An article at VDare caught my eye and I wanted to share it: Old Navy Invests In Clothing Size Equity, Craters
Many of you probably saw it already as I assume many of my readers overlap with VDare readers. Their article points to this article at the Wall Street Journal
The gist of the story is that in their drive to focus on plus sizes they ended up not having enough of the middle sizes and were always out of stock on everything but teeny tiny sizes and very large sizes. The thing that really got me was this part:
The average American woman is a size 18 today, up from a size 14 five years ago, according to Don Howard, executive director of Alvanon, which works with brands and retailers on sizing and fit.
The mean weight for women aged 20 and over was 170.8 pounds as of 2016, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That is up from 163.6 pounds in 2000.
That is pretty significant. As a young man, a woman who was a size 18 was, to be blunt, fat. Now the average woman is a size 18, and that includes all adult women and not just 63 year old women who raised four kids. I have mentioned this before, high school and college age girls when I was in college were much smaller than their counterparts today. I am guessing that the average girl was a single digit size, probably size 8. Pictures from school sporting events now often include obese cheerleaders and even some pretty fat girls playing volleyball and basketball. What makes this even more startling is that the average size has gone up from a 14 to 18 in just five years, although that might be more women embracing “body positivity” and buying the actual size they should wear.
Of course one additional problem: what looks good on a 19 year old size 4 girl does not look good on a 45 year old size 18 woman. When stores had sections for “plus size” women it made it easier to look for clothing that fit and was appropriate for women who were not twiggy teens. Now every style is offered in every size and that makes for a lot of sizes on a rack.
It isn’t just women of course, men are a lot fatter than before as well. I have noticed that t-shirts of various sorts like “Don’t tread on me” stuff are usually sold out of 4X and 5X while plenty of S and M are still available. Who knew being a patriot involved being so fat? But it seems that the “It’s OK to be fat” is more pronounced among women and being pushed on all of us.
You probably also saw the latest cover model for the 2022 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition.
“Not So” Yumi Nu is a plus sized model and even with generous airbrushing and photoshopping she is clearly morbidly obese and that swimsuit looks incredibly uncomfortable. That is actually the best picture of her, the rest? Yikes.
We need to really grow the economy otherwise John Wilder’s famous bikini graphs are going to get swallowed up in these photos. There are some reasonably hot chicks as well but plenty of photos like these. Get your eye bleach handy.
That last girl, Michelle Fuente Steffen, looks great compared to the others and she is a biggun.
I picked a random older cover from a website, Elle Macpherson in 1987.
She is fit and she is beautiful. That is apparently not OK because it makes fat women feel bad about being fat. Or what about Christie Brinkley in 1981.
She is 27 in this picture. Damn son. Christie in National Lampoon’s Family Vacation? Smoking.
The Swimsuit Edition used to be a way for men to get what amounted to soft porn delivered to their home along with their subscription to the regular magazine before ESPN and 24-7 sports coverage. Now it is just another tool of The Narrative.
Yumi Nu is 26 as of this year, so a year younger than Christie Brinkley in the picture above. Christie still looks pretty good at 68 and credits diet and exercise for her excellent condition. If you go to her Instagam she looks better now at 68 than Yumi Nu does at 26. What is Yumi Nu going to look like at 68? Assuming she hasn’t died already she will be a trainwreck unless she stops listening to people telling her she is just fine at 100 plus pounds overweight.
Walking around with 100 or more extra pounds on your frame is bad for your joints and that extra weight is terrible for all of your internal systems. I get it, there is an unlimited supply of simple, cheap, yummy calories there for the taking and it is easy to just eat and eat and eat. It will also probably kill you if you keep doing it.
People telling women that they look great when they are unhealthy and morbidly obese are not helping or supporting those women. They are simply participating in a slow moving suicide.
"It will also probably kill you if you keep doing it."
From our overlords' point-of-view, that's a feature, not a bug.
