Kink.com actually has a pretty good reputation for the treatment of its models, though, so one photograph isn’t enough to make me worry that they made her sustain it for an unsafe length of time.

So I explained my reasoning, and why I don’t feel like a hypocrite.

I express no opionion about what it’s “OK” for others to say elsewhere.

In the context of this blog, such comments are going to be about photographs. And we have no way, generally, to know whether a skinny woman in a photograph is “naturally thin” (if that’s even a meaningful concept, of which I’m skeptical) or has been starving herself since age six in response to social pressure. So, I can’t answer your question, because I don’t know how I would know if that situation ever came up.

When I say of a woman in a photograph “she might need a sandwich” you’ll notice the word “might” in there. It’s my expression that I *suspect* she might be starving herself in response to social pressure, and it’s my attempt to apply countering social pressure (social reassurance?).

It’s always possible, in particular cases, that I’m wrong about a particular woman. Hence the word “might”.

Is it “OK” for me to suspect that a woman might be starving herself? And to share that suspicion, in a semi-humorous way, on my own blog, for reasons I think good? Even though, one time in a dozen, I might be wrong?

Yeah, I think it is.

There are lots and lots of models (porn and otherwise) and women generally who are killing themselves (literally) by trying to be too thin. Because — in part — of those same “full of shit” people.

Saying someone needs to diet is typically an attack — a way of saying “she’s not pretty, she needs to starve herself harder to conform to my twisted ideal of female beauty.” It’s a hostile, even anti-woman, thing to say. Who wants to live in a world where most of the women women deemed beautiful are in a state of muscle-eating anorexic self-destruction, and most of the rest of the women wear six layers of clothes because they have curves they think the world doesn’t want to see? Not me. So I won’t let people promote that world on my blog.

I don’t view “she might need a sammich” in quite the same light. If I said it about someone who was clinically obese, it might be logically equivalent. But, I’m not saying it because I’m trying to socially enforce an artificial standard of beauty, the way the “she needs to diet” people are (IMO). On the contrary, I’m saying it in opposition to that dominant, destructive standard of beauty. I’m trying to encourage a shift in the standard of beauty toward a standard that’s not destructive of the women I love.

Summary: “She needs to diet” is a statement that a woman has failed to conform to the speaker’s standard of beauty, a standard I despise for its negative effects on the women I love. “She looks hungry to me” is a statement in opposition to that same destructive standard.

My opinion, my blog, my sandbox, etc. I don’t expect agreement on this one, luckily I don’t need it.