I was supposed to post pictures of beach babes I saw for my friend at work, Paul Hounslow. But the only women I saw were two obese women in bikinis who put all their stuff down right next to us and proceeded to talk loudly non-stop for two hours while sipping concealed beers (alcohol isn't allowed on the beach).
My daughter and I tried to remember all the best lines to post:
"When I saw he had that $70 fine, I paid it but I didn't have enough for the bills. Then he came home and ate my meal and his, then he ate that cheese that you gave me. I said I ain't payin' his fines no more else I won't have enough for my bills."
"He said I had an emotional attitude, then I got mad and yelled, and he flipped and started beatin' on my car. I got ahold of that wrench and went after his motorcycle."
"He just plays with his hernia. He won't get it fixed. He just sits there and plays with it while he watches TV."
"I got a date tonight. I knowed him about a year." (The friend asks what her new boyfriend does for a living.) "I dunno. But he better do somethin'."
17 comments:
Paul just asked me if you got the photos of the babes for him then? ;)
I just said, didn't I, that I didn't see any. You wouldn't have wanted photos of these women, so count yourself lucky that I didn't have a camera with me.
So fat people should just "cover up and calm down," rather like middle-aged women, eh?
Loud people should shut up, I think, so others can enjoy life without their constant chatter. Fat people can wear bikinis if they want -- but I can am also free to describe what I see.
Says the loud mouthed Mississipian. :P
Well, at least I don't wear a bikini!
Boyz, let this be a lesson to ya. Your women will blab about your most private parts in the most public places. Next thing ya know, it'll be on the damn Internet! And women wonder why we don't tell 'em nuthin.'
>So fat people should just "cover >up and calm down," rather like >middle-aged women, eh?
I don't think that's what Elizabeth was trying to say. I was there, and it wouldn't have mattered at all that they were fat or were loud if they hadn't, WITH ALL THE BEACH TO CHOOSE FROM, decided to plonk themselves down within five feet of us!
Surely it's in order to mention someone's age, size or gender? It all helps the reader visualise the scene. Dickens wouldn't have held back.
And I have to admit, I could hardly take my eyes of one of these women. I mean - I'm fat - but she was like a caricature of a Lucian Freud painting.
"It only takes a modest weight gain for a woman to experience weight discrimination, but men can gain far more weight before experiencing similar bias, a new study shows.
The notion that society is less tolerant of weight gain in women than men is just one of the findings suggested by a new report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, published this month in the International Journal of Obesity."
source:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/fat-bias-worse-for-women/
The more we poke fun at fat people, the more socially acceptable such discrimination becomes.
You could have just moved along down the beach if you found them so disagreeable. Perhaps staying for the entertainment value?
Yeah, like I'm going to move our big beach umbrella and all our stuff further down the beach for the hour or so we had left. And yeah, that's what it was, I secretly loved being annoyed by them so I purposely stayed near them so I could be entertained.
>You could have just moved along down the beach if >you found them so disagreeable. Perhaps staying for >the entertainment value?
No, it was really annoying. But it took a long time to dig a hole for our umbrella and bury it and I wasn't going to go to all that trouble again.
I wasn't making fun of obese people in my post -- imagine if we couldn't say someone was fat or thin -- then sentences in books would sound like this: "I saw a person on the beach. I can't tell you what their body shape is or report what they were saying as it might get misconstrued as class or body-shape discrimination."
Reminds me of the first page of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin':
"He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much over-dressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gayly with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it'
Harriet Beecher Stowe *begins* her description with the man's height and build. Presumably it's ok for classic authors to do this - what's wrong when Elizabeth does it?
I hope I can make a contribution to this thread that helps it reach its terminus.
First of all, body size is a factual matter. People are obese in the same way that shirts are white. There are borderline cases (is the shirt off-white?) that we can quibble about, but this is evidently not what is occurring here.
Secondly, there was nothing pejorative in what was said. 'Obese women' is descriptive, not normative. And the fact that they were in bikinis was worth pointing out, since you don't often see obese women in bikinis, in the same way you often don't see blind people at the cinema.
I further think that it may allow the reader to learn something about the women; for example, most women I know who are even overweight refuse to wear a bikini for one of several reasons: they are concerned with what people will think or they do not like the way the look. Since Elizabeth reported that these women are both obese and in bikinis, I might tentatively think that they do not care what people think of their body size, or that they are absolutely fine with their physical appearance. Other people might draw other conclusions - readers get involved with scenes laid out for them in this way and have different reactions to them.
Let me point out that Elizabeth also mentioned they were women, so perhaps she was being sexist as well, and she mentioned they drank, so she must have been championing abstinence over indulgence. There's room for everyone to find offense every where in the world that they choose to see it.
Pretty soon we'll be unable to use any adjectives, and some pronouns will be verboten as well. Ridiculous.
And as a side note, mentioning body size is not discriminatory, since discrimination involves actually depriving someone of something (and usually people in protected classes have immutable characteristics that are being protected, and not things like body size).
Lastly, forbidding people to mention anyone's body size does nothing to change attitudes toward obese people anyway, it only keeps them from mentioning what they are thinking.
Wow, Lisa! Bravissima! I came in late to this highly interesting exchange of ideas (let's not call it a catfight!:):) so I won't add to it except to say you are 100% correct (and show lots of common sense.) Mel, good defense of your client/lady wife---you should have been a lawyer.
Yes,of course it is okay to describe the scene before you, whether of fat rednecks on a beach or a sunset on a tropic isle.
Moving our beach umbrellas from the "fat" topic a bit, here's a similar issue: our state paper (owned by some faceless Big Brother corporation) does not allow any mention of race in a crime report, for example. Can't say "a short black man robbed a bank" or "a scuzzy-looking white man murdered an old lady." Of course, once the miscreants are nabbed, and their names are published, we can all tell: if his name is "Da'Quarius" we're pretty certain he's one color, and if it's "Chuck" or "Dave" he's another.
Back to fat people: I am in grave danger of becoming one myself after my week in Italy. As it's always dangerous to drink local water, I was forced to live on prosecco...
I was taught never to write someone's race in an article if it wasn't germane to the article, so I can see that point. The English paper have a sly way of getting around this though and letting you know the class of the person they are writing about, they'll give you a sentence like "Mrs. Smith, mother of 5, who depends on state benefits, says...." so you can form your prejudiced opinion that way. When the UK papers want to tell you who they are writing about but are restricted from doing so by the draconian libel laws here, they will sometimes print a photo of the person somewhere else in a non-newsworthy article -- we UK readers are trained to search for our info in this manner.
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