Unrealistic Body Standards

[dowie]

This used to be an SJW thing, but a couple of news stories that have popped up over the past couple of days have made me wonder who the **** some of these people are?

Firstly the "Toblerone Tunnel" - essentially the triangular shape at the top of some women's thighs:

https://people.com/health/toblerone...-disturbing-body-trend-taking-over-instagram/

(pic of bikini bottoms below, some might not want to open in work etc..)

Spoiler

While they're no doubt in great shape I can't say the presence of a triangular gap is something I particularly care about re: what I find attractive in women!

Secondly this story popped up in my iPhone news app - apparently on the reality show "Love Island" some Doctor wasn't picked by anyone, fair enough there were only a handful of girls so it is something that that might happen form time to time... however some of the comments made by them were a bit

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowb...d-2018-dr-alex-george-left-along-fans-cringe/

Air hostess Laura Anderson said she usually opted for someone "darker."

She told Alex: "I feel so bad - I usually prefer darker - can you grow a beard?"

Alex eagerly said he could, replying: "A little bit - maybe a goatee or something - I can work on it."

Model Hayley Hughes from Liverpool was even blunter, telling Alex he needed to work on his tan.

Caroline tried to ease the situation, asking Alex if he "goes a nice brown."

Alex replied: "Yes, I can get a nice tan."

Hayley responded: "Well I'll see you maybe in a few weeks then."[/quote]

so both those girls think he needs to work on his tan...

this is what the guy looks like:

Spoiler

looks fairly tanned already to me (and tall, decent hair, teeth, generally seems fairly attractive + is a doctor... and yet he was rejected by all the girls - WTF???? )

Who are these people? Do they all live in Essex or something? Since when does a triangular gap on a girl matter? Since when do guys have to be so brown they're practically bi-racial?

Do any of you care about a "Toblerone Tunnel" or the previous trend of a "thigh gap"? Or for that matter do any of you prefer your potential partners to be even darker than the Doctor in the second image or consider him to be pale?

 

[dowie]

More quality content. They may have just been using that as an excuse to not pick him rather than actually thinking him too pale.

it's GD not SC and you're free to contribute your own threads...

that is true, though the entire show's cast seem to be rather bronzed so it is also plausible they were being genuine

 

[dowie]

I think the point was the "toblerone triangle", but many women (regardless of weight) cannot have such a gap purely based on their genetic make-up, smaller hips. The triangle is the unrealistic standard, not the weight

exactly, it is partly genetic (just as a tan is)

hip to waist ratio is of course linked to attractiveness in women and as Tefal points out that is perhaps seen as attractive from an evolutionary perspective thanks to ability to give birth etc...

but you'll no doubt find there are women out there with an attractive hip to waist ratio who don't have the "Toblerone Tunnel" as they've not got minimal body fat or perhaps simply have larger, more muscular thighs

I'm not talking about women who are obese necessarily but within normal BMI range, in fact if we're going back to the whole caveman/lack of modern medicine thing then having really low body fat isn't ideal either.

I wouldn't have Dowie down as someone who watches Love Island.

I don't (honestly! ) the story was on "trending stories" in the iPhone news app.

How can you tell he is tall from that picture???

there are other pictures in the article, including him standing next to one of the female contestants (granted she could be a borderline midget)

This is the type of nonsense they post when they can't lock down a 6ft+ Chad:

Spoiler: Female Cope

not too different from guys who claim they like their women "curvy" when they actually tend to date obese women who don't really have any curves

I saw the clip the other day when that tall, dark Chad came into Love Island and all the blokes looked uncomfortable and the girls were fawning, it's over for you in 2018 if you aren't running Mediterranean game.

haha

I guess this does play into that whole 4Chan thing a bit, though this guy probably would count as a "Chad" under normal circumstances but perhaps just isn't as much of a "Chad" (or not as "alpha") as the other guys. The other angle is the guy is a doctor, the other contestants (I googled and found a cosmopolitan article) seem to be a "construction worker", "personal trainer", "stationary sales manager" etc.. according to 4chan logic if these women ("Stacys") were more like 29/30-ish rather than 20-22-ish then they'd be all over a doctor as the number 1 prospect as they want a provider at that age.

 

[dowie]

It is hardly just a single trash TV program, as per above it seems to be a social media thing and perhaps setting certain trends too. The trash TV program is merely a reflection of this stuff, people focusing on the fact this was seen on a trash TV program are perhaps missing that.

 

[dowie]

none of them have a toblorone tunnel ... btw.
There's this one girl at work that does but if a 40-year-old man gets caught taking pics of a Swedish 20 year old women, im going to prison....

LOL, probably counts as some form of rape under Sweden's current laws.

 

[dowie]

I look like a bag of turds in comparison, despite being very fit and strong, even at my peak as an international swimmer, I didn't look anything like as good as these modern gym guys with all these supplements and potions.

Silly thing is, the swimmer physique is probably more in line with the optimal shape girls tend to find attractive. I don't think the pointless excess muscle that various gym queens seek to build is at all necessary. When I was in my early 20s and on R&R from a tour of Iraq I had quite a lot of success with women in that short 2 week period, partly because I just had a bit under 2 weeks to blow off steam and so was putting in effort to hook up with as many girls as possible and partly because I was in really good physical condition and had a bit of a tan.

me and a friend were chatting about this phenomenon the other day, we were talking about when we chopped down a bunch of trees in his drive (proper 40m tall firs) and we were loading up the decent logs to the trailer to store them. there were a few of us including myself and his brother in law, who is a fitness instructor and a proper healthy living type of chap (no steroids), but he was knackered after a few decent logs while the rest of us kept going all day despite me for one being overweight and not exercising much.

the only answer we could draw was that the rest of us were used to doing this kind of work, and as such had developed techniques to minimise the expended effort and properly pace ourselves, while the brother in law who might have had the power, was burning himself out because he wasn't used to lifting awkwardly distributed weights.

you might well find that he's simply not very fit... you get all sorts of BS from these personal trainer types, some of them don't like to do much cardio, especially if they do a lot of work with weights... because they're not really into "fitness" they're into body building.

I remember at a previous workplace we had to enter a charity run (it was only about 5k or something), various gym types (who regularly had protein shakes and other nonsense on their desks) fared pretty badly, they were simply unfit, their gym training consisted purely of vanity sessions to build muscle for the sake of it.

 

[dowie]

he's more of an all-round type, certainly not going for the bag of muscles effect

perhaps it is more like Ayahuasca has pointed out then, gym muscles not the same as real muscles... someone used to doing that work outside who has got that strength partly from doing something in the real world rather than repetitive controlled exercises in a gym perhaps has an advantage

as a more extreme example, this is a former world champion boxer attempting some p company tests:

he's at a huge disadvantage (he's a bit older than them too to be fair), those other recruits have been building up strength and fitness not just in a gym and through boxing but through military training more specific to those tasks. He's clearly a very fit man but he's not going to cope with that (also note he's a bit bulkier than most of those recruits, carrying extra weight/muscle that isn't really needed), though perhaps if he had gone through their training before hand then the result would be different. I'd wager that plenty of otherwise very fit people would still struggle a lot initially with plenty of military training as various aspects of it are only trained for really by doing it.