The extremely thin woman was NOT seen as an ideal of feminine beauty for most of Western civilization. A feminine figure is a full, rounded, curvaceous figure. Not fat, but not skinny. With the highlights exclusive to the female body (namely breasts and hips) accentuated. This is generally the case if you look at artwork and fashion from the past.
One possible idea is that an ultra-thin look may have become more popular among women because of homosexual male fashion designers creating clothes for an un-feminine physique. In the words of Thomas Clough:
“The current abundance of skeletal waifs in America’s fashion magazines is a consequence of the esthetic domination of the fashion industry by gay men who are only too happy to reduce women to mere clothes horses for the display of freakish garments. If normal men ran the fashion industry the models would be softer. They would have proportional breasts and child-bearing hips. They would be about 20% body fat by weight. Think of Marilyn Monroe, not Kate Moss at mid-career. (Kate is looking much healthier since she quit the rag trade and ordered in a few pizzas.)”
This probably isn’t the only cause of the problem, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.
My doctor told me that I should weigh at most 110. He said at 145 lbs that I was morbidly obese and everytime I ate I was killing myself. He also made a few remarks about my figure that I found hurtful. I took his advice. Others thought I was fat, so hearing it from my doctor was no surprise. It was shocking to hear that I was killing myself and so severly overweight. I had a fairly active life. I had lost some weight the year before through exercise and had kept most of that loss by staying active. I already tired to avoid eating excessively as I knew my family tends to get fat. I decided that I must have been deluding my self into thinking I was healthy, just because I was active and felt healthy.
I was able to get down to 135 lbs in highschool, by gradually cutting foods and portions following his advice. I found that to maintain that weught I had to keep restricting my calories. I felt sick, had nausea, headaches, shakiness, and weaknesss. To lose the rest, was going to take further restriction, so that is what I did. All the symptoms got worse.
I stopped dieting and started eating normally again after I landed in the emergency room, starving, and still at 135 lbs. Another doctor told me that I was starving and to eat something, starting with some carbs. It took her a while to figure this out, me being fat and all, but the ketones in my urine were a dead giveaway. She questioned me about my eating habits and told me to stop restricting my caloric intake so severly and to eat normally. She told me if I kept it up I was going to do permanent damage to my body, far worse than I was by being a bit fat. She never disputed that I should weigh 110 lbs.
I went back slowly to eating normally, but watching what I ate, I got up to 150. I was able to maintain that and feel healthy. Hearing about how I was weak willed and fat was depressing, but it felt better than being sick all the time.
Check out the latina women in the Miss Americas contest…the latin american women are much sexier. I don’t see anything attractive in those stick-thin models…they might as well be boys. A rounded, curvaceous figure is much more pleasing than those “twiggy” look-alikes.
I have mentioned this before but years ago an Australian magazine New Woman did a survey where they showed shots of naked women to both men and women and asked what they thought about them. The shots were chin to knees from memory - no faces anyhow. The result was that the women had no idea what men liked - if they thought a woman was perfect most men thought she was too thin, if they thought a woman was “fat” most men thought she was hot.
They had pages and pages of these little photos and after a while it was laughable - if I looked at a photo and thought “nice” I knew that women would be thinking “tub of lard”.
As a very lucky man married to a lovely curvy woman, this frustrates me to no end.
My gut feeling is to agree with those speaking on the current state of the fashion industry- if the designers tend toward being not attracted to women, how good would their judgment be in choosing styles and models? I’ve heard this theory taken so far as to say that gay designers try to ‘make’ young men out of their female models, but that seems to go to far into slur/ tin-foil hat territory.
My own thoughts on it also question the shift from curvy models to waifs…the best that i can come up with outside of the ‘gay designer’ theory’ is that fertility is no longer a draw for a sexual partner. In fact, given the casual nature of sex in present society, lack of secondary sex characteristics are a subtle signal to men that the lady in question is not a ‘mother’ and can be pursued safely.
My husband was married to two fat women before he married me. I don’t think most men are quite as obsessed with weight as we think they are. He does prefer me a bit thinner than my current weight (and so do I), but it’s not like he gives me a hard time about it.
Today’s clothing styles look better on very thin women. That’s just the way it is. If we were in a different era, we’d all go with the flow there, too. But for now, thin is in.
I’ve always wondered about this. I am a “curvy” gal, and have really bigs hips and butt. I’m a white girl, and most white guys would think I was overweight (well, I am.) But, boy oh boy do the hispanic and black guys LOVE me. They think I am a goddess and have the perfect figure. It’s actually kind of annoying because whenever I’m around a lot of hispanic or black guys, I get a lot of unwanted attention
So what is it about the difference in cultures that makes hispanic and black guys appreciate a voluptous and curvy figure, and for most white guys to prefer thinner girls?
You have to distinguish between normal people who just want to be thinner, and real anorexia.
My wife is a psych nurse who works with anorectics. They are sick. Very sick. They literally can not eat, and have to be fed with tubes. They know that they don’t look good, and they know that their problem could kill them. My wife goes to a lot of funerals, and the longer-term patients on her ward have seen some of their friends die. They cry at night because they are afraid, but they simply can not eat. Fat terrifies them. The thought of food being converted into tissue in their stomachs horrifies them. If given the chance, they will purge or abuse laxatives to get rid of it.
