B O D Y

Our society’s obsession with underweight standards of beauty in woman has become so excessive and pervasive that it is nearly impossible to find an actress in a major motion picture or popular television program that is of normal body weight. These unfortunate actresses are not simply slender, but emaciated, and serve as role-models for impressionable girls and young women. Meanwhile, our daughters are being ravaged by eating disorders, depression, addictions and low self-esteem. The related statistics are staggering:

One in four female college students has an eating disorder.
Twenty years ago, fashion models weighed approximately 8% less than the average woman. Today they weight 23% less.
If shop mannequins were real human women, they would be too thin to menstruate.
A recent psychological study found that 3 minutes spent looking at models in fashion magazines caused 70% of women to feel depressed, guilty and shameful.
The mortality rates of anorexia have been found in some studies to be as high as 20%.

These unrealistic and unhealthy "standards" harm all women. Even those women who somehow manage to survive adolescence in America without developing an eating disorder (learning to actually eat when they are hungry) often live with a lifetime of shame related to not living up to the cultural "standard" of beauty. Ask any woman how she feels about her body, and you will discover the sad truth that nearly every woman (even thin, intelligent, apparently successful ones) in our society harbors inner insecurities and criticisms about her body. It may be difficult for the average man to understand, but most women in America, regardless of their dress size, live a life intimately acquainted with self-imposed hunger. Most women I know feel guilty for fulfilling the basic, human need of eating when they are hungry. We all know the interoffice post-lunch lingo: "Oooh, I was so bad, I ate a brownie!"

The problem, particularly in the mass media market, has become so extreme recently that the same media that helped to perpetuate the harmful standard is now jumping on the bandwagon of alarm. A current popular subject of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as television news programs has been the "frighteningly" thin state of many top female stars. In the past few months, actresses’ poor, emaciated frames have graced the headline-making covers of numerous gossip magazines, often with "before-and-after" pictures detailing a decline from slender, but normal woman of a few years ago to the near concentration-camp-victim look of today.

Have we forgotten that women are not supposed to look like boys or little men? Women are naturally soft, padded and curvaceous, designed to create and nurture life within and through their voluptuous bodies. A fact worth noting is that normal, healthy, non-obese women have body fat percentages ranging from 15 to almost 30%, with men ranging normally from about 10 to 15%. If a woman’s body fat percentage falls below 15%, she will usually stop menstruating. I might argue that the body fat percentages women strive for and our society idealizes place a woman’s body fat ratio outside of it’s norm, arguably within the range for an athletic, young man. Many women in America are striving for an unnatural, possibly unhealthy, body standard, damaging their body images and self-esteem unnecessarily in the process.

I am not advocating obesity here. This webpage is not a fat person "feel good"/big-is-beautiful thing, although I do strongly support the need for cultural acceptance of diversity in female images in the media, etc. (At least equal to that which men are given – think about it.) The point I am trying to make is a sociological one related to the physical and emotional health of women in our troubled society. Hell, I am a woman and I am tired of feeling not OK about myself! I have better things to do with my energy than worry about the size of my ass! Enough is enough, already.

So why is it this so? I have to ask…I can’t simply rage at something and not subsequently reach for the underlying cause. And I think I might know the answer: although easily forgotten today, we live in a society that is, and has been for the past 2,000 years or so, a patriarchy. We live in a misogynist society in which the underlying myth system vilifies woman, blaming her for "original sin" and robbing her of her natural place as the source of life. (Click here for more information about the history of the patriarchy and how it was not always so.) Women in Western Culture have only recently gained human rights similar to men, lacking only a few short generations ago even the right to vote. (Click here for information on human rights abuses against women from today and throughout recent history around the world.) How quickly and easily we forget these truths in the climate of today’s politically correct modernism.

Within a patriarchy, woman are scapegoated and subconsciously feared. I would argue that their ability to create life also contradicts and, therefore, threatens the underlying creation myth as well. I believe that it is this subconcious hatred of the female, particularly female power, which drives our society’s obsession with female thinness. It’s as if we want to keep young women (colt-like and boyish) from becoming women. A woman’s power is in her round curves, her breasts, her hips. She is an image of the Great Goddess manifest. Yes, our ancestors once worshipped her for 30,000 years before the current brief period of patriarchy. And she is making a comeback…sneaking back into our dreams and bubbling up once more through the collective unconscious…coming back to remind us of who we really are.