"My full-time, unpaid, job is managing my appetite, and in between that I write for the Guardian."

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett sums up weight-think:

“You have an eating disorder,” some readers of my blog informed me, and I felt affronted. An unhealthy relationship with food, maybe; perhaps even disordered eating. But an eating disorder? I don’t think so. I am a healthy weight, as are many of the women who contacted me to describe their own struggles, their food obsessions, flaws and feelings of being just “too much”. This is despite these women having made significant real-world achievements: a PhD in astrophysics, two beautiful children, a successful career, a loving partner. This is despite, for many of them, being slim. Slimmer than me. 

There are undoubtedly those who will say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, “skinny bitches” feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise with that viewpoint. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me. “What’s your problem?” I think. “I would love to be that thin.”

I know I have been socialised to compete with other women – to size them up, to envy those who are slimmer – but I believe their suffering is as valid as mine, and that body image problems can manifest themselves even when, from the outside, you’re seen to embody the media-approved feminine ideal.

Yes. It's weight-think - and not some kind of ambient request to vary our shirt color - is the extra-added pressure on women in our society, holding us back from greatness, or just optimal enjoyment of our lives.

As for what to do about it, there are two possible ways to go. One is to raise awareness of the sheer ubiquity of this issue, which - and this is what Cosslett keeps hinting at - is wrongly assumed to impact only the small percentage of women with full-on eating disorders, or the especially vapid-and-vain. What a little digging reveals is that even the women you'd least expect will, say, get a diet Coke, and then drop other cues that amount to, huh, even she worries about this. Women who come across as serious, and who give back to the community. Women who've never been fat. Women who, by all other markers, don't appear to give a damn about their looks.

If we demolished the myth that women who care about their weight and think about this far, far more than the typical man does are some kind of aberration, perhaps progress would follow. Acknowledge the problem! Stop the dithering about how #notallwomen care about their looks, or the largely irrelevant asides about how some women are naturally thin, as if naturally thin women are somehow immune to a) worrying they'll get fat, or b) wanting to be even thinner than "nature" made them?

The trouble with that route is that it has a way of making the problem worse. Think the supposedly empowering blog posts denouncing thigh gaps, illustrated like so. (There were definitely some years in my 20s when I'd have as good as forgotten women's magazines existed if it weren't for Jezebel inviting its readers to summon outrage about them.) While weight-think hangs out in the back of women's minds, it's not always in the front. Certain triggers - fashion mags, protests about fashion mags, conversations with a friend who's thinner than you are but used to be thinner still and thinks you want to hear about it... - can ramp up the background noise.

So the second option is to suggest tuning out that sort of noise as much as possible. Cancel your subscription to the magazines that make a big deal of it every time they feature a woman with any body fat whatsoever. Hang out a bit less with that friend, or change the subject when she starts on it. Let weight-think fade into the background. It can resurface unexpectedly, even in women who think they've outgrown it. But you absolutely can control how present these triggers are in your life, and, to some extent, in that of your kids. Stop treating weight-think as an essential truth of the female experience, and it'll stop being one!

Awareness-raising and tuning-out, then, can seem mutually exclusive. And maybe to some extent they are. But there's got to be some way to reconcile the two, as they're both critical to getting rid of weight-think once and for all.

Should dieting be secret? UPDATED

Normally, I cheer when I see anyone condemning overshare. So I should have totally agreed with Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's piece about how - because diets fail, because friends and family undermine them, and because no one wants to hear about your cleanse - dieting should be discreet, between-you-and-your-scale behavior. I mean, I don't want to hear about your cleanse. And I even might have wanted to add to this argument - constant diet-talk gives the impression that to be a girl, woman or even just a person in our society means trying to lose weight, no matter where you're starting out.

And yet. While I'm certain on board as far as not wanting daily social-media updates about every high school acquaintance's calories-in, calories-out for the day (so please, high school acquaintances, don't start doing this!), I'm not sure dieting isn't already if anything too much in the closet. Because no one wants to be accused of having an eating disorder (and because we have this odd idea that eating disorders are things one might be accused of, as if they were pinnacles of vanity and not mental illnesses), already-slim women who want to be even thinner will rarely cop to this. Women who are not already slim also may not want to talk about their diets, but this is for a different set of reasons, and for its own set of reasons, my anecdotal evidence is more (not entirely) in the area of women who don't by any estimation need to diet doing so anyway.

But these days, one won't hear about diets. One will instead hear about toxins and lifestyle changes. (What's a "lifestyle change" if not a diet? The difference seems to require a straw-man definition of "diet" that defines "diet" as "crash diet.") Going to the gym to become stronger, not thinner, and oh!, by weird coincidence, this leads to losing four pounds. Eliminating wheat and dairy, not because these are the things that make cake worth eating, but because if you think about it, our bodies weren't really designed to digest either of these things. (They were instead, of course, designed to digest pulverized kale. Every paleolithic household had a Vitamix, every paleolithic cave-community a Juice Press.)