My wife says that anorexia sneaks up on people. They diet, eat, diet, and one day something changes in their brain and they simply don’t want to eat any more. It’s a very sad affliction. It’s also hard on my wife. She works with these women for months or years on end, listening to their troubles, counselling them, becoming their friend, learning to care for them. And then some of them die. It’s hard on the patients and the staff, and no one chooses to do it voluntarily. Most of them are in treatment because they don’t want to be the way they are - some are committed by family members.
Because hispanic and black guys don’t give a shit what anybody thinks of their women, whereas white men tend to follow the crowd. White guys are told that they SHOULD be attracted to 5’10", blonde, blue eyed girls who are a size 4, so when they find themselves attracted to a 5’2" 200 pound redhead, instead of telling their buddies to kiss their ass, they’ll just hide their attraction because they are terrified of what their friends would say. Hispanic and black guys are just going after what is biologically natural: curves. White guys have been brainwashed into thinking that only a skinny girl will do. It’s not the hispanic and black guys that are different, it’s the white guys that are screwed up.
It might be a generalization, but I think you’re generally right. Although, they probably don’t have to care about what their friends think, because their friends probably think the curvy gal is attractive too…
I don’t think anorexia (and bullemia) is as much a desire to be thin as a kind of self-immolation. When I was in my deep blue funk, one of the first things to go was my appetite. I can imagine that a girl already struggling with self-image issues and despairing that she will never be as pretty as the models on TV would soon find herself in a vicious cycle.
Wimbeldon and many other stadiums are installing new, wider seats to accommodate ever fatter people. Coffins are being sold in extra-wide sizes. Kids today are expected to be the first generation in US history to die earlier than their parents. Childhood diabetes is soaring. Obesity is already an epidemic and is growing at rampant rates in North America, Europe, Australia and Polynesia.
Yet people cavalierly brush-off the whole thing by saying Hollywood is fixated on skinny women. The Fact is that ladies like Julia Roberts, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow are what healthy women are supposed to look like. Sure, the fashion industry has a predilection for people whose BMIs are pushing into the unhealthily low territory, but that in no way justifies obesity in society at large.
[QUOTE=Abbie CarmichaelWhite guys have been brainwashed into thinking that only a skinny girl will do.[/QUOTE]
I was about to say not this white buy but I’m not white enough to join the Klan so…
Anyway I think you have a valid point. I grew up hearing typical locker room criticism of women’s bodies in high school and in the military. Women I would barely call zaftig were called fat pigs. There was always some amount of peer pressure to fall in line with the “norm” but it never clicked with me. I blame years of airbrushed Playboy centerfolds for giving so many men a twisted and unrealistic view of women’s bodies. I’m glad to have escaped that and many men do. Watch the movie Shirley Valentine sometime, particular the scene with Pauline Collins and Tom Conti on the boat.
I don’t know if this was directed at me, but I will assume so.
According to this site I am underweight. I am a bit over 5’2 and I’ve weighed about 95 pounds for the past decade. So my BMI is 17.4. That’s underweight and unhealthy. I’ve had a lot of doctors and nurses think I am anorexic or bulemic and not believe me when I say that I eat plenty and desire to gain weight on my own. I would love to gain a few pounds! I have been trying to break 100 and stay there for years!!
Yet just last week I had a guy tell me that he could only date girls that were thin like me because he didn’t like a woman that was unhealthy. I tried to impress upon him that most of the girls he called ‘unhealthy’ were actually far healthier than I would ever be.
I don’t know the girl’s weights or heights, I don’t ask since it would be impolite, but based on guesses, they are in the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI. My sister has, IMHO, a perfect body. I don’t know her exact weight, but she can’t weight more than 120 pounds. At 5’3, she could gain 20+ pounds before she’d be considered overweight. Still, people have expressed concerns that she’s getting fat.
I’d be all for this obsession with thinness if it was an obsession with healthiness. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be leaning that way.
Not true. Most of those actresses you listed are underweight for their height.
Also, body structure plays a huge part in someone’s ideal weight. Most models, A-list actresses, etc. have ectomorphic body structure (long limbs and torso, narrow hips and shoulder frame), whereas a larger number of women in general have mesomorphic body structure (shorter limbs, wider “child-bearing” hips, larger breasts). You cannot change your body’s inherent structure, no matter how much weight you lose or gain. Women with larger frames can support more weight and a higher fat content, and it’s in fact unhealthy for them to be as skinny as women with narrow frames. Yet, we tell all girls that they have to conform to the ideals of one group, which happens to be the minority group.
Obesity is a big problem in this country, but that doesn’t mean we should shame girls who have perfectly average weight because they don’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow. You shouldn’t base your ideal weight on a chart; healthy weights are different for every individual, and depend not only on height but also on a whole list of other factors, such as hipbone width, limb length, and breast size.
And just for the record, I’m 5’3", 115 pounds, and I’ve been told (always by women) that I’d look so much better if I lost another ten pounds. So yeah, we do have an obesity epidemic in this country, but we also have an epidemic of people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
