually a terrible idea to fall in love with ones eyes closed if they are male.

These people reposting the image and attaching this quote to it obviously don’t mean what they’re saying – they actually mean to say “Men should fall in love with their eyes closed. and then keep their eyes closed and keep loving us no matter what we do to ourselves”. That of course is… slightly less romantic.

I don’t diss the Warhol quote on its own because it most certainly has a role in prudent advising especially as our culture gets more and more superficial, indeed. It’s only the use of it as a blanket standard for body image that makes it an awful adage to live by.

While men with no financial stability and no personality who expect to get laid all the time are frowned upon by society as douchebags, losers and gross – women who show an equal proportion of unwillingness to self-modify and expectation to be loved unconditionally anyway are the new Rosie the Riveters. 

This comparison of Tumblr audience reaction-paraphrases illustrates the point more clearly:

I saw some people react negatively to the above comparison, but baselessly and indeed in exactly he vein of blanket “you’re a sexist!” shaming that makes zero sense in an image literally pointing out baseless sexism.

What’s going on behind the scenes here is the inherent female fantasy to be loved unconditionally has been more and more embraced by the pop-culture without an equal embrace of the inherent male fantasy (to get sex unconditionally). While the concept of “treat your woman right” has only intensified from its traditional starting points in Western Civilization, the concept of “treat your man right” has been boiled down to basically “don’t kill him (but if you do, he was probably a pig anyway, so whatever).

Both default fantasies of each gender have to be reeled in slightly. Every girl wants to be a Princess while every boy doesn’t want to be a prince – they want to be a warrior or king or some other figure with respect and power. The reason: To get access to all the princess poon they want.

Both desires have been around for forever – they just haven’t been endorsed by the majority culture. The change came with the advent of the faction of feminism that soon became dominant in the culture with the anti-science claim that males and females have no significant inherent differences and thus any societal treatment as the two being different is actually hypocritical sexism. Instead of the admirable message of “do whatever you want, because damn it – you CAN” that applies to everyone, modern feminism took the stupid route of being anti-feminine and essentially advocating a message of “act more like men”. Thus, observing the obvious truth of the biological world that we live in and noting that a woman has more options the more effort she puts into her physical appearance has become a politically correct taboo, while the obvious truth that a man has more options of women the more ambitious/successful and charismatic or possessive of certain personality traits has not. A woman who is uninterested in a man because he has no job and no personality is celebrated (rightfully) while a man who is uninterested in a woman because she is physically unappealing to him is condemned as being sexist and shallow.

Of course, with hundreds of millions of people, even the small percentage that doesn’t apply to the overwhelming trends of the genders still amount to millions of people – so standards aside, anyone can get laid nowadays. There are plenty of dudes who will tolerate fat chicks and plenty still who like varying degrees of thickness in a mate just as there are plenty of chicks who will tolerate or even like losers and jerks. The only difference is that only one side of that coin is celebrated, which is what I found interesting in the usage of this drawing.

The truth is that individuals like all kinds of different things, but ignoring consistent trends in a majority is not how intelligent humans operate.