Body Trends

As I looked at the woman before me, I could see the water swelling along the edges of her lids even through the grainy computer screen. Her voice choked as she said, “I weigh more than my husband now.” And with the proclamation, the tide broke and two streams of glistening shame rolled down her cheeks.

Her experience, though clearly painful, is not surprising to me. This shadowy fear is whispered and named commonly in the work I do as a dietitian. This fear of having a body bigger than our partner’s—this fear of having a body that is somehow wrong. Her pain is real and deep, and the fear of its presence is probably understandable to most of us. But why? Why does the comparison of our bodies to that of our partners hold such power over us? Why are we so bound by fitting our bodies into a specific “idealized” mold? The answer is multi-faceted and complex, and I think it’s one worth exploring.

History of the “Ideal” Body

Our culture is obsessed with size, and it has become entwined with our identities. In a well-written article by CNN, Emma McClendon shared a poignant image of this identity crisis. As the organizer of the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum’s exhibition, “The Body: Fashion and Physique”, McClendon describes the overwhelming experience of exhibition visitors repeatedly asking for size comparisons of the displays.

“People come and always want to know what size something is…Whether it’s contemporary or 19th century, they want to know what size it is or what size it would correlate to, or what measurement it is…”1

I believe that in this grasping for extraneous details, we can see the way people want to use other persons, other bodies, as a way to understand themselves. “What size was the woman wearing this 19th-century gown?....How do I compare to her body?...How do I measure up?”. Which connects to the overarching question–”How do I understand my value as a woman and person in this world?”