Repost: Fat Acceptance

This last bit of the Omega’s Guide is taking more work than I thought. In honour of the end of #FatShamingWeek, here’s a repost from a year and a half ago. Still as relevant today.

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Fat acceptance seem to be going around the manosphere right now and derisive mockery seems to be the order of the day. It seems to have started with this guy’s (probably satirical) blog on fat game.

I’m going to avoid the derisive mockery, but  instead I’m going to talk about shame and self-hatred.

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First, some theology. Being fat is generally a sign of sinfulness.

Sloth and gluttony, the two primary causes of obesity, are two of the cardinal sins. It is shameful to be fat, because it is shameful to sin.

Derisive mockery is not untoward to someone who advocates the acceptance and normalization of sinfulness.

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Theology aside, obesity is still something to be shamed.

I do not need to go into all the ways obesity is unhealthy for an individual, that’s common knowledge. By allowing yourself to be obese you are quite literally committing slow, likely painful, suicide.

By allowing your body to destroy itself you are showing that you do not love yourself or your life. You are also showing you do not love those who love you and will be devastated by your early death.

If you are married, by being fat you are showing your spouse through deed, if not word, that you do not love them enough to remain attractive enough to have a healthy sex life.

You should be ashamed of being fat.

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Fat acceptance is concerned with ending self-loathing fat people feel for themselves. That is wrong.

Self-loathing and self-disgust is generally a sign that something is wrong in your life. It is your body and subconscious telling you that something needs to change as your current actions, lifestyle,and choices are negatively impacting your body and its ability to reproduce itself.

It is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect you.

In the case of obesity, the shame and self-disgust you feel is your body telling you that you are killing yourself.

When your body and subconscious  tells you something is wrong, the answer is not to get over it, the answer is not to drug it into submission, the answer is not to accept it, the correct answer is to figure out the reason your body and subconscious are screaming at you and to change yourself so they no longer have to scream.

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Your body evolved in an environment of scarcity. Food was scarce, you rarely gained the calories necessary for optimal health, so your body adapted to urge you to eat as much as possible, particularly of sugars and fats, which provided a large amount of calories.

Modern industrial agriculture has made food abundant; it is no longer scarce but your body still thinks it is, so it demands you eat, and it particularly loves its fats, sugars, and salts.

When you do not eat as much as you can your body screams at you that you are starving yourself; when you exercise, you are depleting your energy reserves and you body screams at you.

This is why it is much easier to gain weight than lose weight. Your old primal self is no made to handle the new modern world. You should not ignore this, but you should know why this pain exists.

The curse of being fat is: Your mind and body scream self-loathing at you for being fat, but your body screams pain at you if you diet and exercise. It is painful either way.

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So why do people participate in fat acceptance, when their own bodies and minds are screaming at them that they are killing themselves, when all the research says they are killing themselves, when obesity negatively impacts yourself and those you care about?

Easy: change is hard.

It is a lot easier to come to accept (and possibly overcome) your self-loathing mentally than it is to overcome the pain of diet and exercise. Self-loathing is vague and amorphous, pain is immediate and direct.

Self-loathing can be reasoned at, self-justified, denied, and overcome by other emotions. There is no reasoning with, denying, or ignoring pain: pain is.

Instead of facing the pain, it is easier to accept the self-loathing.

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Shame is used for societal control. It is used by society to prevent people from following their base urges to self-destruction.

Forgoing shaming obesity, gluttony, and sloth is not loving; it is apathetic. It is people to destroy themselves.

Fat acceptance is not something society should embrace, for the good of fat people.

This is not to say fat people shouldn’t be loved, they should, but their obesity and the behaviours contributing to it should be shamed out of love.

Fat acceptance is telling people it is okay to engage in self-destruction.

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If you are fat, realize it is not healthy. You are hurting yourself and showing you do not love yourself or those around you.

Realize that the pain may be unavoidable, but it is necessary.

Overcoming the pain and making yourself a better person will do much more for you, your self-respect, and your happiness than any amount of fat acceptance.

If you want to improve yourself, I would recommend the primal diet.

I tried the primal diet; while being strict on it I lost 10 lbs in 3 weeks. After that I became less strict, but I’ve still lost about 25 lbs (12% of my body weight) in 3 months. I’ve never been actually fat, maybe skinny-fat, but I did have a gut, it’s quite noticeably shrunk.

The best part, after the initial three weeks it’s required almost no willpower on my part. I rarely feel hungry and I never feel like I’m missing anything; it requires very little discipline. Once you get over the initial hump, it’s easy. It causes minimal pain, while still getting results.

So, do yourself a favour. Try the primal diet.

Repost: An Economic Analysis of Divorce

I don’t have time this week, so this is a repost of an early post of mine that didn’t get much play. I did a little editing. It’s part of the Sexonomics series and is on divorce, so it fits what has been discussed here recently.

The Cost of the Risk of Material Loss in Divorce

Marriage is often discouraged in the Manopshere, and a single male, choosing whether I want to marry or stay an eternal bachelor is something important. Now, there’re a lot of reasons provided for why to avoid marriage, but the risk and consequences of divorce are easily the most convincing argument. So, I’m going to create a series on the economics of marriage.

This first post will be the economic cost of the risk of divorce for the average bachelor considering marriage.

At another time, I will attempt an economic analysis of the immaterial losses of divorce and the benefits of marriage. Then I will combine it all together in a cost benefit analysis.

What are the odds of divorce?

The “50% of marriages end in divorce” statistic is thrown out a lot, but this number includes those with multiple marriages and divorces, which skews the number higher than for people considering their first marriage, among other problems.

