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September 22, 2006

The Race to Obesity, and Skinny Models

MOLLY:

Dollop, I read that they are going to ban models who are too skinny.  What is too skinny?

DOLLOP:

Skinny is size 0.  What is behind the attempt to push skinny girls off the fashion runways is America’s Race to Obesity.  This is not a well-known movement.  There are people who have a lot invested in futures of the oil market.  That is, Corn Oil.  And sugar, salt, and Crispy Crème donuts.   They have infiltrated the government.  You will see that school lunches were designed to plant those hungry little fat cells in the bodies of little children so that when they are faced with a choice between a donut and some baby spinach, you know what they’ll scarf.

How do you think E coli bacteria got into spinach?  Spinach was getting too popular.  People were eating spinach every day.  They started to crave cute little baby spinach, pre-washed, in fun arrangements with baby carrots and snow peas.  The DIP Industry really thrived by producing flowery exotic pink dressings in beautiful bottles that you could dab on your baby spinach.  How did the Race to Obesity foil that?  They put “caca” in it.  (Not the same as George Allen’s “macaca” but we’ll never know for sure…)   There is no faster way to put off fastidious Princesses than to tell them they are eating shit.

Now they’ll have to go back to potato chips.  You need dips with those too, so the DIP Industry happy.  They are adding sour cream to improve the flavor combo.

Many of our other industries, in happy capitalist America, are secretly (what do we know?) supportive of the Race to Obesity.    People need bigger clothes.  They tend to start with “skinny” clothes and then graduate to “fat” clothes, and keep buying the “skinny” clothes dreaming of their tinier selves.  This requires more cloth and bigger closets.  Big chairs and sofas.  Cars.  People buy more food, eat lots.   Medical services have TONS more work.  They built extra-wide wheel chairs and stretchers, and stopped making everybody wear a little wash cloth on their private parts for modesty.  They are making bigger paper robes.  America has always been known for Expansion.

The personal training industry is shifting to new seminar programs, for example, “Fat: What’s Wrong With It?”  or, “Big and Beautiful, Got a Problem With That?,”  and “Re-building Your Life Around Fat.”   My personal favorite is “Love Me, Love My Super Size.”  (I would like a seminar on feathers, too.)

The fashion industry was trending toward super skinny because they would really rather have walking robot-manikins, but nobody’s invented good ones yet.  They already trained the girls and boys to stop smiling so that they don’t distract from the clothes.   You get people to sit up and pay attention when the model looks like she is going to faint and maybe die any minute.  Then there is the magic of watching self-starvation.

Well, all this was making the majority of America look bad.  We don’t want the collective esteem to suffer.  People are flopped on their over-size couches watching over-size TV screens, eating over-size portions of buffalo wings and giant Ho-Hoes brought home in industrial cartons from Costco.  The last thing they want to see is a skinny, gorgeous girl flipping her hair and nearly dancing when she walks.  The word got out.

The Godmother of the Race to Obesity, who had already killed off baby spinach, was now going to see that these skinny girls end up in unemployment lines, eating cheap fast food.  In fact, some mean fatties were seeking them out when they were in line, and giving them free milkshakes with the legend “Just Say No To Lettuce and Diet Soda!”  When the skinnies went for job interviews, the interviewer would test their ability to be “team players” by offering them giant chocolate chip cookies in front of all of the (fat) employed people.  They would hold open houses for skinny ex-models and serve chocolate cake with double whipped frosting and caramel frappacinos.

TV stations introduced new shows.  Instead of “The Biggest Loser” they showed “Stuffing for America,” a secret fund-raiser for the Race.   There are new physical training videos that show, for example, how to put your shoes on when you can’t reach your feet, how to get your arms into the sleeves of a shirt when you cannot reach behind you, how to get up out of bed by rolling to the edge, and how to avoid breaking furniture.   There is a service that will train monkeys and dogs to help the Fat navigate everyday motion. There is a reality show “Swap Diets” between fatties and skinnies, and everybody cries a LOT. 

The industry knows that setting a clothing size standard won’t work.  Remember that “size 8” is the old size 12, and who helped that along??   They talked about using the body mass index, with 18 as the allowable thin.  But most models are between 14 and 18.  Their union proposed 14.9987654321.  But Godmother a.k.a. BIG Momma, nixed it.  She was thinking 35. 

In fact, BIG Momma personally issued a new fashion line that she claimed was “refreshing, new, original” and “a knockout” but a few people have figured out that it is derivative of two major, little appreciated  designers that are very popular in some parts of the world, the unrecognized teams who gave us the Hawaiian muumuu and the Muslim burka.  It just isn’t fair.  She is, however, having trouble finding fat models who can walk all the way down the runway without crying.

As I was saying to Trollop and Chickie, “it’s the oil, stupid.”

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