Terry Poulton speaks at length about this concept in her book No Fat Chicks: How Women Are Brainwashed to Hate Their Bodies and Spend Their Money. According to Poulton the three main concepts of this ideal are:
1. Fatness is the worst cultural catastrophe possible for women
2. Obesity must be voluntary because slenderness is available to all who pursue it
with sufficient diligence and money
3. The sole cause of all excess weight is ... despicable self-indulgence (76)
Much to the surprise of some none of these are true. These are messages that are pushed upon women from all sources of society from magazines, television, and the most guilty of the bunch, the fashion and diet industry. Terry Poulton describes these industries as alchemists who have found "a formula that turns fat into gold, and prejudice into profit" (78). What makes this brainwash so easy is that all one has to do is set an ideal body weight that is completely unattainable for 90% of the female population, then continue to lower this ideal and set it as the standard for all ages and body types (74).
Advertising
"A United Nations report on the status of women named advertising the worst
offender to women's well being"
(Maine, 2000: 78)
Everyday from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep advertising floods your mind in a continuous stream. Magazines, tv commercials, radio commercials, newspapers, and even busses continuously tell you who you should be and if you are not there already, how to get there. "By high school graduation, the average American teenager, conservatively exposed to 300-500 ads per day, will have been bombarded by as many as 350 000 commercials" (Maine, 2000: 77). Women need to consider that fact that these models and "ideal" women are not always completely real. They are airbrushed and digitally altered but "we are programmed to believe that the bodies in ads, no matter how unreal, unattatinable and unhealthy, are ideal" (81).