So, according to the US Census Bureau, for men, only about 60% of men reach their 25th anniversary for their first marriage (p. 11), which means about 40% of men did not.

Now, the data is by age cohort, and those married earlier had a greater chance of reaching any particular marriage anniversary milestone. For example, those married in 1975-79 had a 54.4% chance of reaching 25th anniversary, while those in the married in 1960-65 had a 66.9% of reaching this milestone. But, those married in 1975-79 had the worst chances of attaining any particular marriage milestone; they were peak divorce you might say. Since then, younger marriage cohorts have been more likely to reach milestones.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Statistics Canada has it that about 40% of first marriages will end in divorce.

So, we will estimate there is a 40% chance that a male entering their first marriage will divorce.

(Remember, the chances of marriage ending in divorce can vary depending on a wide range of variables, which I am not going to calculate at this time, but I might go into them in-depth in the future.)

How much does the divorce process cost?

The cost of the actual divorce process varies considerably, depending on a wide range of variables. A simple divorce will run about $1000, while a contested divorce can run from about $8,000-$133,000.

According to this, the median cost for mediation is $5,000, while the average contested divorce costs about $20,000.

So, we’ll say your divorce process will be about $20,000.

(Here’s a calculator if you’d like to play around).

What about Spousal/Child Support?

Your chances of paying spousal support depend on the amount of child support already paid and your income. There’s a ton of laws on this, so I’ll just use this calculator to calculate this.

The average Canadian household income is: $74,700
Two-earners without children: $79,700
Two-earners with children: $85,600
One-earner without children: $58,100
One-earner with children: $60,900

The average length of marriage is 14.5 years, with the average age of divorce for men being 44 and for women, 41.

So, putting the average divorce and income in the calculator we can get the average cost of support (both child and spousal) payments come divorce (in Ontario), assuming children live with spouse:

Two-earners without children (Equal): $0
Two-earner without children (Primary – 2/3): $327/month for 7-14 years (10.5)
Two-earners with children (Equal): $0 + $619/month child support
Two-earners with children (2 – Primary – 2/3): No spousal support, $758/month
One-earner without children: $1,186/month for 7-14 years (10.5)
One-earner with children: $838/month for 7-14 years (10.5) + $905/month child support (10.5)

For your own income and planned family situation input the number in the calculator.

So, the average male will have to pay about $149,436 in support if sole provider, $73,458 in support if primary provider, and $0 in support if equal provider. (The cost of child support is there for illustrative purposes, but that would be the cost of having a child, not marriage and divorce and is not calculated here.)

One interesting thing to notice: if you’re the sole breadwinner, your likely monthly payments can actually decrease as mandated child support payments replace spousal support payments. I would not bank too much on this, as it’s likely just a quirk in Canadian law or the calculator and may not apply broadly.

US law does not seem radically different overall from Canadian law.

What about a Settlement?

In Canada, “the spouse with the higher net family property is required by law to pay his” spouse “half of the difference between the two spouses’ net family properties.” Net family properties being current assets minus both liabilities and assets at marriage.

In the US, there are two systems, community property and equitable distribution, depending on the state with variations in how they are distributed. The former divides assets gained during the marriage equally, but leaves property attained before marriage alone. Equitable distribution distributes property equitably (not necessarily equally).

In general, we can say that the property you acquired during the marriage will be split more or less in half. If the wife was the primary housekeeper, while the husband was the primary breadwinner, then the difference will be the wife’s payments for continued support of the house. If they both shared provider status roughly equally, then an equal distribution of marital resources should occur.

There does not seem to be much economic cost to the average husband at the point of settlement in Canada, unless he sunk significant sums into the marital home prior to marriage and the wife did not match these sums after entering the marriage.

In the US, one could economically lose if the equitable distribution was not necessarily equal, or by quirks of local law, but for the average divorce, these would not present much of a cost. There might be extreme cases in both systems where quirks or abuses of the law could lead to unequal distribution either way, but

Other Cost Considerations

This is not to say that this will not increase economic hardship. Having to pay the expenses for two dwellings will, by itself, greatly increase economic hardship on both ex-spouses. For the ex-husband specifically though, the extra cost of two dwellings would be accounted for in the spousal/child support payments taken from his income.

It is possible a divorce could affect a male’s job performance, and thus his earnings, creating additional economic cost, but this would be outside my ability to remotely calculate.

The Total Material Cost of Divorce Risk for the Man Considering Marriage

Our formula:
Costs of Divorce Risk = Risk of Divorce * (Cost of divorce process + cost of support)

Average Male Single Earner
40%*(20,000 + 149,436 ) = $67774.40

Average Male Primary Provider
40%*(20,000 + 73,458) = $37383.2

Equal Male and Female Provision
40%*(20,000 ) = $8,000

For the average male who’s considering marriage and planning to be the sole breadwinner of the family, the material cost of the risk of divorce would be just over a full year’s worth of pay. For the average male who plans to be the primary but not sole breadwinner, it would be somewhat less than a full year’s pay. For the average male who plans a marriage where both partners earn equally, it would be a few months’ worth of pay.

So, if you plan on marrying and being the sole or primary breadwinner, you would have to ask yourself if you would pay roughly a year’s salary to be married.

* This analysis will be done for Canada. Canada’s divorce laws are generally nationally coherent, with federal laws and. The US’ divorce laws differ widely between states, so I can’t really calculate for the US. On the other hand, for the majority of men, the analysis shouldn’t vary too significantly; this should be roughly applicable to most and sufficient for analytical purposes. Check your own jurisdiction’s laws for personal information.