"THINKING THIN"
According to Dr. Nada Stotland, MD, MPH, women and girls around the world "often feel judged on the basis of how thin they are." Living in cultures that reward women for what they look like puts an enormous amount of pressure on impressionable young girls to conform to whatever said culture deems "beautiful". In Ndebele culture, it's having an inordinately long neck (often warped by a series of rings worn around the neck) that makes a woman beautiful. In certain Amazonian tribes, it's having incredibly deformed lips (modified by weights put in the mouth) that makes a woman irrestible. But of course, these are the hallmarks of barbaric cutures, right? In the enlightened countries of the West, we don't dare impose such unnatural alterations on women.
In America, we just starve our girls to death.
Up through even the Enlighenment, size was a much- sought-after attribute. Since a woman with some "meat on dem bones" (not a quote from Shakespeare) would probably be quite wealthy since she could afford enough food to get fat, she was very much desirable. Also, since some degree of body fat is necessary for childbirth (anything less than 12% body fat can lead to complications of infertility), a large woman might be seen as a good partner for siring children. And for the progeny-obsessed ancestors of ours (you'd be obsessed too if our mortality rate in childbirth was 1 in 5), "breeding hips" were very nice indeed.
Skip ahead to modernity and what do we have? McDonald's. Burger King. Wendy's. We have food a-plenty. Thankfully, we live in a time and place where food is so common, that even the poor can afford to get fat. Of course, once being fat becomes easy, it's being thin that suddenly becomes desirable. Rarity is a key ingredient of something (or someone's) value. And in a country where 60% of us are overweight, a thin body is worth more than its weight in gold.
We've become too excessive in our adoration of the thin body. Models aren't even "fit" these days; they're just gaunt. Meanwhile, very attractive "normal" women are given the impression that if they don't look like skeletons, they're fat, and therefore unattractive, et ergo, they should have no sense of self-worth. What happened to moderation? Why is 60% of our country fat, and another 6% thin to the point of sickliness?
