Fat bottomed girls

I could never fall in love with a woman who had a fat bum.

It's not that I consider it a fatal flaw in a gal - some of my best female friends and relatives have huge arses - it's just that I'm not attracted to chicks with big patooties.

But here's the thing - by admitting this in print - I've guaranteed myself a minimum of twenty mocking emails, three angry phone-calls from the aforementioned female friends and at least one face-to-face smack-down with a fat chick.

Yet, if a female columnist or blogger wrote that she couldn't fall in love with a short guy or a bald man, well, that's a giggle, that's completely understandable, that's 90 per cent of episodes of Sex and The City ...

As I've written in previous posts, if there's a substance on this planet that's more talked about than property prices, more controversial than embryonic stem cell research and more explosive than a sweating block of Semtex, it has to be female fat.

You can't escape its reach in everyday life; our foods are processed and marketed to reduce it, movies are scripted and promoted to generate fear of it, clothes and undergarments are manufactured to hide it (or produce loathing for it), and billion-dollar diet and cosmetic surgery industries flourish to get rid of it.

And while it is women who do most of the worrying about their fat - its distribution, density and the possibility of it appearing after marriage are also oft-discussed topics among men.

Millions of guys, rightly or wrongly, daily dismiss or accept partners based on their body fat.
Men are obsessed with bodies and, thanks to the influences of pornography, beer adverts and high fashion, there's more than enough fodder to convince us that if a woman is not sporting a tight rig, she's somehow less desirable.

I'm as big a victim of this syndrome as anyone and admit that all of my serious relationships have been with women who made me sigh pleasantly when they disrobed.

This is because undressing a woman is like unwrapping a Christmas present from your Grandma. If you don't like what you get, you just have to smile and pretend to be excited for the next two hours (or twenty years).

The thing is, our fixation on hardbodies is completely socialised - many of you could no doubt cite other eras that prize a Rubenesque figure in womankind, while Hispanic and black cultures hold the big booty as the archetype of femineity.

This merely serves to prove how powerful a lifetime of media imagery can be.

I wasn't born with a preference for women with small bums and flat stomachs, it is not a default setting hard-wired into my circuit board, rather it's been soldered there year after year thanks to swimsuit calendars, Bond movies and surf magazines.

When you're a young bloke down the beach or at the pool with your mates, chicks are callously rejected because they "have a fat arse" and dudes whose girls are tidy are lauded as legends because they have attracted said glamour.

This is why women worldwide flagellate themselves with diets and eating disorders in order to fit a body aesthetic encouraged by the media and fashion designers, yet if men display impressionability to the same influences we're considered arseholes, stupid or superficial.

They are actually two sides of the same coin and while males are not 'victims' of the same calibre as body-obsessed women, men and boys are certainly affected by the fear and loathing of fat - which is probably why you didn't see white rock stars or George Clooney squiring tubby chicks to the Oscars last night.

Women, however, are ones who buy the magazines, clothes and potions that drive this 'ideal'; men like me, who are attracted to it, are merely the by-product.

You could speculate that men covet women with athletic bodies because they subconsciously feel they will produce healthy, desirable offspring with these females but there is nothing unhealthy about cellulite; even 20-year-old swimsuit models have it.

The fact is many men will overlook a woman's mental instability, absence of a sense of humour, absence of intelligence, even absence of teeth - if she has an incredible figure, which shows just how powerfully suckers like me have been conditioned.

So sure, call us superficial arseholes for expressing a preference for little bums, dash off an abusive email if you must, but really, we've been manipulated just as surely as the woman who spends her lunch hour on the Stairmaster or her savings paying for liposuction.