David McElroy

About eight or nine years ago, I dated a woman for a few months who was a model. As you might expect, she was beautiful. She had a lovely face and a perfectly proportioned and perfectly sized body. The odd part? This physically perfect woman was a “plus-size model.”

Since I don’t pay attention to fashion or to modeling, I hadn’t consciously realized until then just how insane the world of modeling had become. I didn’t realize just how hideous most models are. And I didn’t realize just how warped most women’s images of their own bodies have become.

I’m thinking about this today because of publicity from a story in Plus Model magazine about the difference in size between mainstream models and plus-size models. The magazine argues that models small enough to work in mainstream modeling meet the definition of anorexic. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I almost never find those waifs attractive.

What I’ve become sure of is that women have very distorted images of their body size today. Is it from the anorexic girls they see presented to them as the examples of what women should look like? I have no idea. I’m just sure that the truth has become distorted beyond hope in many of them. I’m going to mention three examples of women I’ve known.

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When the supposedly conservative Republican candidates attack the leading GOP contender for being an evil capitalist, you know the world has turned upside down. Mostly, though, you know there’s not much of a market anymore for people who believe in economic freedom.

Some of my best friends are highly invested in a futile effort to elect Ron Paul president. I’ve talked before about why it’s going to fail, and I’ve also talked about why I won’t be voting for him (or anybody else). But I’ve been told forcefully by my friends that I’m wrong — that Paul can be elected. I’ve also been told that even if he’s not elected, he’s “educating” voters and the effort will pay off some other time, when the masses are (apparently) suddenly going to ditch their core values and start agreeing with libertarian principles.

Anyone who’s paying attention to the realities of this year’s Republican campaign can see that this is pure fantasy. Most people don’t want our ideas. Even if you’re willing to accept a “limited government” — if such is even possible — there’s no evidence that people want such an animal. If you listen to the Republican candidates bicker, it’s clear that everyone other than Ron Paul will say whatever it takes to win votes. And it’s also clear that Paul isn’t going to break out of his core support among a minority of libertarians and economic conservatives.

In Monday night’s GOP debate in South Carolina, the “conservative” candidates attacked Mitt Romney for having spent years at Bain Capital, which made its money buying companies and making them more profitable. As part of that process, many people in unprofitable companies lose jobs. Self-styled super-conservative Newt Gingrich has been attacking Romney for this, despite the fact that anybody who knows anything about free market economics understand that this is the way the market functions. It always has and always will. (Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction.”)

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Two weeks from today, a surgeon will cut me open and remove a lump from my left breast. Few things will focus your attention on what matters in life as quickly as finding out that you have cancer cells growing in your body.

Just a few weeks ago, I noticed a lump under the skin on the left side of my chest. It seemed to just show up without warning one day. After seeing several doctors in the time since then, I found out Thursday that there were cancerous cells in that mass. It’s not the sort of thing that anyone expects, so there’s no way to be prepared for such news.

Breast cancer is about 100 times more common in women than in men. In men, it’s not as likely to spread to other parts of the body as the female version of the disease is. I probably have a greater risk of being killed in a car accident in the next five years than I do of having this thing kill me. Still, it’s one of those things that gets your attention and makes you think seriously about what matters to you.

Until last Tuesday, it still wasn’t striking me that it even could be cancer. I knew it was a theoretical possibility, but I just assumed it would be a benign cyst of some sort. I’ve known other people who’ve found such lumps and had to have surgery to have them removed, but they’ve always turned out to be benign. That’s what I assumed would be the case for me.

One of the lower-level doctors had come in to tell me that another doctor — the specialist — would be coming in to stick a needle into me to get some tissue for a biopsy. He left and I was alone in the room to wait. For some reason, I’ve never felt as alone as I felt in the minutes I waited. I can’t say it was surreal. Instead, it was hyper-real, as though I was more aware of everything than I’ve ever been.

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