What Does It Mean to Be Fat, Thin, and Female

1
What Does It Mean to Be Fat, Thin, and Female? A
Review Essay of these Five Books
2

• The five books under review address what it means
  for women to be fat and thin in contemporary
  North America. Womens obsession with food the
  compulsive eating of obesity, the self-starvation
  of anorexia nervosa and the oscillating binging
  and purging of bulimarexia.
• The forces they propose include the contradictory
  expectations of families for girls the
  objectification of women and the degradation of
  their sexuality the institutionalized cultural,
  political, and economic powerlessness of women
  and the cultural slighting of female experience
  and female values.
• The books express a humanistic sensitivity to
  women tormented by obsessive thoughts of food,
  starvation or gorging and caught in a vicious
  cycle of guilt, self- loathing and despair.
• All six authors view obesity and skeletal
  anorexia as two versions of the same obsession.
• There are several organizations to help fat
  people. These include The National Association
  to Advance Fat Awareness (NAAFA) and Over-eaters
  Anonymous and summer diet camps for children,
  also several other programs nationwide.

3
Anorexia nervosa is a voluntary starvation, the
physiological effects of starvation are crucial
to the distorted perceptions of self and reality
that make anorexia hard to treat. Anorexics tend
to be white adolescent girls from socially and
economically advantaged families. Like
bulimarexia, it seems to have been increasing at
an alarming rate in the last 15 to 20 years.
4

• Bruchs patients are characterized by undeveloped
  sense of self, over-compliance, and a fixation
  with being thin as the sole way to exert control
  over the world around them. She locates the
  cause of this pathetic condition not in the
  victim, but in forces around them, principally
  their family and cultural expectations that women
  be unreasonably compliant and thin.
• Bulimarexics include older women of more varied
  backgrounds. They tend to be thin, but not
  starving and may go through long periods of
  eating normally before erupting into a cycle of
  binging and purging. Chronic bulimarexics may go
  through the cycle from once a week to as many as
  18 times per day, consuming from 1000 to 20,000
  calories per binge.

5
The authors do not emphasize the dangers of
obesity-which is exaggerated by the media,
medical plans, doctors, and insurance companies.
They do concentrate on the physiological burdens
of constant weight fluctuations, fasting,
amphetamine consumption, the stressful nervous
effects of maintaining an excessively low body
weight, and the isolating self-centeredness of
the obsession. Obesity is defined as a body
weight statistically determined as being from 10
to 25 over normal body weight. An estimated
40 of American women may be obese. Bulimarexics,
anorexics, and the obese typically loathe their
bodies. The thin constantly weigh themselves and
assess their shape in mirrors, while the fat
retreat from looking, but cannot escape their
thoughts.
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• A womans attempt to escape hunger is a terrible
  struggle against her sensual nature, a struggle
  destined to failure because all human beings have
  physiological needs that cannot be denied.
  Womens antipathy toward their own sensuality
  reflects Western cultures repression of
  appetite, which may be particularly strong within
  the Puritan tradition.
• They all display an irrational terror of hunger
  that is often accompanied by an inability to
  allow, recognize, or satisfy the physiological
  stirrings of appetite.
• They may also feel disgust and fear toward sexual
  contact and insecurity about their own sexuality.
  Becky Thompson reports that many studies confirm
  that between 1/3 and 2/3 of women who have eating
  problems have been sexually abused.
• North America female sexuality is degraded and
  objectified. In fashion and in the media women
  are repeatedly presented with idealized,
  objectified, and sexualized images of themselves.

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• The social atomization characteristic
• of the United States facilitates the
• secrecy and increases isolation in
• women.
• In a society that competes in every
• aspect of life for grades, jobs, shape-
• as it denies women the ability to
• compete and still be feminine, it is no
• wonder that women opt out of the competition,
  internalize it, or limit it to the trivial domain
  of body weight. Womens isolated, competitive
  individualism in their struggle with food, is an
  internationalization of the competitive values
  and practices to Western society.
• Because our society tends to define all problems
  as individual ones and to suggest that they can
  be overcome by personal effort aimed at raising
  oneself above others, individual rage is focused
  not against society, but against the self this
  permits the continuance of the status quo built
  on the systematic oppression of women.

8

• Reported cases of anorexia and bulimarexia have
  increased alarmingly in the last 20 to 30 years
  and a concern with obesity also appears to be
  rising. The culture of North America commodity
  capitalism, the food is plentiful and consumption
  is pushed. The U.S. food industry contributes to
  the problem. With a stable population,
  advertising must create markets for new foods.
  Once women had converted these foods into fat,
  they are expected to buy diet foods to shed the
  fat. The economy depends on manipulating
  consumers to buy as much as possible, and one way
  is to project the urge to eat and the need to
  diet.
• Current standards of fashion and beauty
  contribute to womens obsession with food by
  projecting a thin ideal. These standards for
  female beauty have fluctuated over the years in
  the United States and have demanded the greatest
  thinness at times when women have demanded
  greatest rights. These behaviors are often the
  responses to the cultural problems of womanhood.

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• Women need to learn that they have a right to eat
  
• and that contrary to what society tells them,
  their
• identity consists of more than how they look.
• Although social and psychological factors may
  be
• extremely important in contributing to eating
• disorders, some people may become excessively
• fat because of how their bodies work.
• Are there women out there who are fat and happy
• in the United States? Is our society so full of
• conflicts as to render a happy, healthy, sociable
  
• fat woman as impossible in this culture?
• Data from societies without the political and
• economic stratification that characterizes our
  own
• can offer perspective on how womens obsession
• with food is a product of female powerlessness in
  

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