Why Do We Feel Revulsion When We See A Fattie?

From Chateau Heartiste: Think about the revulsion you feel when you see a grossly obese person. It’s instinctive, like the way you would recoil from a pile of dog shit. This revulsion is near universal. But why do we feel disgust for fat people? Hordes of obese have only been with us recently in evolutionary history. Instead of seeking an explanation in a “fat revulsion” gene, it’s better to think of our natural disgust for fat people as having its origin in a more general “abnormality” or aberration template deeply wired into our hindbrains.

This abnormality template — you could call it the monster mechanism — is easily triggered by the sight of anything which seriously deviates from its category’s normal phenotype range, provoking fear and disgust in the observer. You can find indirect confirmation of the monster mechanism hypothesis in the fact that it is limited to objects which exist in the state of nature, and therefore would have been around during the millennia humans evolved. For example, if you deform something that does not exist in the state of nature — a car, say — you may make it look really weird, but it won’t inspire visceral terror and revulsion.

But if you deform a human being by adding eyeballs, limbs or hundreds of pounds of fat, you get a nightmare creature that will make small children, who have not yet learned the proper polite restraint, cry. Similarly, masculinizing a woman or feminizing a man turns each into a monstrous aberration, the degree of perceived monstrosity and primally induced disgust proportional to the deviation from the normal sex phenotype.

Your typical outrage feminist and limp-wristed manboob flirts dangerously close to the monster threshold. Humans recoil from manjawed, mustachioed, beady-eyed, actively aggressive women and chipmunk-cheeked, bitch tittied, curvaceously plush, passive-aggressive men as if they were the human equivalent of dog shit. The farther your feminist or manboob deviates from the normal human template, in physical and psychological form, the more monstrous it becomes to the average person.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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