bodies: fat

Prolific sender-inner Dmitriy T.M. found a fascinating PSA from the New York State Department of Health aimed at encouraging women to breastfeed (via the NYT). What’s their angle? Why, breastfeeding as a diet plan, of course! See for yourself:

They certainly  manage to get the tone of a diet commercial down perfectly. And don’t ever forget, ladies: one of your main responsibilities as a new mom is to lose the weight as quickly as possible.

As Lauren Feeney points out at The Daily Need, getting women to increase rates of breastfeeding will likely require more than efforts to change individual behaviors — it requires changes in the workplace and family leave policies that make it possible for women to realistically combine breastfeeding with the demands of their jobs.

Jezebel recently posted this Australian PSA about the dangers of fast food:

It made me think of this British PSA from 1967 that addressed childhood obesity. Our ideas of what you should be eating may have changed in the past 40 years, but the tendency to rely on individualistic explanations and to blame moms for not providing children better food, as though the food they choose for their kids exists outside of any larger social context, seems to have quite the shelf life.

Miriam H. noticed that the “Plus Size” section of the Frederick’s of Hollywood website uses very thin women to model the clothes, a phenomenon we’ve documented at Woman Within, even as it boasts “SEXY AT EVERY SIZE” and “Styles in sizes up to 3X and 42F”:

I browsed through all of the front pages for the categories at the left and noticed only one photograph of a woman that could pass as a “plus size” model:

This got me to wondering where these photos come from… and I have absolutely no answer to this question.  I don’t know if Frederick’s arranges for these photos to be taken, if they hire a company to take these photos, if the manufacturers have the photos taken and give or sell them to Frederick’s.  That might explain the single image with a plus-sized woman.  It also seems to me that the photos vary quite a bit stylistically, suggesting that they were coming from different places.  For example:

I suspect, as well, that the reason all of the products are modeled by thin models is because only one photo of each product is produced (one with a thin model on the assumption that plus-sized models could not be used to sell to non-plus-sized people).  That is, it would be twice as expensive to show two differently sized women in the garment, so women searching for plus-sized clothes don’t get to see the garment in their size.

Then again, as I continue to think out loud, almost no women buying any of these clothes has a body that approximates that of the models in these photos.  So this is not a non-representation issue for larger women, it’s a non-representation issue for almost all women.

So this seems to me to be an issue of representation, but also an issue of the institutional and financial constraints of the fashion industry.  Thoughts?  Insights?  Answers?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

When I was a young adult there was a pervasive concern with unrealistic expectations of thinness for women and how this contributed to low self-esteem and eating disorders among young girls.  I don’t think this discourse is gone, but it’s definitely been joined by a competing discourse, the one that says that kids are too fat and need to diet.  In the latter category come these limited calorie snack packs from Disney (with Cars and generic princess themes):

When the anti-eating disorder discourse reigned supreme, I think this product would have been protested off the shelves.  They fit quite nicely, however, with the anti-obesity discourse.  From that perspective it makes perfect sense to teach kids to count calories.

The rise and fall of discourses is a fascinating topic.  What do you think?  Do the two discourses co-exist today?  Is anti-obesity winning?  What’s the future of the anti-eating disorder discourse?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Andrew M. sent us a link to an interesting post by Lewis Denby at Beef Jack about the video game APB. The game lets you customize the characters in a variety of ways, including height and weight. Denby noticed something interesting about the customization, however. Here’s a male figure with the weight at the maximum level:

As Denby points out, it’s pretty unusual to have main characters that give the option of not being super muscular and slim, so this is pretty surprising. Perhaps less surprising is what he found when he maxed out the weight scale for a female character:

While she’s certainly larger than most women in video games, the maximum body proportion for her seems quite a bit thinner than the maximum allowed for the male character, and she still has an hourglass shape. So you’re given the option to customize the characters’ bodies, but it appears you get less choice for the female figures than the male ones. The question is why; did the designers think this is as large as anyone was likely to ever want a female character to be? Were they, for whatever reason, more concerned about female than male characters being too much outside the video game norm, to the point of limiting customization options? Some other reason for this disparity? If it were due just to technical design issues, I don’t see why it would be possible to give more weight range for the male character than the female one.

Beef Jack contacted the company for comment but, it being the weekend, they’re still waiting to hear back.

Kristi P. sent us a link to a story at OMG! from Yahoo! about Christina Hendricks, who is famous for playing the curvaceous Joan on Mad Men. The article title includes “‘I Felt Beautiful’ Gaining ’15 Pounds’,” and the article discusses how Hendricks feels about her body.

Notice the contradiction in this screencap?

That’s right: throughout the article on how Christina Hendricks loves her non-waifish body there are links to stories about “incredible star slim-downs,” getting a “celebrity six-pack,” and how to get a “last-minute bikini bod.” So even in a story about a person reveling in her body, the message is clearly conveyed that your own body is not good enough, and to make it better, you probably need to make it thinner.

Vintage ad?

Nope. This ad for Virgin Active Health Clubs arrived in D’s mailbox this very month.

Credit: “D & T” of “Wish I Were Baking” at Flickr.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This graph, from Flowing Data, shows the obesity rates of different generational cohorts as they age.  Each differently colored lines represents people who were born in different decades (between 1926 and 1935 and on up).  Ascending lines represent higher percentages of obesity.  Horizontal progress represents age.

So, first things first: rates of obesity go up as a cohort ages.

What else?

People born after 1975 are starting out with higher rates of obesity than people born between 1956 and 1975.

And.

Obesity rates seem to rise at a pretty consistent rate as cohorts age.  So, if a cohort starts out with a high rate of obesity, they will have an ever higher rate 10 years later, and an even higher rate ten years after that, and so on.

The consequence:  Higher rates of obesity overall for each cohort that follows the last.

The data for the most recent cohort, born between 1996 and 2005, however, looks like it might be bucking the trend.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.