I watched a video about a dating experiment last week that left me completely confused. Initial frustration progressed into full blown anger after reading the comments. The YouTube video is called “Fat Girl Tinder Date” and it is essentially a social experiment by the dudes behind the Simple Pickup channel, designed to see if men would be nice to an overweight woman on a blind date, or not.
The reason the comments piss me off is because so many people fell for the bullshit manipulation and used the disgust shown by some of the men as proof that guys in general are insensitively shallow. Highlights from the comment section include:
I’ve heard a lot of stupidness in my days, but these comments above absolutely take the cake as far as dating goes. So you mean to tell me that Tinder, a dating app where you decide who you’re interested in by swiping one picture of the person either to the left or to the right, is actually NOT designed to cultivate deep, meaningful spiritual connections? Are you really saying that Tinder, which has been compared by many to the dating app Grindr, which members of the LGBT community use to find sex partners within their proximity, breeds superficiality over seeking substance? You don’t say! How stupid can you be to actually expect anything more from an app that is dedicated to streamlining that whole “getting to know you” thing?
The reason I really hated this experiment is its aim: to prove that “fat” is nothing more than a synonym for “disgusting.” And then they put fake plaster all over a woman’s face and said, “yeah, this will be good enough to tell if a man is attracted to big women or not” as if a woman’s size is a physical deal breaker.
It reminds me of those arguments I used to have with people who SWORE that I didn’t like dark skin women because I didn’t find Whoopi Goldberg attractive even though I think Bria, Lupita and Naomi are all sexy as hell. Because THEY viewed dark skin as a handicap, they tried to limit my belief that all dark skinned women are not cosmetically equal – just like any other human beings on Earth. A woman’s attraction (or lack thereof) to Flavor Flav does not determine her love for dark skin men, just as her level of affinity for Bonecrusher does not determine her interest in big men.
Throughout my dating life, I’ve been able to maintain my somewhat-superficial-sapiosexual nature with every woman I go out with. It’s an absolute must for me to date a woman with charisma, personality and wit, but I’d be lying if I said that her physical appearance was unimportant. Throughout my superficial dating days, I’ve dated women of all shades, all heights and all sizes. Why? Because if I want to date a beautiful woman, that does not disqualify plus size women. Jill Scott, Queen Latifah, Toccara, Katya Zharkova, and Denise Bidot are examples of this. In fact, Mia Amber Davis (R.I.P.) was one of the most beautiful women I’ve EVER seen in my life.
Personally, I would have reacted the same as those men who got the hell up and left because, as a former online-dater, I think people who use old pictures that aren’t representative of their current features are deluded sociopaths. Also, I think confidence is sexy, and if you aren’t confident enough in your own body to post pictures of what you look like today, then you aren’t comfortable in your own skin and that’s a huge turn-off. I can’t rock with a woman who wantonly wastes my time by presenting herself as something she’s not. In that moment, it’s not her waistline that’s unattractive, it’s her personality.
The problem with using a fat suit wearing, goitre chin having, Tinder decepticon as an example of how men discriminate against big girls is that it presents being overweight as an all encompassing dating disability, instead of what it really is – an individual body feature. And that’s a feature that some men like in some women, and one that some men don’t like in others. So I suggest we STOP using “big” and “fat” as equal terms when the truth is that beauty knows no size – and there are many “big” women I know who look far better than the model in the video in her natural, skinny form.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.