Fast Food Fetish

Is watching America's Next Top Model while eating chips, dip, brownies and the ironic diet coke some sort of subversive self torture? Am I laughing in the face of the conventionally underweight body image, or am I watching one form of body injury while performing another? Are we actually holding ourselves to the impossibe media beauty standard while ensuring that we fall incredibly short? Am I laughing at this show or brainwashing myself?

I think that celebrating the human form is a beautiful form of expression, it's just that so much of the messages feel less like celebration and more like the "doublethink" that Orwell describes in 1984. Like that Carl's Junior ad camaign with the toothpick model manging on a burger as big as her airbrushed face while getting off on riding a mechanical bull or washing a car- that likely sold a lot more product than would a model of a healthy weight eating their baked potatoes and salads would. But do our puritan roots follow us as a culture so closely that beauty must be enexorably linked with torture? Are we a society of closet S & M fetishists? "Look like you've starved yourself, while actually starving yourself of nutrients with fast, cheap, and apparently sexy fast food loaded in sodium and fat". Leave it to the uppity female vegetarian to mouth off about all this . . . can you hear me around this bite of brownie?