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Body Image (Archive)
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
posted by TheBroadroom.Net at
3:09 PM (Pacific)
Americans, imo, are confused about how they should look.
Who can blame us? There are no fewer than three powerful lobbies warring to control how we look.
There are the insurance companies--who think everyone should be in perfect health, non-smoking, not overweight, under age forty, never pregnant, never sick... Within this arm of the Triad, fall a few other industries who benefit from fitness-as-the-norm: gyms, workout tapes, exercise clothing manufacturers, and so forth.
There are the fast food companies--and junk food companies, and pharmaceutical companies, large-size clothing manufacturers, diet centers--who profit from overweight people, and try to promote overweight-as-the-norm. (Diet centers like Jenny Craig have admitted that they would be out of business were it not for repeat customers.) Add to this arm of the Triad, corporations--who market virtue in overworking employees at sedentary jobs.
The last arm of the Triad is comprised of the advertising industry, high fashion and Hollywood. They consider that a somewhat-to-extreme underweight figure, sells, and so they try to promote underweight-as-the-norm. Hollywood includes an army of plastic surgeons, and what appears to be a whole lot of aging executives who get turned on only by exceedingly young mistresses. High fashion is dominated by homosexual men, who have to believe that the perfect female body is a male body.
So, which arm do we choose? Which group do we pander to?
I have my own prediction as to which arm of the Triad will triumph, but I will save that opinion for last. I realized, when I was contemplating doing this piece, that I'd never actually written about my personal experiences with Weight Issues. And that was a mistake. It is just another aspect of being female that is never written about in any purposeful way.
Since I'd never thought about it as a cohesive article, I thought it well to remember...to travel back to my earliest observations about women and weight.
I grew up in the 1970's in America...perhaps the peak historical period of anorexia nervosa in the West. Thin was in.
I was not thin. I started overeating when I was seven, roughly, right after my parents got divorced. No one talked to me about it. They just let me put on weight. I suppose they thought it was the kind thing to do, but of course to me it was not kind.
I remember eating until my stomach hurt. Eating a lot of junk. I never felt well; I was quite sickly in fact.
I never became "the fat kid," exactly, but I was definitely overweight. I belonged to that minority group of chunky kids. I have no idea what it's like now...there are so many overweight kids now. How fat would you have to be, to be "the fat kid"? Is that group of chunky kids now the norm?
In my dreams, I was this fantastically slim, gorgeous creature. I never fantasized about myself having the body that I actually had. All the leading characters in the stories I wrote, were normal sized. I don't recall creating a single chunky character.
This was, I think, well before I started to become influenced by Madison Avenue or Seventeen magazine. I just looked around me. Most of the people were neither fat nor overly thin. I deduced that being overweight was wrong. I hated my body; it did not please me; I wanted to change it. But, unlike changing a tire, there was no simple consensus as to how to do it.
Bear in mind this was the 1970's, when the Baby Boomers were young, middle-class, well-nourished really. You could fill up your grocery cart with meat and vegetables and fruit. No one ate fast food as food. Then, no one would dream of asking a mother with young kids to work at an office eight hours a day. There were still plenty of housewives, and they cooked...dinners of pot roast, chicken, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans.
The resulting clothing styles were tight, clingy, and unstructured. They showcased these young, healthy bodies. Fat bodies had little place to hide.
Looking back on it, it should have been simple. And that was another facet to this story that infuriated the logical side of me, back before I even knew there was one. Losing this extra ten, twenty, or thirty pounds, was not rocket science. Any diet, that provided adequate nutrition and came in the form of three square meals a day, without snacking or junk, would work if you stuck with it long enough. No one ever got fat eating too much carrots, broccoli, lean meat and mashed potatoes.
But it was like this: you're a chick, therefore you're too dumb to possibly figure that out.
The parallel was how getting a college degree and having a career was presented to me. It was this impossible dream. Impossible, that is, for me. Entirely possible for other people.
When I was around thirteen, I suddenly started putting on more weight. I felt confused, unlike before. Before, I hated my body, plain and simple. But after I started developing, there was a part of me that found my body beautiful, despite the extra weight.
Nevertheless, I still wanted to be thin. I think that was when the third arm of the Triad--Madison Avenue, movies and fashion magazines--had kicked in. I started crash dieting; I became a modified anorexic myself when I was...fifteen I think. The usual, obsession with ingredients and measuring, counting each calorie.
It worked at first but then I lost too much weight. I became gaunt, I couldn't sit down in the bathtub, I lost my hair...I became weak. The weaker I became, the harder it became to eat at all. I was scared. I would read books about anorexics; I knew intellectually that I was anorexic, but I couldn't understand that it was wrong.
Anorexia, is not a good way to lose weight. I put it all back on again after a few years.
Finally, when I was in my early twenties, I got sick of it. I decided once and for all, that I was not going to be overweight and I was not going to be anorexic. I went on my simple diet...no snacking, no desserts, nothing unnecessary...but I ate meals, I didn't measure anything, I didn't count calories. I did that for around nine months. I lost all the extra weight and it stayed off, permanently.
So...what happened, when I finally became that slim, gorgeous creature I'd dreamt about most of my life? I suppose I'd been led to believe that I'd live on a separate plane of existence. Men would throw money at me. Jobs would fling open their doors to me. Everyone would love me.
Of course that is not what happened. A whole new sector of society now hated me, simply because I was thin and beautiful.
I didn't realize it at first. In my mind, I was still that chunky plain kid that no one notices. I think the revelation came after I got married and acquired sisters-in-law, and through a couple of jobs that I had. Simply: fat women disliked me and wanted to get rid of me, before I so much as opened my mouth. Since I had not grown up on this side of the phenomenon, it took me years to comprehend it.
Why does no one ever talk about this? I suspect it has to do with keeping it a divisive issue, un-intellectualizing it. Divide and conquer, really. There is no massive competition between fat and thin men, after all.
Now for my prediction about the Triad. I think the insurance companies will win.
You would not think so right now. Currently, the second arm of the Triad is winning. You don't see any new regulations requiring Burger King, say, to label their products "high fat." There's no breakdown of the kinds of fat in packaged foods. Basically, anyone can wrap fat in waxed paper and sell it to you as food.
Recall however that everyone smoked when I was growing up. Everyone: every man, woman, and most children, smoked. The children who didn't smoke, would grow up to smoke. It was everywhere. You could smoke in doctors' waiting rooms. Pregnant women smoked. Twelve-year-olds smoked and bought their own cigarettes, which cost less than a dollar a pack.
Did anyone think back then, that that would ever change, that there could ever be a 180-degree turnaround? That smoking could ever be banned from public places? That cigarette machines would disappear from restaurants? That smoking would no longer be cool?
No...no one thought that. The winning lobby at that time was the tobacco industry.
--Josephine
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