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Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Why Are The Germans Being So Mean To "Heavy" Heidi Klum?
Christian Bale's Apology: "I Was Way Out Of Order"
Why Do We Tolerate Men Who Throw Tantrums?

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jenalicious
07/19/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
reading this makes me incredibly grateful for my boyfriend, who, when i have a little extra poundage, only points out how great my boobs/curves look.
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Mishegoss
07/12/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Dear offending author of this Askmen.com article: I suppose that in reality, you yourself have dealt with the issue of your honey getting hornier for pie than for you. It's probably because she's so depressed from being with a monstrously unpleasant asshat, so she suffocates her own anxiety with Ding Dongs and Little Debbie Devil cakes. I would know; I've dated men like you.
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Eleanor Ramilly
07/12/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
I have been struggling with disordered eating since I was twelve. Every time I go into a store or restaurant I feel a sense of panic and fear. Sometimes the thought of eating makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I just read some highlights of this story out loud to my boyfriend, who was shocked and disgusted and said "I can't believe people are actually like that."

The only time I feel comfortable with my body, at ease and happy, is with him. I can eat whatever I want and never worry about what it will make me look like. I've told him that before, and it makes him sad more than anything else. Obviously these are issues I'm working on.

The point is, ladies, don't put up with this shit. This article sounds like it was written by a man who has never really loved someone.
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cmd
07/12/09

@Eleanor Ramilly: I read the tips to my fiance and his response was, "so what you're saying is I should mentally torture you?" KEEPER.
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merlesray
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
And the best way to respond to a man who would use this is: wait until said man puts on a few pounds. Seductively walk up and pat his pooch and in a throaty whisper say...you know, the bigger your gut gets, the smaller your cock gets.
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sympathyforthebasementcat
07/11/09

@merlesray: Very tempting. Though I guess body snarking is just as bad when directed at guys. Unless they're this much of an asshole. But I would never date one of these assholes.
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Adah
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
God, I don't really know why, but that triggered more body issues in me than anything else I've ever read here. Maybe it's because I haven't been working out as much lately as I used to, and my clothes are getting slightly tighter. Excuse me while I go cry.
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sympathyforthebasementcat
07/11/09

@Adah: Cry over the fact that some douche got paid to write this. Don't cry for your body - it's the only one you got. It lets you see the world, have orgasms, pet puppies and enjoy yummy food. What more could you ask of it? Trust, if dudes like this not wanting to have sex with you is the only 'drawback' to not working out all the time, then I say you win.
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Adah
07/12/09

@sympathyforthebasementcat: Honestly, it's not a romance issue. I'm in the military, but deployed and don't have the time to work out that I did at home, or the support group of people who work out with me. For me, that makes it infinitely harder to exercise. The military has a focus on fitness that is appropriate due to the nature of the job, but all too often that focus on fitness is transferred to an inappropriate focus on weight and body shape, period. It's not just about how fast you run or how many push-ups and situps you do, it's about how good you look in uniform and how much you weigh. The military body snarks and fat shames like no other. I wear a size eight and I've been called fat more times than you would believe. My slight drop in fitness is leading me to real paranoia and depression right now. It was not a good time in my life to read this article, because people do this shit to each other every day in my job. It's disgusting.
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rednrowdy
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
shouldn't this be titled "10 ways to ensure that your girlfriend will break up with you so you don't have to be the bad guy"?
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Keep it cool
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Counting down until askmen sees this post and proceeds to call us a bunch of fat, cat loving spinsters.
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lizardbits
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
I think this article might have been written by my mother.
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femputer
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
I'm just going to tell myself that, like newscasters who crack jokes/fuck up and then say "oh boy, this is gonna be on The Soup/The Daily Show!," these Ask Men/Men's Health douchebag extraordinaires are writing shit like this thinking "Oh boy, that's gonna end up on Jezebel/Bitch Magazine!" Otherwise...I can't even cope with the reality of this attitude. At least such tactics may have ONE positive outcome: alerting the women targeted that they need to move on and FAST.
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VirginiaDentata
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Hm, maybe Ask Men can help me. See, my boyfriend has been inconsiderately losing his hair! What about my needs? He had a full head of curls when we first met, and now he is just letting himself go.

I've tried everything. I leave before and after pics around. I buy him shampoo, and hair gel, and conditioner, and comb and brush sets, so he'll get the hint that I only love him for his hair. I take him to the salon for dates, and for his birthday I'm surprising him with tickets to see HAIR on Broadway. I've even bought a wig for him to wear in the bedroom.

Why won't he regrow his hair for me?! I'm so tired of his ignoring my sexual needs!!!!
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Rooo sez BISH PLZ
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Those drooling semiliterates posing as readers -- not to speak of that hellspawn passive aggressive calling himself an author -- aren't fit to wipe the bottom of a Neil LaBute protagonist's shoe.
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mbot says Spock yeah!
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
So Ask Men says you're fat

Well I ain't down with that!
'Cause your waist is small and your curves are kickin'
And I'm thinkin' bout stickin'
To the beanpole dames in the magazines:
You ain't it, Miss Thing!
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Edited by mbot says Spock yeah! at 07/11/09 4:57 PM

anibundel
07/11/09

@mbot says Spock yeah!:

Take the average Jezebel and ask her that.

She gotta pack much back.
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Edited by anibundel at 07/11/09 5:06 PM anibundel was starred anibundel was unstarred

rumpelshowsskin
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
I came back from a trip home, six months after the BF and I had been a couple. I had been across the ocean for a summer and had gained about ten pounds. I told the S.O. about it on the phone jokingly, but was secretly dreading his reaction. My father and all my brothers weight-shame women so i've just grown up expecting it and constantly gearing up to fight it, while simultaneously excusing it as a clumsy manifestation of a good intention---instead of recognizing it for the dingleberryism it actually is.

