Thank God another mediocre man finds a plus-sized woman attractive

A week ago, an Instagram post of a man proclaiming that he finds his wife attractive went viral. Why you might wonder did such a banal statement garner so much attention? It’s because the man in question’s wife isn’t skinny. He describes her as someone who the “average (basic) bro might refer to as ‘chubby’ or even ‘fat’.”

There’s nothing wrong with being attracted to different body types, and there’s nothing wrong with posting it on social media: the problem is that he thought he was exceptional for doing it and that the rest of us should celebrate him for showing a basic level of decency toward his partner.

It was as if he thought he was the only man in the world to have a plus sized wife he found attractive and that this made him a divine godsend of a husband. As if he was doing her a favour by dating her and that he deserved a metaphorical pat on the back with thousands of Instagram ‘likes’. It’s weird that for someone who doesn’t think the size of his wife matters, he sure goes on about it a lot. “Her shape and size won’t be the one featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan but it’s the one featured in my life and my heart.”

On the flipside, if a woman proclaimed how she found her larger husband attractive, no one would care. But thank the lord that another mediocre man finds a plus sized woman attractive. What. A. Hero.

There are those men who don’t do good things to be nice, they do good things so people notice. No one can accuse someone like Lenny Henry for only doing Comic Relief purely for attention, or Bono for doing Live Aid because he wanted people to think he was great. But I can’t help but feel that we’ve accidently ushered ourselves into an age where people’s morality is dependent on its social capital. The power of social media to let hundreds of people know what upstanding citizens we are seems to have inflated our sense of importance. The bar has been set so low for us that whenever we do something that should be common decency we instantly feel the need for someone to celebrate it.

I’m not pretending I’m an incredible person, or that my respect for women is greater or lesser than anyone else’s – that’s not my call to make. But right now the bar is too low. I think that if we, as men, spent half as much time being as nice in real life as we try to make ourselves out to be online, we might actually help the world out a little bit.