When Anne Ream, already stressed and overworked, picked up a Third-World virus and dropped a significant amount of weight and suddenly became a size 0, she found herself rather disturbed by the positive reception she got:
There was nothing deliberate or attractive about it. Yet I soon discovered that what should be impossible (When did the absence of a number become a dress size? How did we make nothing into something?) was actually highly desirable, at least to the whisper-thin crowd that floats through Chicago’s upscale fashion boutiques.
“Don’t even look at the 2s, you’re a 0,” a Damen Avenue shop owner trilled triumphantly while a fellow shopper looked on, not with pity for a woman emaciated by a Third World virus, but with envy.
“You’ve lost so much weight!” an acquaintance rejoiced later that week. “It’s fantastic! Who is your nutritionist?”
Something is very, very wrong with the collective perception of women’s bodies when emaciation is viewed as desirable, when an illness-induced weight loss is praised. I know I’ve read accounts of women who delayed getting treatment for illnesses such as diabetes because they were so happy to be losing weight. And my understanding is that many young female diabetics deliberately skip their insulin because they wind up losing weight. Hey, you may go blind and have to get your feet amputated — but you’ll be thin!
Ream notes that women will do all kinds of physically and psychologically damaging things to themselves in order to be thin — but because it’s not supposed to be easy, the gossip rags are filled with the latest Hollywood diet so that the stars can show that they are properly self-denying. Even naturally-thin models and actresses talk about how little they eat and how much they work out — but fat celebrities who get gastric-bypass surgery deny it up and down and say they lost weight through hard work.
What really endears Ream to me, however, is how she ties the fashion for ever-smaller and ever-thinner female forms with a suppression of female ambition and expectations:
What is going on here? It’s bad enough that our dress sizes are shrinking to 0, but so too is our common sense and our understanding of health, wellness and lasting beauty. Most distressingly, our ambitions are shrinking as well.
It sometimes seems that we like our women small, literally and figuratively.
We tell girls that they can be anything, while showing them — through airbrushed ads and glossy media images — that their first order of business is to be beautiful. We celebrate Grrl Power while marketing “Property Of My Boyfriend” T-shirts. When Madonna dons a “Mrs. Guy Ritchie” sweat suit, she speaks volumes without saying a word.
Remember how Madonna used to wear that “Boy Toy” belt buckle? Back then, she left no doubt that it was meant ironically and that she was in charge of her own sexuality, not to mention ambitious as all hell — during what was probably her first appearance on American Bandstand, before she had broken through, she told Dick Clark that she wanted to “rule the world.”
Now? Not so much. The “Mrs. Guy Ritchie” thing, given that she’s become mostly a SAHM and children’s-book author, doesn’t quite have the same I-dare-you-to-take-this-seriously challenge of “Boy Toy.” You wonder how much of it is a joke, and how much of that joke has to do with being apologetic about being more famous than her husband (who undoubtedly bristles at being “Mr. Madonna”).
Then there’s the polarization of the ideal vs. the average:
Though the dress size of the average American woman is 14, the average fashion model is — you guessed it — a size 0. The Hollywood starlets who dot our cultural landscape look just this side of skinny on their good days, and dangerously tiny the rest of the time.
Between the size 14 real and the size 0 “ideal” exists a world of women and girls, many of them pursuing an elusive body type through means that can be psychologically and physically devastating.
This kind of polarization contributes to celebrities who are perfectly average weight or underweight but not skeletal getting tagged as pigs, not to mention the persistent idea that if a model isn’t so thin she may drop dead on the runway, she must be so obese she needs a crane to leave the house. Because there is no other option.
It seems, too, that the emaciation of Hollywood has led to the idea that eating disorders aren’t serious unless the sufferer is thinner than Nicole Richie. I remember reading a forum at TwoP about a documentary on an eating-disorders clinic, where posters expressed shock at their own reactions to the women in the clinic — they weren’t that thin! What’s “normal” is so skewed that underweight is the new fat.