During the phone conversation the BF just said " Hey, woman, you're beautiful. Shut up about it" but I thought he was just being nice and once he actually saw the weight something in his body language would let me know he was unhappy with it.

So i get back to the U.S. He rushes to my apt to meet me. When he sees me for the first time he tackles me to the floor and starts kissing me. He grabs my (bigger than three months prior) hips and looks up at me and whispers: "it's sexy how your body's changed; i want to kiss it in different ways" and then proceeds to screw me silly.

I melted with love for him, and then teared up because in that instant I realized how much damage my dad and brothers had done to my self-esteem. Coming from a close, loving family, I think I had never been able to admit to myself how patronizing and controlling any attempts to influence a woman's weight really were--my line of reasoning was always if your loving family does something then it must be loving by default because they are, right?

That moment, and my level of gratitude for what should simply have been the expected behavior, really made me reassess my imagined amount of self-esteem. It made me able to tell my father how much his talking about my weight saddened me.

The BF and I are still together, three years later, thirty total pounds of weight gain more. He has never once done anything but say I was hot and mean it. He's never pretended not to notice I had gained weight or ignore my real distress if expensive work clothes no longer fit (which I personally could also not deal with because I would feel patronized or pussyfooted around) but he's also never assigned it any meaning, or shown that it affected his personal assessment of my attractiveness in any way, because it doesn't.

I don't think all guys that weight-shame are assholes. My father and siblings aren't. They're just misguided. I myself went through a period with my ex where I thought his bringing up my weight was a sign of maturity in a relationship--a sign that we were so comfortable and honest with each other he could tell me when I was compromising my attractiveness to him. And I think a lot of women who stay with weight-shaming men take this view of it and as such make excuses for other people's behavior. I did. It didn't occur to me at the time that the fact that even one iota of my attractiveness to my ex being based on how I looked in an old pair of jeans meant that he wasn't fully seeing me. It didn't occur to me at the time that he was inadvertently just exacerbating wounds my family had inflicted that had just scabbed over.

With my S.O. now, every pound I have gained, every new dimple of cellulite, every coat that won't close, is just a part of our journey together as a couple. It's a living map of delicious dinners, and ice-cream eaten in bed after sex, and meals we have lovingly made for each other, and the part of it that is based on my ongoing battle with the kind of depression that should have made me jump off a cliff, is just a testament in his eyes to how strong I am to still be alive and still be fighting and still be trying to make a life with him. The weight is a piece of our history together. It's a part of me, another layer of my story that he loves because he loves me.

I know i'm rambling so I'll stop but I just wanted to share this because it was such a revelation for me to realize that this was the way weight gain should work (at least for me) in the context of a relationship. Most importantly it taught me a lesson that I could extrapolate to myself and my own personal relationship with my body. My every pound is simply a sentence in my narrative. Every part of that narrative, good or bad, is mine and mine alone to want to change, and every pound acquired in the course of my journey through life is worthy of love because I am. Plain and simple.
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squirrelcop
07/11/09

@rumpelshowsskin: This is a remarkable piece of insightful writing that deserves to be more than a comment on Jezebel (with all due respect to this site and Hortense's post that inspired its being shared, seriously). Brava, rumpelshowsskin.
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tonightineed is actually Mrs. Ziegler-Spock
07/11/09

@rumpelshowsskin: I really appreciate your long-windedness because it was such a fantastic story!

I'm really lucky that my boyfriend is like this too. I used to hide my weight and sizes from him as much as I could (we've got a long distance thing), and then one day I screwed my eyes up and sent him a mostly unclothed shot with "This is what I really look like". What I got back was not a snide comment or a "Hm. Oh.", but rather a long talk from him about loving my body as much as he does and never needing to be concerned about my weight around him. He likes that I'm bigger, and when he heard I wanted to lose weight he was flabbergasted, but, to my joy, has been incredibly supportive even though I've actually gained weight since we had that discussion.

....and my boyfriend loves my cellulite too. He thinks it's cute, like my stretch marks. He's an odd one, but I love him, every super tall and scrawny inch of him.
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sarrible
07/11/09

@rumpelshowsskin: MARRY HIM.

Seriously, your man sounds great. And your relationship with your body sounds really healthy.
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Eleanor Ramilly
07/12/09

@rumpelshowsskin: I love this comment and I'm glad you found someone so wonderful.
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itsonreserve
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
Top Ten Subtle Ways to Point Out To AskMen that They're D-Bags:

1. Leave a box of Summer's Eve out on his favorite copy of Maxim with a post-it that says "Just Like the Owner of this magazine"

2. Serve them a laxative pie

3. Take him somewhere with an unknown dick drawn on his face.

4. Sabotage their computer so they can't write misogynistic drivel

5. Playfully grab their nostrils and pull hard.

6. Ask him to not wear Axe to dinner
.

7. Set out your own "God my AskMan is a douchebag signs."

8. Sabotage their chair.

9. Show them your new yoga pose with your foot up their ass

0. buy condoms that are too big. When they ask so, "Oh no wonder I don't feel anything!"
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anibundel
07/11/09

@itsonreserve:

11. Give him anti douchebag clips for his birthday.

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Edited by anibundel at 07/11/09 5:17 PM anibundel was starred anibundel was unstarred

gherkinfiend
07/11/09

In reply to Ask Men Thinks You're Fat, Wants Your Boyfriend To Tell You So
So Ask Men are only concerned with women in couples gaining weight? I don't have a boyfriend and they haven't told me if I can adapt this article for family and friends to make me feel worthless...

Or is being single telling me something?
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wtfox?!
07/11/09

@gherkinfiend: Ohhhh, it's telling you something all right.
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