The Energy Spatula has a heartfelt post on the difficulties and uncertainties that come with being an overweight female.

While I've fought my own battles with the waistline, the struggles a heavy guy endures simply don't match up with what a heavy girl does. As I've say every now-and-again, if you're shy it's better to be a girl, but if you're heavy it's better to be a guy. So I'll let her post speak for itself and won't try to say "I understand" what I will never entirely appreciate. I will, however, offer a guy's perspective on this matter. I'm an atypical guy, to be sure, but I'm present in conversations that occur only in the company of men and studying people has been my hobby for as long as I have been a wallflower can recall.

This is a meandering post with little utility other than trying to string together a bunch of thoughts on the subject. I'm not giving relationship advice so much as I am giving self-improvement advice (though not self-improvement in the diet form, at this juncture). So take it with a grain of salt and gleam from it whatever wisdom you might be able to find.

Any guy who says looks don't matter is almost certainly a liar. Any girl who says the same is almost certainly a liar as well, but (a) less certainly and (b) less lying. Be it cultural or innate, appearence matters more to guys than to girls from the get-go. But even if it is completely innate or evolutionary, the statistical outlying guys are oftenly caught in the swirl due to cultural concerns.

So why are guys hung up on weight? Largely, I think, it's because we're told to be. The greatest irony, I think, is that this message comes as much from women as from men. Look at Cosmo and look at Playboy and you'll see more waif in the former. In a vacuum, people will stratify. For guys, this often leads to physical intimidation starting at a very young age. I can't tell you how many little napoleon runts tried to lift themselves up in junior high by attacking the oafish, 5'10" fat kid that I was. For girls, a lot of the stratification games appears to be built around beauty, fashion trends, and so on. A lot of the time, girls dress cutely not just for guys, but for each other. Fashion trends are built not to look good, but to be exclusionary. While male infighting tends to be more direct, females find their ways.

Stratification occurs in a vacuum and school is the ultimate vacuum and the ultimate case of inmates running the asylum (socially, and at that age, that's all that really matters).

So why am I talking about high school? Because, as I touched on the other day, a lot of our attitudes are formed during that age of frivolity. Those that were successful in high school will continue to run the same patterns until it stops working. Those that were not successful in high school will sometimes try to play catch-up on a game that has long-since ceased to matter.

The bad news is that some people never get beyond this and others, for reasons both practical and not, continue to have priorities that emulate adolescent priorities. The good news is that a lot do grow out of it and, fortunately and unfortunately, people are pretty impressionable. Especially guys (girls may be moreso, but I'm witness to less testimony there).

I have seen guys line up and compete for girls that are more than a couple of pounds overweight. I myself have transitioned from liking the stereotypical waif to appreciating a little softness. Ever since a turnabout at some point in 2001, I've not had any desire to see the people I've been with lose weight. And unlike Spatula's husband, I meant it. It's not that I'm this super-evolved being, but I've grown up and evaluated who I am and what I want and have determined that a pretty (and frequent!) smile does more for me appearence-wise than anything else. Outside the realm of looks, values and priorites have become more important.

I see similar transformations among the great guys I include as my friends. I've experienced the frustration of having to line up in "competition" for girls carrying enough excess baggage to keep themselves out of the game in high school. If you're heavy it may require a little more selling, but the same is true if you're a guy in to geeky things (or, for that matter, a guy who is overweight). By "selling" I don't mean whoring yourself (far from it!) or being extra-aggressive, but rather cultivating other aspects of your personality. Not re-inventing yourself, but bolstering what you've already got going for you and perhaps making them a bit more apparent (if applicable). The next thing I would advise is to put yourself in a place where you are comfortable, where you are at your best, and where you're likely to meet people that share your interests.

Unfortunately, some interests are more convenient than others. For instance, ladies that are in to anime are a hot commodity due in part to scarcity. Ladies that are in to romantic comedies, on the other hand, may not get much mileage from that. But cultivating those interest you already have that are more likely to appeal to the opposite sex can't hurt. Well, not just the opposite sex, but the kind of man that you want to end up with (if you fake liking anime to get a guy, you're going to wonder who this alien boy is that wiggled his way into being your boyfriend.) The other effect is that it will attract guys that will find something unique to you. One of Miss Spatula's external problems was being in the military, where such things matter a greater deal.

One of the tragedies I see as I get older is how often we hide aspects of ourselves in order not to offend or off-put. For my part, I spent a year or so trying to be as generic as possible so as not to cut off any opportunities. It happens. But the more interchangeable we make ourselves, the more replaceable we become. The more the commodifiable traits (attractiveness, income, etc.) matter. Ring or no ring, as long as kids aren't involved people will always try to trade up as long as they're not losing something uniquely special with the person that they're with. Forging that kind of bond requires quite a bit of self-knowledge, cultivated qualities, and...

Confidence.

That was the part that struck me most about Miss Spatula's post:

Finally, the girl went to dinner with a friend of hers from school and they talked about why the girl felt like she didn't deserve a man who would treat her well, with respect and kindness. And why she felt that she didn't deserve sexual attention and desire from a man that was sincere and long-term and, frankly, not confined to sneaking in and out in the dead of the night after a couple of beers and a furtive phone call. The girl realized that, voluptuous or not, she has internalized so many poisonous things about herself, about her looks and her talents and abilities, that she doesn't even know where to begin to start getting better. She thought she was being self-deprecating and funny and in an epiphany, a sudden flash, she realized that somewhere along the way she started to believe all these things that she had said and heard, that she was less-than, undeserving, not good enough. She cut herself down to make women like her, and let men cut her down so they wouldn't be threatened by her.

This is what a lot of people don't realize: Self-depricating humor only works for the confident! It's one of life's cruel tricks, but it's true. In the same way that it takes a certain amount of masculinity to get away with wearing a dress to a costume party, it takes a degree of confidence about something for self-depricating humor to come across well.

A heavy girl that jokes about her weight a lot (and I am thinking of a couple of people here, though not Miss Spatula) shoots up all kinds of red flags. This is particularly true when I don't know her well. If I've known her a long time and have a clear idea of how she views her own body, I'm going to draw a troublingly distorted or distressingly accurate opinion of how she sees herself. The heavier girls that I know who have met with the most success in the dating world don't even mention their size. There are, of course, times when guys will say stupid things like she quotes repeatedly, and I don't know what to say about when that happens.

But, sadly, there are limits to any advice that I can give. I remember a casual conversation I had with someone that I was once very close to. The subject of weight came up and she said that while she knows that theoretically any guy that would dismiss her solely for her size (big, but not huge) theoretically wasn't worth her time, but she had a hard time imagining that every guy she seems to meet isn't worth her time.

And she started to cry.

She was actively doing most of what I describe above. I didn't have the answer for her then and I don't have it now.