How a Beholder’s Eyes Have Changed Through the Years

 

This post is the third one in my blog series, Where Pounds and Inches Hurt the Most. Follow these links to read the first post and second post

Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair points out the defining virtue for women in the 1950’s was to remain virginal until married, whereas in recent years it is to be thin. Columnist Ellen Goodman has noted that dieting is perhaps the most popular female “sport”. Ninety percent of dieters are females who typically associate beauty, success, personal happiness, and self-worth with thinness. The belief that “you are what you eat” has become a reflection of the new morality. 

We have lost sight of the fact that beauty standards are both culturally and temporally relative. A very large woman recently vacationed in the Caribbean with her average weighted friend. Much to her amazement, she was constantly pursued by the mature men, while her friend was virtually ignored. 

In the Time Travel Diet, author Jennifer Shute chronicles temporal relativity: “Large, swaying buttocks, swelling bosom, spindly legs? Go straight to the Muslim world around the time of Muhammed. Plump arms, sloping shoulders, pale skin and a wasp waist? Take up swooning and petit point and visit the nineteenth century as a Victorian china doll. (Come to think of it, the swooning will take care of itself, since to keep the waist waspish, Victorian women had to wear – from childhood, even while sleeping – a corset that systematically crushed their ribs, deformed their inner organs, and made breathing a hit-or-miss affair. 

Despite an increasing body of evidence that genetics plays a significant role in determining body weight and that dieting rarely results in long-term reduction, the belief that obese people lack the willpower, “pig out” or bring it on themselves persists. Veneration of thinness is predicated on the belief that control and mastery of the body is associated with the capacity of shaping one’s own destiny. As a culture, we do judge the book by its cover and assign high or low worth scores on morality and virtue in accordance with dietary restraint. “I’ve been really good today. I just had a salad and an apple” or “I’m going to sin and have some chocolate.” Women in general are more prone to judge themselves – and each other – without mercy. One of my patients joked that on her tombstone her mother would surely inscribe, “She had such a pretty face!”. As a society we must pay attention to the proliferation of research that unequivocally counters the myth that weight is purely a matter of willpower. 

In my next and final blog post, I will recount my experiences wearing a fat suit, and how I faced my own prejudices on this topic.