RISE IN FEMALE OBESITY?

How Has the Fashion Industry Contributed the Rise in Female Obesity?



How Has the Fashion Industry Contributed the Rise in Female Obesity?

Introduction

Pictures of beautiful but undernourished-looking women have led, in recent months, to a round of fashion-industry bashing in the press. One anonymous wit even mocked up satirical pictures of women who looked like concentration camp victims—except that they had masses of glossy hair and wore slinky clothes. As often happens when satire meets a mass audience, lots of people thought that the doctored pictures were real—which is how, one day in November, they wound up in my inbox, courtesy of a women and media list-serv.

A predictable discussion followed. Curvy women were praised for their healthy-seeming fuller figures. "Self-acceptance" was praised, too. It was argued that the evil images presented to women by the fashion industry were part of the broader plan of beauty magazines to make women feel bad about themselves and thus buy products for self-improvement.

Such a critique, which we hear over and over today, is based on a conceptual error. The beauty industry is not the problem; it is a part of the solution. American women today are the victims of a more insidious idea, an idea that underlies the American obsession with self-esteem: the tyrannical ideal of "natural beauty."

A "Natural" Life

Few Americans today live a "natural" life, whatever that may be. The more educated and well-to-do among us may eat organic foods and avoid chemicals as best they can, but such efforts hardly make us "natural." Our society is too complex for that. Indeed, all societies involve such a thick layering of culture over our malleable essence that it is virtually impossible to say what we might be like in a natural state.

What is clear is that, over the past century, American women have changed their shape. Most noticeably, they have gained so much poundage that, today, more than half are overweight and a third are clinically obese. The sharpest spike in obesity has come since the late 1970s. There are all sorts of reasons, of course—from the rise of corn syrup as a sweetener to the increased portion sizes of our daily meals and our increasingly sedentary styles of life. And yet the doctrine of "natural beauty"—so favored by the self-esteem brigades of the 1970s and still confusing women today—asks women to accept themselves as this unnatural environment has made them.

What the critics of the beauty industry further fail to recognize is that the doctrine of "natural beauty"—and the desire it breeds in women to be accepted as they are or to be seen as beautiful without any effort—is a ruthless and anti-egalitarian ideal. It is far more punishing than the one that says any woman can be beautiful if she merely treats beauty as a form of discipline.

Only in America do we think that beauty is a purely natural attribute rather than a type of artistry requiring effort. Look at the French: They are no more beautiful as a people than we ...