Ideal body image

[jack]

Finally, two too many people are on my friendslist compaining about other people's attempts to help weight loss made me think of this. Many people are overweight and need to do something about it, this is unarguable and not what I want to discuss.

But there's also the strange thing that the ideal image seems to be way too thin. It used to be the case that fat was seen as beautiful, because it meant you were rich and had enough to eat, whereas poor people weren't and didn't[1].

Will we experience a resurgence of this? Certainly probably the richest people tend to do office work and not have spare time, which isn't a recipe for staying in shape. On the other hand, I can think of a few reasons for the status quo:

* Maybe success correlates with self-control correlates with body image
* It's an overreaction to people being overweight. So much effort is put into losing weight people forget the goal is a healthy weight, and try to continue to lose weight afterwards.
* It's just self-perpetuating. Standards of beauty get reinforced because everyone tries to live up to them, so it takes a long time for anything else to take hold
* Maybe it's a complete myth. Maybe no-one actually does like looking at skeletally thin people at all, but fashion magazines are just print them anyway because they're really stupid or in a modern art rotting cow way .

[1] Or so I've always heard. I haven't looked for a historical cite to confirm that.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Well, you know my feelings on this. If someone is genuinely overweight and they want to lose it, I'll give them all the encouragement I can, purely on health grounds - I work in public health research, so just about every day I hear about obesity as a risk factor for one thing or another. I lost about three stone myself because I didn't fancy getting diabetes or similar nasties. However, I have very little patience with the cult of the body beautiful, especially since (as you know) I am surrounded by skinny women on diets here at work. I get very impatient with them when they obsess about their weight.

Whether or not I find someone attractive depends first and foremost on their personality. After all, I did go out with Mole, who is not exactly slim... :-)