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It’s a sign of dangerous curves ahead. Anorexia nervosa is so 2005.
Today, muffin tops, neck rolls and beer bellies are mortally hip.
In these days of gluttony and pint-size porker Honey Boo Boo, we’re doomed. At a time when devouring supersized cheese fries and slobbering over plus-size models are no longer specialized perversions, but acceptable lifestyle choices, comes TV’s “Saturday Night Live.’’
The show is said to be hiring its first “full-figure’’ (read: morbidly obese) comedienne, Aidy Bryant. A gal with nice eyes, good skin and a monstrously dimpled caboose.
Add her to an ever-expanding list of pleasantly plump pinups (calling JCPenney’s muu-muu department!), from Lena Dunham of HBO’s “Girls’’ to Melissa McCarthy of the chick flick “Bridesmaids.’’ Under pressure from buzzkill feminists, a share of Fashion Week giraffes has gone wide. Even Barbie dolls’ waists were thickened to mimic middle-age spread.
Thunder thighs are no longer a ticket to a Saturday-night date with a tub of Haagen-Dazs. In this political climate, fat has become — paging Oprah Winfrey! — sexualized and glamorized to the point where a regular-sized woman runs to the Ho-Hos.
So when the anonymous blogger for “Skinny Gossip’’ wrote in June that model Kate Upton was a “little piggie’’ with “NO waist, big, fat floppy boobs, terrible body definition,’’ she wasn’t applauded for fighting our nation’s march over the obesity cliff. She got death threats and rape threats.
She wrote in response, “As a thin person, I was also annoyed by our double standards around weight. For example, people think nothing of telling a thin woman — to her face, in front of an entire group of people — how skinny [she] is and even to suggest what [she] should eat. But I’ve never seen the reverse happen to an overweight woman.”
Mayor Bloomberg, bless his nannified heart, is waging an uphill battle to save us from our suicidal selves, banning trans-fats and trying to outlaw Big Gulp sodas. (He forgot that fruit juice is packed with nasty calories.)
As a result, Bloomberg has been derided as an elitist curmudgeon. Soda-delivery trucks in New York are emblazoned with the tubbies’ war cry — “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what size beverages to buy.’’
First Lady Michelle Obama also has asked kids to drop the Big Macs.
Her quest to replace school lunches in Los Angeles with black-bean burgers and quinoa salad has spawned a junk-food underground.
The truth is that far more people die every year from excessive blubber than have perished in decades from anorexia nervosa. Anorexia, a disease owned by sexy, young things, is rare. But it’s turned into a full-blown media crisis.
You can probably name many anorexia victims — Karen Carpenter succumbed to failure-to-eat in 1983, Michael Krasnow, author of “My Life as a Male Anorexic,’’ joined her in 1997. But big-boned TV talker Rosie O’Donnell’s recent heart attack drew far fewer column inches.
Maybe it’s too gross to address.
Obesity and overweight are the nation’s second-leading cause of preventable death, a close second to smoking. The National Institutes of Health figure that fatness causes 300,000 deaths per year, a heckuva a lot more than Ralph Lauren caused by Photoshopping a skeletal body under a model’s head.
Fat New Yorkers suffer from an epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, even cancer. Not-so-fun facts: Some 60 percent of city adults are overweight or obese, and 24 percent of kids. But this should drive you to the Diet Sprite: Among New York state tots aged a tender 2 to 5, fully 17 percent were classified as overweight. And 14.5 percent were already obese!
There is hope.
In five years, hectoring by Bloomberg has reduced the obesity rate of city children to a ridiculous 20.7 percent, from an unconscionable 21.9 percent.
If people continue to follow Hollywood’s lead and stuff their faces, there won’t be anyone alive to turn out the lights.
‘Rubber-room’ HS a crass act
A Bronx high school may have found a novel way to force out low-performing students: Stash them in a “rubber room.’’
The rooms — offices in which people sit all day doing nothing — once warehoused lousy teachers protected from dismissal by the union. But parents told The Post that a rubber room is used by Bronx Health Sciences HS to persuade problem students to transfer, allowing the school to maintain its 95 percent graduation rate.
The school might try to teach these kids instead. But that would be hard.
Columbia crash course
Columbia University is such a draw, nonstudent Birva Patel, 19, allegedly stalked the campus and ate in the dining hall for months before being busted, three times, for trespassing. Crashing Columbia isn’t so hard.
Barbara Walters bullied the university into accepting her girl crush, Sheherazad “Sherry’’ Jaafari, the ex-media adviser of Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad, into an elite graduate program. Surely, there’s room at the U for another unwanted young lady.
End the sleazy ‘Shel’ games
Monica Arias Miranda, running for state Senate, joined a chorus of women who say they were serially sexually harassed as Assembly staffers while Speaker Sheldon Silver covered for his cronies.
I’m shocked — that more women have yet to come forward with tales of raunch.
Harassment has been a revered practice in Albany for at least since I was an intern in the ’80s. In 2001, Silver’s top aide, Michael Boxley, was accused of rape, but the case went nowhere. Two years later, Boxley again was charged with rape, but pleaded guilty to a wrist-slap count of sexual misconduct.
That victim got $500,000 to settle a lawsuit, in a deal approved by Silver and legislative leaders. Well, it’s happened again.
Assemblyman Vito Lopez is accused of groping four women. In an ugly case of deja vu, Silver arranged to pay $103,080 in taxpayer hush money to keep the alleged victims quiet. But now, the state’s ethics panel is looking into Silver, plus other leaders who OK’d the payoff.
The “culture of perversion,’’ as Miranda calls it, has to end. Silver must resign.
Savages, beware
A “small and savage’’ Libyan mob, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described it, murdered US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three colleagues. It appeared butchers shed blood to protest an obscure American movie that mocks the Prophet Mohammed as a sex fiend.
But now, officials think an al Qaeda offshoot piggybacked on a protest to avenge a comrade’s death, while turning the lousy film into a hit.
The US cannot tolerate this savagery.