In fact, I found myself surprised at the end of Ream’s piece when she said this:
As for me, I’m 15 pounds heavier than I was as a nothing, and once again a quite ordinary size. The attention of the fashionista set has disappeared. Healthy and happy, I’m waiting for someone to ask me again who my nutritionist is.
She never says how tall she is, but if only 15 pounds stand between a healthy weight and emaciation, she’s probably pretty thin to begin with. Pretty scary that that’s not good enough, isn’t it?
Via Feministing.
I had a similar experience when I was secretly struggling with an untreated clinical depression several years ago. Not one person asked if I was OK or feeling well after I lost about 40 pounds in 2 months. Everyone was impressed with how “great” I looked. I’m lucky I didn’t die of malnutrition or suicide. Hey, I least I was thin, right?
I saw that documentary and also had the “They’re not that thin” response. And then I thought, “What is wrong with this world that I see women who are seriously ill, starving themselves, and I think they’re not that thin???”
TLC’s A Model Life isn’t much better. “Oooh, you’re such a natural in a swimsuit!” Um yeah. If natural means “I can count each rib and see the bone structure in your upper arms.” Sigh.
That reminds me of one of my last social encounters in Manhattan: A friend was having her art shown in a new gallery, and so I went on opening night to support her. Now, I’d been dealing with uber-skinny greenwich village for four years of college at that point and saw my self esteem plumet while my waistline expanded.
It was a pretty relaxed environment. The crowd of ultra-hip were raptly listening to a young woman describe how she went camping, drank some stream water, and got a parasite, and that’s why she’s lost so much weight. “Look!” she said to the throngs of guys barely containing their drool, “you can count my vertebrae!” She actually lifted the back of her shirt to show off her skeleton. She was talking about how difficult (not really) it was having a parasite, and that she wrote a song about her parasite.
Within a month, I’d moved to Philly.
I have a good friend who spent months dealing with horrific gall bladder problems that basically left her unable to eat anything but raw vegetables. In four or five months, she lost a ton of weight and her face looked terrible (exhaustion, being in pain, and not being able to eat healthily) and all of her colleagues kept praising her thinness and the contents of her lunch bag. (Oh, you’re so good today! Eating your salad without any cheese or dressing!)
She’s since had the gall bladder removed, she’s gained most of the weight back and is really cheerful again. Some of her colleagues still wonder what happened.
I saw that documentary and also had the “They’re not that thin” response. And then I thought, “What is wrong with this world that I see women who are seriously ill, starving themselves, and I think they’re not that thin???”
I think that’s part of the problem — we have this idea that anorexia isn’t dangerous until the person gets down to 60 pounds, but it is. Just being underweight (a BMI of 17 or less) is unhealthy in and of itself and can have long-term health consequences.
I do think that this is a big media center problem to a certain extent — it’s most acute in places like New York and Los Angeles, and less acute (though still a problem) the further out you go. I remember going to Las Vegas with a group of friends about 10 years ago. We went to a nightclub (I think it was The Beach) and one of my friends was absolutely swarmed by guys. It was disconcerting to her because though she’s very pretty, she’s about 50 pounds overweight and in Los Angeles, she could barely get guys to acknowledge her existence. But in Vegas, where you have people congregating from all over the country, her weight was not nearly as big a deal.
Like Unruly Duckling, I lost a lot of weight due to depression. People would come up to me all the time to tell me how great I looked. My clothes were falling off of me, I had bags and dark circles under my eyes, I was exhausted, depressed, on the verge of a breakdown every minute. But I was thin, so apparently none of that mattered.
My aunt had that problem. Most of the women in my family are, at best, a little chubby, or, at worst, severely overweight. My aunt had always been a bit heavy, as with the rest of the family, and had gained quite a bit of weight as she approached 40. Then she suddenly started losing weight. Since she had been dieting off and on forever, at first she was thrilled, but the weight loss didn’t stop. She eventually got down to about 100 lbs (from close to 200 lbs at 5′7″) before she stabilized. Turned out she was diabetic, had some kind of thyroid disorder, and at the end, her kidneys failed. She died a couple of years ago at 46, but even at the end, when she was positively skeletal, in a wheelchair, on dialysis, and looked about 80 years old, people were still complimenting her on how thin and great she looked. Honestly, she was sick and she looked it, but random people were really impressed by how skinny she was, especially people who had known her when she was fat.
