Another Reason to Diet ...

A rather bizarre study by researchers at Yale found that male respondents were more likely to claim an obese woman guilty of a crime than a thin woman, thin man or even obese man: Slate. Women respondents, on the other hand, were unbiased based on size -- thus calling into question the old cattiness claims. But what does this tell us? Maybe nothing, but it is interesting to contemplate. As I have written before, Americans love the overweight male dolt, buffoon or trickster. From Lou Costello, Oliver Hardy, Dom Deluise and John Candy to Jim Belushi, Chris Farley, Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson, America has had a long love affair with chubby or downright obese men who do funny things and, generally, make fun of themselves. For women, the list is much shorter -- maybe including Oprah, Rosanne, Margaret Cho and Melissa McCarthy (though many others dislike some or all of them) among a few others I can't think of at the moment. But what do we have against the non-celeb obese women? Is it our sense that women are supposed to make themselves attractive for our pleasure? Is it our sense that they have impulse control problems, which men just aren't really punished for? Could it be that given how much women care about their weight, we just see them as bodily instantiations of failure? On this point I defer to brighter minds, but it is certainly food for thought ...