The weighty issue of body image

In a world obsessed with body image, one extra-large person stands out in confident defiance. Kim Dotcom’s wedding photograph last weekend saw him dwarfing a new bride, mouth open wide as if about to roll her in aioli and eat her with fries.

The large German, resident here and fighting extradition, is suing the government for proportionately large millions. The new Mrs Dotcom, 22 years his junior, is a quarter of his girth at least, but the last Mrs Dotcom was even daintier.

Love is a marvellous thing. It can make the seemingly impossible, possible, sweeping girth-ism aside, and I wish them as much happiness as anyone has the right to expect.

Girthism is the new means of mocking Donald Trump and his commodious puku, in defiance of the glowing medical credentials of the White House doctor.

As a taunt it’s a bit droll, coming from a country overflowing with large people who probably live, as he does, on that greatest of American exports, junk food.

I actually envy people like Trump and Dotcom who are able to ignore the diet Nazis, especially this hot, sticky summer with plump girls on the streets wearing good taste.

I like Stormy. She’s a smart woman, and if what she says is true, she earned her payoff; she’s bound to develop serious back pain for one thing.

Incidentally, what is so ‘‘adult’’ about adult movies? Surely not their infantile plot lines.

No sooner had Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her girth-expanding pregnancy than former deputy prime minister Paula Bennett went public with her choice to have gastric bypass surgery.

Not that it’s anyone else’s business, but I guess bored reporters would start to notice her dramatic weight loss, which can apparently be up to 50kg in the first year after surgery, and ask impertinent questions.

Whatever your politics, you can’t seriously say that Bennett’s girth prevented her being a hardworking and effective politician, but like many women, she says she has battled with her weight most of her adult life. As have most women I know, in fact.

I remember former MPDonna Awatere being pilloried for saying her sudden weight loss was down to dieting when she, too, had had a gastric bypass.

Again this was nobody else’s business, but she had fibbed.

Former Maori Party leader Tariana Turia has also had the operation, and calls for more gastric band operations to be available from the public health system.

She argues that this would reduce the rate of diabetes and