Fighting the Wrong Villain: Thin Women and the Thin Ideal

It’s the beginning of a new year, so I expect to see a lot of posts and articles about losing weight, working out, eating healthy, etc. I’ve been encouraged by seeing some fighting back against the annual guilt fest and claiming their right to love their bodies and selves as they are.

However, as you can easily guess, the positive body-image posts and resolutions are the minority. Even on sites whose entire mission is to fight the unrealistic expectations of the thin ideal, there is body disparagement, ranging from the typical self-critique to demonizing and criticizing others.

A couple of days ago, Beauty Redefined posted a quote from Zooey Deschanel about refusing to give in to unrealistic beauty standards, and I was dismayed to see how many people dismissed what she had to say because she is thin.

But I probably shouldn’t have been. It’s not really much different from what I have gotten on a regular basis from others.

I’m not a particularly large person, though certainly not as small as Zooey. My mother was very petite, and I inherited her small bone structure. My freshman year of college, I went through a brief period of being slightly heavy, according to the charts, but for the most part, I’ve always been within a “healthy” weight.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t struggled with my body image. Even though I can’t be classified as overweight or obese, I’m still far from meeting the standards of the thin ideal.

I’ve been working hard the last couple of years to learn to accept and love my body for what it is instead of what it isn’t, but it’s been a lonely journey. It’s difficult to express my insecurities to others. More often than not, when I dare to bring up my own struggle with the thin ideal, I’m met with comments such as “You’re thin; you have nothing to worry about” or “If only I were your size. You’re perfect.”

Perhaps comments like that are meant as an encouragement, but they don’t feel encouraging. Failure doesn’t really come in degrees. I fail to meet the thin ideal as much as anyone else who fails. The goal is still as much out of a healthy, realistic reach now as it would be if I gained an extra hundred pounds, and my need to overcome the thin ideal and to accept my body is as great as any other woman’s.

I’ve grown so tired of being dismissed. I’m tired of seeing women like Zooey vilified for being small. The goal of redefining beauty standards shouldn’t be to make thin “bad.” Rather it should be to accept the range of healthy expressions that women’s bodies can take–“fat,” “thin,” and anything in between.

More importantly, it should be to break away from the idea that a woman’s value is based in her appearance. Zooey’s wisdom or my journey aren’t diminished because of our weight—or at least they shouldn’t be. No woman’s should be, no matter what her weight.

So while we’re all talking about our resolutions and health goals for the year, can we also please stop demonizing women, whether heavy or light, for their bodies? I’d love to see every woman reach a place where she can stand up and celebrate her body as a beautiful part of herself, as my beautiful and amazing friend Dani did, but I understand that kind of journey is a long one that some may not ready to make.

At the very least, though, we can refrain from making the journey harder. The next time you feel like dismissing someone’s body concerns because they don’t match yours, take a step back and just try acknowledging that she is allowed to struggle too.

The Invisible Woman and the Thin Ideal

I doubt there is a single woman in the U.S. who hasn’t felt the need to be thin at some point in her life. The bombardment of thin ideology is impossible to escape. What’s worse, it’s being sold to women under the guise of having something to do with health, finding its way into children’s commercials like the Sketcher’s ad for girls in which their shape-ups keep Heidi fit so that the boys will follow her around to adult ads promising practically the same thing.

The reality is that the thin ideal has nothing to do with health.

The thin ideal is all about the dress size. Exercise is marketed to slim the body down. Foods are marketed for the ability to make a person lose weight instead of for their nutritional content.

It’s this thin ideal that drives people to criticize an Olympic athlete  for being “fat” and obsessively speculate about the few-pound weight gain of celebrities while ignoring the very serious and dangerous weight loss of models.

It’s the thin ideal that makes plus size models (and for the record, plus size in the fashion industry is now anyone size 6 or above) all but invisible in media. The only time they’re not invisible is when their “largeness” is being focused on—an anomaly of being comfortable with a body that doesn’t fit the thin ideal. Think about it. Do you ever see plus-size models on the cover of fashion magazines when their weight or body size is not the focus? When was the last time a female protagonist in a movie was anything but thin? For that matter, when was the last time a female background character was anything but thin?

While we’re on the topic of models, let’s not forget that even the “thin” models are photoshopped to be thinner… that is, if the body is even real.

The thin ideal sets an impossible standard, and it’s used to sell women products they’re told that they absolutely must have in order to achieve this impossible standard. It’s a marketing tool.

But it’s so much more than that too.

In one of my earlier posts, I pointed out how modesty is a tool of the patriarchy to keep women objectified. In a similar vein, I believe the thin ideal is a tool of the patriarchy to keep women invisible.

On the literal front, the thin ideal goes hand in hand with other gender norms—demure, dainty, delicate, frail, fragile. Being thin literally prevents women from taking up too much space or from being too obtrusive. The physical taxation on the body ensures that women remain weaker and in need of a “big strong man” to protect them. Morever, it pressures many women to choose to be weak because working out and eating healthy can cause a form of weight gain. A healthy weight is still too big for the thin ideal.

On a more metaphoric front, the thin ideal keeps women’s accomplishments and abilities invisible. By placing so much important on the body’s appearance, the thin ideal diminishes the importance of pursuing intellectual accomplishment, which means fewer women are a “threat” to men in cerebral fields. And if a woman says “fuck it” and breaks away from the pressure of the thin ideal, her accomplishments are still safely obscured by drawing attention to her body and its perceived flaws, thus people are more concerned with Ashley Judd’s “puffy” face than with her kick-ass activism and with Sandra Fluke’s sexual appeal than with what she has to say.

Lastly, the thin ideal keeps women invisible to themselves. When everything, including exercise and food, is marketed based on its ability to make a woman attractive to others, it becomes far too easy to forget that the body is the vehicle through which we live. Exercise shouldn’t be about keeping a firm butt and flat abs because that’s what others (e.g. men) want, it should be about keeping the heart healthy and the muscles strong so that women can experience life. The thin ideal distances women from their needs and desires for the sake of matching up to an arbitrary (or perhaps not so arbitrary) standard set by an obscure “other.” We’ve come a long way from the days when people thought a woman’s uterus would fall out if she exercised, but we have an equally long way to go to allow women to reclaim their bodies for their own use.

It’s time to change the conversation. We need to replace the thin ideal with a healthy ideal–one that acknowledges the body diversity that exists and that takes the focus off of a beauty standard that requires bad health to achieve. Women need to claim their right to care for their bodies’ needs for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone else. Women need to claim their right to take up space.