A Status Beneath Slave: Millennia of Systemic Inferiorization of Women
And how that includes today’s dictatorship of thinness
It’s wonderful to be a child there. Plus, I was quite a gifted one: I was nailing it at school! Not so much on the popular side: clumsy, with big glasses, not skinny enough for that time and space… It’s not that I was fat, I realised recently by looking back at some pictures. But you need to understand that the Twiggy style was still pretty popular and thinness was not a goal, it was a way of life, an inevitable obligation. If having heavily developed curves was the ultimate beauty when Rubens was around, in the 1970s (and 80s, and 90s…) exhibiting an inch of fat was not acceptable, especially for women. Being fat was equivalent to being a failure, and a disgusting one for that matter. To this day, even after years of training myself otherwise, it’s still hard for me to disengage myself from that cliché. Luckily, and I’ll probably mention that more than once, my head is telling me a lot of nonsense I’ve learned to gracefully ignore.
Ironically enough, lots of the vociferous defenders of the holy emaciation were everything but beauty canons themselves. One might wonder why we take so much crap from people who can’t walk their talk. (Memoirs of an unexpected loser — Magali M.)
