North Star Writers Group

“Doris” remains one of my most vivid and unsettling college memories. In the dining hall she would fill a mug with hot water and call it a heavy meal. She wailed about her “excess” weight to anyone she could sucker into listening. Far from fat or even chubby, Doris was a walking skeleton. Her skin was so pale it seemed invisible, and stretched tautly over the jagged bones that protruded almost obscenely at her neck, wrists and ankles.

Doris was my introduction to the devastating effects of eating disorders. Three-and-a-half decades ago, few knew about anorexia nervosa, a serious, potentially life-threatening condition characterized by self-starvation and excess weight loss, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.

News that the fashion industry has awakened at long last to the issue of low-weight models brought Doris to mind. The images of women the industry has fostered for decades are those of Doris, just as emaciated. From the earliest age, girls are bombarded by the sight of waif-like females on the fashion catwalk, in magazines, films, on TV – everywhere. Overweight women have no hope of playing romantic lead roles, yet overweight men don’t seem to suffer from the same restrictions. Has anyone ever seen a female TV news anchor or reporter who wasn’t reed thin?

Small wonder that by the time they reach age 18, 78 percent of young women are unhappy with their bodies, according to Margo Maine, Ph.D., author of Body Wars: Making Peace with Women’s Bodies. Meanwhile, full-blown eating disorders are showing up in children as young as seven, while even five-year-old girls are concerned about dieting, according to The Renfrew Center.

Having fought (and mostly lost) my own lifelong personal battle of the bulge, I have always been interested in why society seems to demand that women be thin to the point that it is unhealthy if not downright life threatening. Media images of acceptably skinny females do not appear out of whole cloth or thin air. Instead, these images reflect (and reinforce) much deeper beliefs about the roles women are “supposed” to play in our world.

Despite all the changes that have taken place over the past half a century, there is still an underlying, pervasive belief that females exist to please and serve males – that women remain less important than men and are not to be taken as seriously. In addition, and perhaps even more germane to the issue of weight, the ideal size for women began to shrink during the 1960s, just when the recent women’s rights movement emerged.

From the voluptuous Size 12 look of the 1950s domestic woman, the revised image of the more “liberated” female took the form of a British model aptly named Twiggy: flat bust, narrow hips, matchstick legs. Twiggy and her successors soon made it obvious that the more women progressed in securing economic independence and opportunities outside their traditional home-based roles, the more they would pay a price. And that price was the amount of physical space they would be approved to take up in what remains a man’s world. Not too tall, sweetie, and certainly not too wide. Men really don’t like it when an uppity woman gets too big for her size two britches.

The recent government push against the so-called national obesity epidemic plays right into the inherent cultural bias against overweight women, giving this prejudice the government’s stamp of approval. Two studies, one published in 2005 and a smaller one publicized last month, revealed that doctors are likely to under-dose obese women with chemotherapy for their breast cancer, supposedly because the physicians worried that the larger doses would cause side effects that their patients could not handle. Other studies, however, have shown that this concern is unfounded - that obese women can withstand strong chemotherapy, and that under-treating them leaves them more vulnerable to recurrence of the disease.

Do we really disapprove of fat women so much that we aren’t as concerned about helping them survive a deadly disease? It would not surprise me at all. The only cure I can see for this situation is for fat women to eat as healthy as possible, exercise reasonably, do their best to ignore the messages and get on with their lives. There’s not much point in starving for approval that will never be theirs.

To offer feedback on this column, click here.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column #CT22. Request permission to publish here.