America reclaimed a little bit of its strength yesterday with the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Hopefully we will look back on that act as a turning point in our “war on terrorism.” At home though, we are still losing our own internal war on the Pussification of America (Credit my boys Covino and Rich from SiriusXM).

Last week, my buddy Lance from Honey and Lance sent me a link to this post which he knew I would find interesting and would want to comment on. Reading my comments on the post, I think you’ll get a pretty good sense of my take, so that’s not what I’m going to touch on here. What I instead want to write about is some more meta-ethical points that relate directly back into this post as well as many themes of the blog on which it lives.

The blog post was written by a chick named Rachel Rabbit White, a self proclaimed married bisexual feminist. I should mention that I have a lot more respect for her now than I did when I wrote my first comment, which was an intentionally douchy response to an intentionally douchy article. Despite my tone, she handled herself in a very mature, open minded way that I have a lot of respect for. It doesn’t excuse her blog based on morally bankrupt concepts, but I want to make it clear that the goal of this post is not to be an ad hominem attack, but rather a critical review of some of these concepts.

Yesterday I was walking around central park with a girl and she brought up a tangential topic, namely, morality in dating, and more specifically, what drives human dating behavior in men and women. My response was pretty long, but at the start of the response, I noted that the prevailing scientific theory in biology at the moment is that of evolution by natural selection, and as such, any discussion of human drives, and by extension human ethics, must have its theoretical foundation in evolution to even be on my radar. I don’t want to get into too much debate about what makes something good or bad, but suffice it to say that any model worth considering is going to be rooted in evolution, and as such is going to agree with the rest of this post.

So let’s talk about “fat positive” for a second, because it came up numerous times when I was exploring Rachel’s blog, and it also came up indirectly in a couple of comments below the post, specifically those by Scarlett. For those of you who don’t know what it is, “fat positive” is a movement with the goal of an acceptance of fatness as normal, healthy and attractive. Now, I understand where Rachel is coming from, as she has a history of anorexia, so it’s understandable that she feels like judgment of female beauty contributes to body image issues, and that this is a problem for the world. But here’s the thing: attraction is not a choice, and is largely rooted in biology, much moreso than people are willing to acknowledge in this day and age. Body fat in healthy individuals is tightly regulated in the hypothalamus. Both the urge to overeat and to undereat fall into this category of “tightly regulated,” and the psychological story that our mind tells itself is reverse engineered from the biochemistry of the brain. As such, if someone is overweight, it means that they are unhealthy, in the sense that this regulatory signaling is getting disrupted, so the body chooses to retain excess fat mass because it thinks that this level of fat mass is a much lower, actually healthy level.

From a evolutionary standpoint, it makes a world of sense that an unhealthy physique would be unattractive. It also makes sense that physique would be vastly more important to men than it would be to women. Biologically, a man is capable of impregnating a woman, leaving, and still having his genetics passed onto the next generation, assuming that the woman is physically capable of giving birth and raising the child without dying. So the minimum investment required from a man is about two minutes or less, and evolution will select for men to be attracted to fit women who will be able to raise their child to self-sufficiency. By comparison, the minimum level of investment required of a woman to have her genetics passed on to the next generation is a bare minimum 9 months and more commonly on the order of 13+ years. Since our incentives are so misaligned, it’s no surprise that our mechanisms of attraction would be so different.

These differences are reality, and to judge individuals on these differences is to ignore reality, to fly in the face of it. As such, it is immoral to judge a man for liking hot women, just as it is immoral to judge a woman for liking power, money, word creativity or anything else that women are attracted to. That is why the “fat positive” movement is total bullshit. Being fat is not normal, it’s not healthy, and it’s definitely not attractive. To deny these facts is to deny reality. To criticize someone for choosing to accept reality is immoral. For this reason, the “fat positive” movement is a morally bankrupt movement.

Still with me so far? Great, so let’s go one step deeper. Now, for the most part, I do not blame fat people for being fat, it is not their fault. They were born into a perfect storm of obesity creation, namely a world in which grains are the base of the food pyramid and are subsidized by the government, and dietary animal fats are demonized and replaced by frankenoils created from the subsidized grains. Still, just because it’s not your fault that you’re not fat, doesn’t mean that you should except that you are fat. Accepting mediocrity is to refuse to strive for greatness, which brings me full circle to the Pussification of America.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned that I am going to do my best to keep things agnostic of your beliefs about morality as long as whatever system you believe in has a basis in evolution. Still, I want to make it clear that my belief is that human achievement is good, and to accept mediocrity for yourself is bad. Regardless of whether you agree with this worldview, it is undeniable that the United States of America was founded on this conception of morality. So anything that serves to make America accept mediocrity rather than strive for greatness is something that results in the pussification of our nation. Look, if you want to accept mediocrity for yourself and have that be sanctioned by the government, there are plenty of other countries in the world. America is supposed to be the one safe haven for ambition. At some point, I may write a blog post on this (hint, government needs to get out of the way on most things, the exceptions being public goods, a bare minimum standard of living social safety net, healthcare because it is not a market good, and education because it is the vehicle by which one learns the basic tools required in order to move from poverty into prosperity), but for now, I’ll try to stay on topic.

The Pussification of America needs to be stopped. It needs to be resisted at every turn. This includes derailing the “fat positive” movement. For all of you fatties who protest, check out Robb Wolf’s site or Mark Sisson’s site, a lot of great free information on both, and both have hugely popular books available in all major bookstores. Now you have access to the right information, and losing weight will be stupid easy for you should you choose to do it. If you don’t choose to do it, well, now that you have good information, you are choosing mediocrity for yourself, and I no longer give a shit if I offend you.

Posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 2:47 pm