It's amazing how big the kids are. I mean little kids. elementary and jr high aged kids. HUGE. The fattest kid when I went to school was certainly smaller than the average kid is now. These kids are screwed. Fine you get fat when you get 40 or 50, you had 30 odd years of skinny and in shape. These kids will never know in shape or healthy. Even the hot 18/19/20 year old girls have MASSIVE fat potential (look at their upper arms), they are going to explode in size, you can see it. Maybe 1 or 2 people in the whole class looked like that (I'm a GenX). The biggest kid on my high school football team weighed like 225 (500 kids per class, not a small school). Now 15 year olds are bigger than that.
It has to be the food. Sure the kids today don't do much activity at all, but you can't out exercise a bad diet anyway. and EVERYONE is fat now. Someone in shape stands out so much at any age group. Nice push for everyone to take pills instead of being "normal" sized.
It's the deluge of simple carbs. When I was a kid I was thrilled to get a 12- oz soda; I think a large was 16 oz. Like clothing sizes, that's a small today. My alarm went off when I started seeing drink cups that have to step-down at the bottom to fit in a cupholder. Remember cars without cupholders? We could walk to school uphill in the snow AND we could drive for hours without needing a drink (or a phone loaded with games).
The Standard American Diet certainly has an appropriate acronym. It's not just unattractive fat, it's called "morbid" obesity for a reason. All of the "diseases of civilization" follow from excess weight. The solution is well known for anyone who values their health: #1 CUT THE SUGAR. ZERO. #2 Expand your definition of sugar to include any and all simple, refined carbs. #3 Trans fats truly are evil. Avoid anything called "partially hydrogenated"; any and all vegetable oils. #4 Soy. If you don't know what phytoestrogens are, look into it.
I'm 69 and have recently had both a cardiology consult and an internist visit, and the only thing either one of them could find to recommend for me is to lose some weight. Not a lot, 10-15 lbs will do it for me, and I'm working on it.
Come on man, White genocide is a conspiracy theory!
Those women's sizes were not broken out by race for very, very good reason. Black women are simply out of control, and the Latinas are not far behind them (or, at least as close as those big blaq booties allow them to be). I am literally staggered whenever I go out in public and see what exits those enormous SUVs at the grocery store.
I was one of the biggest kids in my high school graduating class of nearly 700 students at 6' 2" tall and 225 pounds. I am still within ounces of that same weight decades later, a natural mesomorph and lifelong weightlifter. I was considered overweight as a teen, and indeed I was, compared to the vast majority of my peers. But as the years have flown by, I've become leaner and leaner by relative standards, without changing at all, while virtually everyone else went supersized. The clothing that I buy now has been re-sized, despite my static physique. I used to require XXL t-shirts and 38" waist jeans. But now an XL is a little big on me and 36" waist jeans will fall off my hips without a belt. Vanity sizing in action.
My wife is not the skinny tomboy that she was as a teenager, but she is still considerably lighter than the average woman and an inch or two taller. Every time she whimpers and moans about how hard it is to keep the scale under control, I tell her to take a look around her, starting with her own sisters. She is literally half the size of the largest of them.
We attended an elementary school concert yesterday for a family member's son and it was disheartening to see how many of the boys and girls are already badly overweight. They all wore band t-shirts with their school affiliation on them, but none were tucked in. They looked like smaller versions of their own fat, waddling parents, with hanging guts and outsized rumps. These kids are too young to be responsible (yet) for their weight issues, but they are suffering for it already. This does not end well, especially with the looming food shortages.
Yep, even girls that aren't fat yet look like they are about a cheeseburger away.
Sporks Illustrated
Poster girls of the woke revolution. Coddle them, give them celebrity status and black and latino boyfriends and the sky's the limit – and where the pie (10 different flavors) is!
Wonder what their thoughts on Kermit Gates' global transition to eating bugs is?