I think that’s part of the problem — we have this idea that anorexia isn’t dangerous until the person gets down to 60 pounds, but it is. Just being underweight (a BMI of 17 or less) is unhealthy in and of itself and can have long-term health consequences.
You don’t even have to go down that far. I went from a BMI of 21 to a BMI of 20 over the course of about a year, due to thyroid problems & depression–a loss of about ten pounds–and it messed with my bone density (I’m 19!) and had my gynecologist seriously freaked out. BMI is a flawed mechanism for measuring health, of course, but it’s given a range to account for different body types, and anyone who’s seen my shoulders, ribs, and hips knows I was not meant to be at the lower end of the healthy range. Healthy for someone of, I dunno, Korean descent (my tiny roommate who is probably at a perfect weight for herself) is not necessarily healthy for someone of Mediterranean stock (me).
And, yes, I did get people who didn’t understand why I was unhappy about losing weight, or in one especially creepy instance complimented me on getting in shape sine he’d last seen me (when I’d had, remember, a BMI of 21–and when my hands didn’t look like they were about to fall off my wrists). Of course I was in terrible shape–I wasn’t exercising, I was depressed, my bone density was low, I was probably somewhat malnourished (still probably am honestly). But I was “skinny” so it was awesome! BLEH, I say.
BMI is a flawed mechanism for measuring health, of course, but it’s given a range to account for different body types, and anyone who’s seen my shoulders, ribs, and hips knows I was not meant to be at the lower end of the healthy range.
Yep. I’m working (not very hard) to get back to my Happy Weight, which would give me a BMI of 22. My female ancestors herded sheep over mountains while carrying firewood on their backs — we are not built small. Short, but not small.
Oh, and I was slightly incorrect — according to the CDC, unhealthy weight at the low end of the BMI scale starts at 18.5, not 17.
Zuzu, awesome expansion on an awesome article. In fact, I’m off to link it…
As cool as it is that Ms. Ream wrote this piece (and it is WAY cool, given the onslaught of negative press about fat), I about fell off my horse when she revealed that the big change was 15 pounds. If I lost fifteen pounds, a few incredibly perceptive people might see an everso slight reduction in the depth of my second chin.
Seriously? Fifteen pounds? How sad is it that our society is so sensitized to the thinness ideal that this woman’s friends and colleagues so vehemently observed a mere 15 lb. weight change? I understand that, as a percentage, it like would have been more obvious on her than it would on me, but seriously. Fifteen pounds?
I was hospitalized 10 years ago after contracting a particularly nasty virus that pretty much eliminated my blood platelets. From the time I started feeling sick until I went into the hospital, I had lost 15 pounds. The admitting nurse noted this and said, “Wow! You’ve lost 15 lbs. in a week!” She couldn’t contain her excitement. I — feeling and looking like death (and precious near it) — responded, “give me back my ability to clot, and I’ll take those 15 lbs. back in a heartbeat. I’d rather be fat and healthy.” (Not that losing those 15 lbs. made me thin, by any stretch of the imagination!)
I think we humans oversimplify everything, not just weight (fat=unhealthy, thin=healthy). People want to see thin people so they can be reassured that all is right with the world, the same way they want to see married heterosexual couples. It doesn’t matter that there may be domestic abuse or infidelity or financial ruin — if a man is married to a woman, then that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and that couple is therefore acceptable. Anything that deviates outside that formula (singlehood especially past a certain age, gay marriage, even childless hetero marriage, etc.) is suspect.
Tangent alert! Sorry. It’s just that, the more I read about people’s experiences with fat hatred, the more I think that fat activism must be as much about acceptance in general as it is dispelling misinformation about body size and teaching people to assert their rights as human beings, fat or otherwise.