Women's Fat and the Supposed Dangers of Dieting

"'The results of recent studies have suggested that women may in fact live longer and be generally healthier,'" Naomi Wolf recites from Radiance in her book The Beauty Myth, "'if they weigh ten to fifteen percent above the life-insurance figures and they refrain from dieting'" (187). Though I agree with much of what Wolf has to say regarding women's obsession with being thin and so achieving "'the look of sickness, the look of poverty,'" as she cites "fashion historian Ann Hollander in Seeing Through Clothes" as saying, I take issue with a few specific beliefs she has on dieting (184).

Wolf's tragic personal narrative of her battle with anorexia at the age of thirteen, which she calls "adolescent starvation," is heartbreaking, and it brings new light to her reasons for writing the novel (203). It makes the reader even more sympathetic to her cause, even more on her side. The reader, who may have previously been in denial of the beauty myth's affect, sees Wolf as a living example of everything the beauty myth has done to women. However, her personal narrative also gives the reader a new understanding of what side she is coming from and of the extreme degree to which she is on that side. If this book, and the criticisms of diet within it, had been written by a heavier women who shared Wolf's grasp of the beauty myth, I would be more inclined to believe her accusations of diet. In the same way, when the health teacher at my school dismissed the question asked in class, how to lose weight, with "you just eat healthier," I knew she had never dealt with being above a healthy weight before, and therefore her weight suggestions were much less relevant to me. I feel that women who deal with the other side of the problem - being too skinny - do not have an understanding of the position I am coming from, which is, even if not by much, the heavier side. To be fair, I do not understand the too-skinny perspective, but at least, unlike my old health teacher or Wolf, I do recognize that not every women has the problem of weighing too little.