A coke used to be kind of a treat but now it is a staple of their diet, add in energy drinks, "coffee" with about a bag of sugar in it and even Gatorade full of sugar and most people are guzzling more sugar in a day than kids did growing up consumed in two weeks.
There are going to be a lot of enormously fat women with horrific tats in the future, assuming we have a future. Invest in the companies that make electric scooters for Wal-Mart.
The sugar is a killer
Ha!
The really young kids are the saddest part, they are not even to middle school and already fat. I think the biggest kid on my football team was around 230 and I thought he was huge but a lot of high school girls are at least as heavy as him now.
There is going to be a calorie reckoning at some point and when these porkers can't get their 8,000 calories of simple carbs a day? It will get ugly
Glad I was on the road in the 70’s and 80’s.
Lean Sweet Female boinking machines.
Those were the days !!!
Simple advice to the porkers who are being told they are beautiful and sexy: you're not. You're repulsive and unhealthy. Try only eating half a dozen donuts instead of the full dozen.
Arthur, I'm glad you posted the Brinkley and Macpherson pics. I also remember Carol Alt and Katky Ireland in SI. Substantially more attractive than the Lane Bryant linebackers pictured this year. Yuck!
Well , I guess the home boys like the big huge gross nasty fat white chicks so they have hope , I guess ….. If that's what you want.
Like I have been saying for 2 years now, McDonalds has killed more people than COVID.
It's literally satanic inversion: call something not pretty, pretty. Who is going to buy that magazine?
I got a shock at a family picnic about 15 years ago. I'd heard a cousin's daughter (D) had just returned after a few years living in a midwestern state. Cousin is a good-looking guy, his sisters are hot, his wife is attractive, and their kids have inherited the genes. So his wife is sitting at a table with some other people and I walk up, Hey K I heard D is back. Is she coming today? K looks at me strange and tells me D is here. D is sitting right next to her. D gives me an ashamed look. She was 26 years old, at least 80 pounds overweight, not recognizable from the pretty young woman I remembered. She's lost weight since then, but nowhere near enough. What a waste of her genes.
I'm posting as Anonymous today, just in case.
If you count the children never born because guys are staying away from the cheesecake-eating heifers who threw away whatever chance at romance they had, it's probably even more than that.
it's not McDick's fault. It's immediate gratification and lack of self control.
Obesity is the reason kids are reaching puberty so early. an organism is capable of procreating when it reaches a certain weight. If a kid is 9 yrs old and already 110 lbs or approaching that threshold, the endocrine system goes into readiness and starts the menses.
I've had arguments with people who insist that it's hormones and antibiotics fed to livestock (i'm a farmer, ex dairy, now beef, have raised other animals and live and work among other farming/ranching families), because that's what the media tells them. OMG our food supply!
More divide and conquer. More death by a thousand cuts.
Well, between the coming famine and all the black guys that prefer some junk in the trunk ((( which I think partially supported this look ))) it should kinda work itself out. The excess weight is cringe but combine that with the hideous prison and tribal looking tatt's that do NOT age well and…dry heaves. Oh, I forgot about the badly done pastel kool aid hair doo's. She's just big boned. https://youtu.be/7PCkvCPvDXk
Excellent and eye-opening post, Arthur. I'm so glad I grew up in the 80s, before women turned into tatted-up, purple-haired hippos. As a buddy once said, "I won't be with any woman who has an ass bigger than mine." Tall order nowadays.
looking back at those older pictures is like looking at a different species
They like big butts and they cannot lie
It is like the meme, how will this help us sell more magazines? Magazines?
Wise precaution, you never know. I get that people, especially women, put on weight when they get older but the volume of extra weight is incredible
Look back at your yearbook and the girls, big hair and too much makeup aside, are all generally more attractive than most girls of the same age now. No wonder these girls are addicted to antidepressants and turning into lesbians.
That is a good point, I expect to see a lot more early teen or preteen moms in the years to come.