The sense that even if you're thin, you'd look better thinner, hasn't gone away, it's just gone undercover. Women who don't need to lose weight, but want to all the same, know that their friends and family will undermine their efforts. But it's like, these are efforts that should be undermined!

But I'm torn. Maybe all the "health" talk that's really diet talk is better than diet talk. Maybe a certain number of people really do perceive of it as being about health. In which case, fair enough - efforts to eat more vegetables and get off the couch should not be undermined. And my sense is that thin women trying to be thinner, whose friends and family tell them this is unnecessary, are no less convinced that this is just about jealousy than are actually-overweight dieters looking to reach a healthier weight whose friends and family are undermining perfectly reasonable efforts.

UPDATE

Huh! (Posted after this, I might add. Not to accuse of uncredited inspiration, of course, but to make clear which direction any theoretical inspiration might have gone in.)

"That’s not at all chic."

My recent Bloggingheads with Autumn got me in a beauty-bloggy frame of mind, so here goes!

Can women's magazines (broadly defined to include the online-only ones) move beyond diet advice? One complaint I've long had about these publications, including ones I like, such as Refinery29, is that they offer up "health" advice when it's clear between the lines, they're just telling you how to lose weight. Which is an unpleasant distraction if you're reading these publications for the shiny-things coverage. Well! Refinery29 has taken a first step in the right direction, with Kelsey Miller's "The Anti-Diet Project." Miller is, as she herself notes, not thin. Yet there she is in a fashion publication, announcing that she's not going to beat herself up over that. Progress!

Granted, I'm not entirely convinced that "intuitive eating" is possible. Can a lifetime of weight-think be so readily abandoned? What about those who, if they listened to their bodies, would subsist on pasta with olive oil and grated parmesan, croissants and, for variety, chocolate croissants? Yes, it's unnatural that, over the years, I've trained myself to feel off if a day goes by without any green vegetables, but this is artifice I can live with (assuming sufficient olive oil, etc., has coated those greens, and that pasta and cheese are also often involved.) And the number of times I've seen 'this is not a diet but a lifestyle' as the preface to some advice about how to eat less so as to fit into smaller jeans' makes me skeptical as well. But it's something. More power to them for publishing a series that's about the challenges of isolating health concerns from physique ones.

*****

Via that same site, Marisa Meltzer has an interesting essay in Elle about trying to reconcile dieting and being a feminist. I loved this passage:

But there’s also a strain of ambivalence that’s more nebulous and apolitical: the notion that evolved girls simply don’t need to diet. The modern woman, after all, is that highly capable, have-it-all creature to whom career success, confidence, and effortless style—and, oh yeah, the yoga body and the eco-conscious, preservative-free diet—come naturally. She’s too damn smart and balanced to overeat in the first place. If anything, she’s already healthy and getting ever healthier. So juice fasts and Goop cleanses and barre classes? All fine as part of a vague “healthy lifestyle” of “clean eating.” Losing weight for your wedding day? Okay, you get a free pass on that one. But the daily slog of dieting—all that calorie counting and dessert skipping and 
cardio bingeing? That’s not at all chic.

So spot-on.

My impression, though, is that one is treated as a feminist traitor not so much for dieting if actually very overweight, and more for doing that thing so many already-thin women do, where the goal is to be thinner still, or to preempt any possibility - however remote - of gaining a significant amount of weight. Yes, there's the fat-acceptance movement, and the BMI-is-nonsense perma-conversation. But my impression is that when feminist women are, for example, told by their doctors that they'd be healthier if they lost weight, these women's feminist friends are supportive. (I really can't imagine a thin woman chastising a heavy one in this way.) This no doubt varies by friend group, and requisite caveat, I've never been in Meltzer's own situation, but this has, at any rate, been my impression over the years.

The weirdness seems more pronounced among the women who don't plausibly need to lose weight by any standard (health, social stigma, fitting into readily-available clothes, etc.). My sense is, it used to be very much the thing for already-thin women (certainly already-thin Manhattan middle-schoolers circa 1995, from which we can infer about the mothers) to bond over diets, but now, as Meltzer says, it's "not at all chic." Part of it is the cult of effortlessness. But it's also, I suspect, the greater awareness of eating disorders. While there isn't generally an eating disorder involved when a woman who'd be a size six artificially keeps herself a size four, there's this sense that confessing to doing such a thing would invite friends to intervene and suggest she get help. Which, in turn, leads to all the evasive discussions about "health," where everyone kind of knows it's about weight, but would be aghast if that were brought up explicitly.

"Some fashion suits a curvier girl, some doesn't."

Kirstie Clements is the latest fashion-industry honcho to have a public sad about the fact that models are emaciated minors. More on that in a moment.

