History of BBWorld Part X

The 1960s would bring their own changes to the feminine beauty ideal, though not in ways many would have expected. Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in 1962 came as a shock to many; though her life was considered to be ideal by outsiders, both in terms of her wealth and her continual claim to the HMW title (which, after her death at 569 lbs, would see a brief period of inactivity out of respect for her achievements), it was revealed in the days following her suicide that her mental health had suffered due to the pressure of maintaining her title and the paranoia resulting from the constant reporting on her activities. As women across the world began to more deeply consider the consequences of pursuing the feminine beauty ideal, a bombshell study would create a new schism in the overall feminine identity.

Second-wave feminism began to take hold in the United States in the early 1960s; innovations such as the oral contraceptive pill and policies such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (in many cases arising from the findings of President Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women) resulted in an increase in the number of career women attaining positions of true equality with their male contemporaries. This was exemplified in the scientific sphere, which had continued to be a male-dominated area despite the advances in representation driven by the first-wave feminism of the early 20th century; as more women entered the field, more research was conducted on topics relevant to the female life experience, which had been largely neglected by male researchers. Sociological research would drive many further improvements with regard to equality under the institutions of society, but it was a physiological study which would bring increased debate to the subject of the feminine beauty ideal.

In 1965, Bodil Schmidt-Nielsen published a comprehensive study on human physiological characteristics and their correlations with life expectancy. Though the paper included many seminal findings, one in particular stood out. When comparing the life expectancies of the general population of America, men on average lived 68 years in comparison to women’s 63; however, when men and women of approximately the same height and weight were compared, the women on average lived 2 years longer than their male counterparts. This immediately attracted controversy, as such a drastic change in statistics could only indicate bad methodology, and yet further studies had no choice but to confirm these findings; whether they reanalyzed Schmidt-Nielsen’s dataset or did their own original data collection, the result was clear: the average woman’s fatness was shortening her lifespan.

Debate surrounding these findings would result in opinions split into two broad camps; these would come to be known as the “traditional” beauty ideal and the “reformed” beauty ideal. Adherents to the traditional beauty ideal argued that since the indicator of female beauty had been fatness for so long, the reduction in health resulting from the current peak in the average woman’s weight could be addressed from a pharmaceutical standpoint in order to preserve the traditional beauty standards. Paradoxically, these advocates promoted the use of modern technology to maintain the sustainability of a traditional institution; regardless, this saw majority acceptance among the population due to the average woman’s desire to “have her cake and eat it too”- that is, retaining her fatness (and thus her traditional beauty) while also prolonging her lifespan. Meanwhile, those arguing for the reformed beauty ideal argued that if society managed to shift its beauty standards such that women of moderate size were viewed as ideal (well encompassed by a chant made famous by the activist group Goldilocks Girls: “neither stick nor blimp, I’m just right!”), pharmaceutical intervention would be unnecessary as natural physiological characteristics would bring male and female lifespans into alignment. As with any proposal requiring broad societal change, this saw far less popularity among the general citizenry, though there were a few noteworthy groupings of support (most conspicuously, women who naturally struggled to put on weight and who chafed at the possibility of augmentation, and men who felt that maintaining the weight of their wives was pushing them to the limits of their income). Though the traditional beauty ideal has persisted as the predominant philosophy even today, the reformed beauty ideal would begin to gain traction in the following decades (with advocates adopting the moniker of the “thin acceptance movement”).