Who’s missing from the American cultural landscape?
I just finished reading the book Rethinking Thin, and it totally blew my mind. It’s not so much that I learned anything I didn’t know, but now I have science to back me up! Basically, study after study has shown that there is no permanent way to lose a great deal of weight- or that it’s even healthy to do so. Many people can lose weight, but most will gain the majority of it back.
The thing I really can’t get off my mind, though, is how stringent our beauty standards have gotten, especially for women. The author uses Jennifer Aniston as an example of the ideal body type- and with an estimated BMI of 18.3, she has a body so thin that less than 3.7% of American women are that thin.
If this is the case, what are the cultural implications? And I don’t mean how bad most of us feel about our bodies. I mean, what are we missing out on because we, as a culture, simply do not allow anyone much heavier than that to become famous. How many incredible actors, musicians, comedians do we just never get to see, because they are outside of the ideal? When you add in the fact that you also likely need to be white, not poor, not disabled, relatively tall, straight, and gender normative to be successful, you realize that we are choosing our culture makers from an exceedingly small portion of the population. (I’d love to see a statistician do a breakdown of this.)
How many awesome artists are we missing out on because they don’t fit an absurd ideal? Why has modern capitalism created a situation in which profit for art is so seriously driven by arbitrary beauty standards? This is a big problem, and the worse these standards get, the more popular art will be degraded.
