Picture for yourself the 'ideal' woman in the dominant culture of America today. If we are passably close to the current media image of beauty we may not be aware of the intense pressures working on us. Women who don't 'fit' the image experience painfully the negative judgments, fears and hatreds which in subtle or unsubtle ways make it hard for nearly every woman in our society to love and accept herself as she is. Yet fear of fat and bigness reigns in most sectors of American culture today. The reducing, medical and advertising industries all insist that thin is beautiful and that fatness is a dangerous problem in need of correction.
Fat women encounter daily hostility and discrimination.
Low-calorie dieting has become a national obsession. Fat activists suggest that making women afraid to be fat is a form of social control. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company recently revised its optimum-weight charts upward by several pounds. Many health problems blamed on overweight turn out to have a more complex relationship to weight than doctors once assumed. Studies suggest that dieting is usually not successful in the long run, and that repeated low-calorie dieting is in fact a major cause of ill health.