This is a picture that I found online recently, and it really has me thinking about women's weight issues. In the picture, the girl is holding a candy bar, but she has measuring tape wound around her mouth, and a distressed/confused/sad look on her face. I feel that this picture represents what happens in a lot of women's every day life (especially girls around our age/high school girls). We are forced to choose between eating (which is a natural animal instinct for humans), and looking nice for society (which we feel immense pressure from). I do not know a single girl who is 100% completely satisfied with her body, and all of the women that I know are either watching what they eat, working out everyday, putting themselves down, having an eating disorder, or a combination of those!
I'm not afraid to admit that I do feel the societal pressures to be thin, and thus I really try to watch what I eat, and I work out every single day. But my question is: why has the views on women's physical beauty changed so much within the past few decades? Look at famous women from the 1950s, they look medium sized (probably large from today's standards), and look at famous women and models from today. They are stick thin with no curves! It baffles me that society, within just 50 years, has changed it's views on how women should look. But why did it change to make women skinnier and less curvy? Does anyone have an ideas?
This is an issue that I find interesting/frustrating as well. I remember a few years back watching some sort of documentary about how the standards and what we deem as attractive for women has changed over the past few decades, particularly in regards to weight. It started off by noting that in the 50's and 60's, women with full and/or "curvy" figures were the standard that all women strived for. Take Marilyn Monroe for example; even today, she is a legend but based on today's sizing criteria, it's possible that she was a size 12 (there is a lot of controversy over this and no one really has a definitive answer). However, it stated that as the fame and popularity of the British supermodel Twiggy (name says it all) rose, so did the focus on being thin. Now I don't think that Twiggy was the sole cause of this shift, but perhaps her rise in fame can at least be a point at which we can see this shift beginning to take form.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Heather, I definitely think the rise in the fashion industry (supermodels, magazine publications, fashion shows, etc.) gave rise to an even more widespread view of what the "ideal" woman should look like. As Bordo writes about in her article on 'the slender body' the issue is not so much an ideal weight, but is instead an ideal appearance of having little to no 'flab, fat, or bulge'.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking personally (and I believe most women can) about this cultural obsession with weight and appearance, it's something that for the most part has gotten little attention until very recently. Even now, I think the issues of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder (to name a few) are things that are often hushed up. The fact that these "disorders/behaviors" are usually done "in secret" (usually you don't hear someone bragging about not eating/ or throwing up afterward) makes them difficult issues to confront. This silence on the issue, I think, is what promulgates and perpetuates it.