How to live in America and in Russia with excess weight
'21.06.2021'
Source: Update
I am 28 years old, I am a journalist from New York and all my life I have been fighting overweight. As a size 6/8, I do not in any way consider myself fat and do not suffer from excess male attention, but like many women, I want to have a chiseled hourglass figure, writes Diana Brook. I want to move with the ease of a ballerina, and not feel the heaviness of my chest and hips.
I want things to sit on me just like on mannequins in stores, and not to decide how much clothing hides my flaws and emphasizes advantages in relation to its price, the author notes Update... I want to be thin and fit so that when my boyfriend says, “You’re awesome,” I can believe him, and not feel that he is just saying it because he should.
When I was a teenager at the start of 2000, the beauty was considered a belly ideal enough to have a piercing like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. So, quite expectedly in my 15 years, feverishly doing it, being on a diet that consisted of sliced tomato and cucumber, soaked in balsamic vinegar, I earned the first eating disorder.
My best friend, a similarly broken high school student, and I photocopied every page of the Weight Observation handbook, and I vividly remember trying to catch them blown away on a barbecue, desperate to figure out how many calories a watermelon had eaten.
Russian everyday life, where I grew up and where every stranger passing by finds it necessary to comment on your body, did not help at all.
I remember going to dinner parties in 12 years (then the problems started), and family friends literally took the food out of my hands before I could put it in my mouth.
“You can take bread,” the head of the family said to my naturally thin friend. “You can't,” he said, addressing me. When I was 17, I rode a train to the village, and an old military veteran shamed me for trying to lie next to my skinny cousin because he said I would "crush her." I went to the restroom, where it smelled creepy because someone had put a sneaker in the toilet, and cried there until dawn. I stopped eating solid foods until the end of that year.
But in the USA it was not much easier. At the age of 18 my periods stopped due to an eating disorder, and when I told my male gynecologist that I had anorexia, he looked down at my naked body and said, “Well, you can't be SO anorexic.” ... That month I lost a couple more pounds.
This is what I am for: ladies, I understand you, and I think it is GREAT that we promote the beauty of different types of figure. A recent study showed that more plus-side models in advertising improved the psychological health of women, which is great.
Ashley Graham was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, and Spark Lawrence advertises Aerie underwear, and that's great too. But I think this is all good-selling nonsense. Because Ashley Graham and Iskra Lawrence (with all due respect to the message they are trying to convey) is not an example of a progressive view of the body: they simply show another facet of the same original ideals.
These two models have a larger size than, say, Winona Rider’s 1990’s, but the attributes that make them conditionally attractive are the same: long legs, big hips, slim waist, big bust. In fact, despite the ostentatious body positivity, the Spark figure is much more difficult to make than the Winona figures.
You can (but you don’t have to) starve to look skinny. But in order to get disproportionately wide hips and narrow waists, you will need plastic surgery, which, by the way, is now at the peak of its popularity among teenagers because big buttocks are a standard of beauty.
You might ask: what about all these photo stories about sickly looking obese women that promise to “change the way you look at what's beautiful”? I will answer: the women who take part in them are bold, amazing and have every right to love and show their bodies. But the media, which illustrate the “feminist” approach to body image with such photo reports, are in fact condescending to these women.
First of all, we are so obsessed with the sexualization of the female body that we have completely forgotten about maintaining a healthy weight, first of all, for the sake of well-being, and not for the sake of beauty.
It is not healthy to be overweight, and especially obesity, because it increases the risk of developing diabetes, heart problems, stroke, certain types of cancer and other diseases. I do not want to write the obvious, but I have to, because it seems that we have forgotten why it is important to maintain a healthy diet and exercise. Not so that we could get more positive clicks on Tinder, but so that we could live longer, happier and healthier.
But even if you approach such examples purely from the point of view of aesthetics, they are still condescending. I worked in several magazines that daily produced articles like from under the conveyor belt, but none of the "thin" women in the editorial office delved into this topic. Because what we find attractive can, for the most part, be explained through science.
Decades of research analyzing the ideals of the female body, from Greek statues and paintings of the Renaissance to Twiggy and Marilyn Monroe, have shown that although the attributes of beauty have changed, a certain ratio of body proportions has been revered throughout Western history and culture.
Regardless of size, a waist-to-hip ratio of 0,7 has always been considered “ideal” because it indicates that a woman is particularly “fertile” (fertility has been scientifically proven to be the basis for mate / partner choice for sex). Research confirms my previous thoughts on health: women who are “overweight” on their hips face fewer health risks than those who are focused on the waist.
If you think that nowadays we have really become more progressive, advertising figures like Kim Kardashian with big buttocks, then you just have to look at the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, which almost scream: "DAT ASS!" (“This is an ass!”).
The idea that we have less progressive body concepts may not be revolutionary. But here's what's a little revolutionary: I'm not going to write that “we are not yet mature,” as they do in essays like this, I want to say that we will never “grow,” and that is NORMAL.
I'm tired of hearing the phrase in advertising: “Your body is beautiful the way it is!”
Because condescension here manifests itself on two levels. Firstly, such an advertisement assumes that women are rather naive and buy into the fact that it is better to be overweight than to resemble Victoria's Secret models, which they really are not. But what is worse, they are promoting the idea that everyone, nevertheless, should have a beautiful body and be beautiful, and this is just an outdated concept.
You don’t have to have a perfect body, nor do you have to become specialists in the field of neurology or Nobel Prize winners. We are much more than the shell in which we are. We have much more opportunities than just beauty.
I didn't have a moment of liberation when I looked in the mirror and said, “You know what? Despite these folds of fat, I'm flawless. ” The moment of liberation came when I looked in the mirror and said, “You know what? My body is not perfect, I will never have a perfect body, and this is NORMAL. Because I am so much more than just a body. I'm smart, talented and funny, and all of this is much more significant than how I look in a swimsuit. " That's what true body positivity is for me.
