The Meat Market Index

[Tabouli]

Ali:

> *sighs*  Well, living in New York City, I am constantly bombarded with 
> armies of thin, perfect women as I walk down the street.  And being a 
> college student, most of the girls my age are thin, perfect girls.  
> Personally, I'm what you'd probably call "comfortable" - by no means fat, 
> but not thin either.  5'9" and a women's size 12.  Which I think is a 
> perfectly reasonable size to be, though being a 10 would be nice.  But when 
> surrounded by size 2's on a daily basis, it's a little hard not to be 
> bitter.
>
>Thank god I have a boyfriend.  The competition here is a kinda steep.

This reminds me of something that happened in this Egyptian dancing class I did a few months ago.  There were about 15 young women (most about 20yos) in the class, of whom one was from New York and the others were Australian, and someone mentioned rice crackers.  The NY woman commented that they were great, and only had x calories each, whereupon the others shrugged at each other in amused mystification.  "Do they?" asked one woman indifferently.

My cross-cultural ears pricked up.  Given that these women were all university undergraduates (i.e. similar demographically), could it be that young American women are much more diet-conscious than young Australian women?  It looked to me like none of the Australians had ever calorie counted, or at least, certainly not to the point of knowing how many calories there were in certain foods.  Not that Australian women don't fret about their body shape, mind you, they just seem less controlled and organised about it.

You know, I had a couple of years of my life where I bought into this idea of women's attractiveness being measured in terms of how far they deviate from the media ideal and it was hellish.  Why did I go there?  Because I had two successive relationships with men who saw their girlfriend primarily as a sort of sexual accessory, there for having sex with and wearing on the arm as a measure of their social status.  Women, in their view, were a sort of perishable consumer product, and when they went shopping at the meat market, they assessed them accordingly, almost like buying a car.  Hmmm yes, handles well on curves but a little high on mileage, what do you think, guys?  Can I get better value for my money?

It was all very interesting, what these two frightful men did to my body image.  Before them, I'd just about cured my adolescent body traumas and recognised that even though I deviate quite a fair way from the media ideal I never seemed to be short of male attention by virtue of being viviacious and cheery and articulate, at least on good days, even in the presence of women much closer to the media ideal.  Someone once told me that bimbos found me very threatening for this reason!  After these men, however... (quotable quote from Awful Man I: "Why can't you just face the fact that you're not particularly attractive, and get on with your life instead of being so insecure about it, for God's sake?  Just get over it!"  Quotable quote from Awful Man II when trying to reassure me: "I'd rather go out with you than a Good-Looking Woman, because...")

I started obsessively comparing myself with every woman I saw, looking at them through my dodgy boyfriends' eyes and despairing at my conclusion that at least 90% of them were closer to the media ideal than me.  I looked in the mirror and saw a dumpy little woman with a flat chest, stumpy legs, a broad face, bad skin, eyebags and limp hair, destined to whoever was left over after any man worth having had claimed a Good Looking Woman.  I started resenting the female friends that my charming boyfriends had informed me were better looking than me.  I became miserable and withdrawn, avoided mirrors, and, after a period, flirted desperately with any man I met to try to prove to myself that I *was* attractive, trying to swallow the terrible fear that all men, deep down, are just the same as those two.

But then, after a recuperating overseas trip, I came to a realisation that it's much healthier to view yourself in terms of absolute value, rather than comparative value on the Meat Market Index.  All this trying to fiddle the figures and put on acts to *appear* a higher scorer on the Index than you are, all those magazine articles teaching you how to act attractive and manipulate him into "buying" before he realises... blagggh.  For a start, a woman's value on the MMI depreciates horribly; absolute value is much more stable.

I want a partner who wants me for who I am as a unique person, my absolute value, not because I'm about the highest on the MMI he thinks he can catch.  How insulting.  These days I have very little time for men who run their love lives according to the MMI, and assume women do too.  There *are* people out there who don't buy into the MMI, and they're the people I now cultivate in my life.  And you know what?  I feel much better for it.

Tabouli.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]