Femininity by Susan Brownmiller

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     who were forced to lose one-third of their normal weight because, poor creatures sipping
     their bouillon, the body photographed heavier than it looked in real life. But model
     thinness is no longer considered extreme. The Seventies popularized the sylphlike
     vision of the ballerina on pointe, and she herself is thinner and more exquisitely
     ethereal than ever before in the history of dance, competing for weight loss with
     other members of the company and subsisting on Tab and coffee with Sweet ’n Low between
     her arduous classes. After her White House years, Jacqueline Kennedy got even skinnier
     to stay in fashion, Pat Nixon and Rosalynn Carter matched each other ounce for vanished
     ounce, and Nancy Reagan nibbles little more than grapes and lettuce to keep the right
     shape for herGalanos gowns. Presidents’ wives who pose several times a day for photographs seem
     no less determined to stay thin than models and ballerinas, or the “new” Diana Ross,
     or the “new” Gilda Radner, and they are hardly alone in this intense form of feminine
     competition that takes the form of denial of food.
    A higher basal metabolism enables men to burn up calories and expend physical energy
     at a faster rate than women. Not only can they eat more cake and ice cream to fill
     out a larger frame, but because of their dimorphic muscle mass they can eat more cake
     and ice cream without its turning to fat. A man may consume 50 percent more calories
     than a woman in the course of a day without gaining weight, or at least without worry
     that he might be getting hippy. If one likes to eat well and would like to keep thin,
     one has to concede that here is an arena in which the male has a decided advantage.
     Men and women do not approach the dinner table from a position of equality until they
     reach old age, when the metabolic differences taper off. Even when men do decide to
     watch their consumption, it is usually fear of cholesterol and heart attack that provides
     the impetus—important, life-threatening stuff, not the lack of attractiveness in a
     spreading belly. (Gay men worry about keeping their figures “just like a woman.” In
     a sexual marketplace controlled by male values, those who are trying to please had
     better look good.)
    The American feminine obsession with weight goes beyond sexual differences in caloric
     conversion, beyond the issue of sex appeal, and beyond the intriguing question of
     how to cope with a female reproductive tendency toward fleshiness in a fast-moving,
     self-conscious, much-photographed era. In Competing with the Sylph, Dr. L.M. Vincent makes the sage observation that slenderness and refinement have
     become synonymous to striving women. Indeed, the saying attributed to socialites,
     “You can never be too thin or too rich,” seems to illustrate this theme. Dieting is
     an act of choice confined to privileged people who have access to a surplus of good
     food. When there is not enough food to go around, emaciation is a sign of poverty,
     not of willpower or chic. The typical adolescent anorectic usually comes from a privileged
     background and she is often described as an overachieving perfectionist whose obsessive
     pursuit of thinnesshas crossed the line into self-destruction. In a characteristically feminine way,
     ambition in women frequently expresses itself in meaningless or destructive exaggerations
     of the cultural ideal: the smallest foot, the narrowest waist, the biggest breast,
     etcetera. Granted that the anorectic suffers from a deep psychological disturbance;
     but if she lived in another age, perhaps the one that Zola brought to life in Nana, she might stuff herself with cream-filled cakes and hope the poundage would settle
     gracefully on her thighs, or chest, or arms or wherever it might win approval.
    Most women do not carry the desire for slenderness to anorectic extremes, but fad
     diets and wonder plans usually are not unknown to us, and we maintain