First, as I've said on many occasions, I believe the 'think of the models' line of thought misses the big picture when it comes to women and weight. Think of the models as underage/unpaid/exploited workers, yes, absolutely. And thinking of their plight and that of ordinary women is anything but mutually exclusive - perhaps everyone stands to benefit if the ideal look isn't 12 and starving. (More on that, too, in a moment.)

But at least when a model tries to remain artificially slim, or worries tremendously about aging, this is because of her career. "Not every model has an eating disorder, but I would suggest that every model is not eating as much as she would like to," writes Clements. Replace "model" with "woman," and what changes? There are so, so many women who would never in a million years be models, often if for no other reason than they're decades past the cutoff age and far shorter than 5'10", obsessing about their food intake, simply because they feel they must, that this is what it is to be a woman. Not because there's any kind of prize for them at the end of it. My sense is that the intense focus on the models themselves comes from this being a more, well, photogenic problem. A normal-looking 38-year-old (or 88-year-old) woman struggling to maintain 130 when she'd be healthier at 150 just doesn't say Fashion, or something. The daintily young-and-tragic are, it seems, the ones even very concerned readers prefer to hear about.

Anyway, Clements's article is part exposé (of what everyone already knew - models may be naturally thin, but not naturally that thin), part damage-control. She doesn't want to accept the blame for the skinny-model problem. She seems to have it in for Anna Wintour, although that bit of the piece feels quite gratuitous and tacked-on. 

One is clearly supposed to read the article as a somber revelation about a serious issue, maybe even the stirrings before a revolution of sorts. But I just can't seem to do so.

For me, the trouble began with this bit: "When I first began dealing with models in the late 1980s we were generally drawing from a pool of local girls, who were naturally willowy and slim, had glowing skin, shiny hair and loads of energy."

I mean, maybe? If this is simply to contrast how it once was with the rise of heroin chic, perhaps. There are more women naturally built like supermodel-era Cindy Crawford than like Anonymous Slavic Waif #302. But a) not everyone with an eating disorder looks all that emaciated, and b) any time you have people getting paid to be "willowy and slim," you can expect artifice contributing to that cause. "Glowing skin" might well mean tanning beds, and good products can make hair shine. Just because the model look is relatively attainable doesn't mean that those who have it (again, all the more so if it's their job) aren't going to dangerous lengths to achieve it. I mean, having lived through the 1990s, I guarantee that the supposedly 'healthy' supermodels in media images contributed to making women and girls plenty insecure about their appearances.

Also, "girls"? Why should models of clothing for adults be "girls"?

And here, though, Clements really lost me: "It cannot be denied that visually, clothes fall better on a slimmer frame, but there is slim, and then there is scary skinny."

Sure it can. Here's how: visually, clothes fall better on a frame the clothing is cut to fit. If designers recognized breasts and hips the way the seem capable of recognizing limbs, we'd be getting somewhere. (An E-cup bra isn't going to "fall" so well on an A-cup woman.) That, or we're looking at a circular argument about thinness being more attractive. I mean, it's been defined as more attractive, so those who are thinner are, at this moment in time, at an advantage. But it's not some kind of essential fact. 

And Clements continues along those lines, as if it's objectively true that chic only works for a certain build:

As a Vogue editor I was of the opinion that we didn't necessarily need to feature size 14-plus models in every issue. It is a fashion magazine; we are showcasing the clothes. I am of the belief that an intelligent reader understands that a model is chosen because she carries clothes well. Some fashion suits a curvier girl, some doesn't. I see no problem with presenting a healthy, toned, Australian size 10 [UK 8-10].

This is already sending us down the wrong road. Once "fashion" and "showcasing the clothes" requires the non-having of curves, that rules out not merely the overweight (who - to be clear - should not be ruled out in the first place), but also the vast majority of thin women. How is it possible to read this without thinking that "healthy" and "toned" are just euphemisms for straight-up-and-down? Is a non-vanity-sizing size 6 (what I take this to mean, in US terms) on a very tall woman the epitome of "healthy" or "toned," or is it more like the extreme edge of that, as in, a few women will be those things at that size, but a lot would be healthier and more toned if a good bit wider?

As long as a typical female build is defined as ruinous to clothes, as long as models must be incredibly tall and a dress size commonly worn by thin women nearly a foot shorter than they are, what changes? Well, what changes is, the "ideal" goes up by about five pounds, two years, with everyone all the more convinced that there's something edgy and exciting about those younger and slimmer than what the mags allow. With everyone all the more convinced that it's desirable to look like a skeletal preadolescent.

Which is, after all, what's driving this. Many women want to look younger and thinner, so even if few women really want to look like starving children, a starving child (in expensive clothes; preferably without the daughter from "All in the Family" asking for donations) brings out whichever insecurities, and thus the credit cards.

Clements apparently doesn't object to the notion that models should remain a very specific and mostly unattainable size, only that the size is as small as it is:

A model who puts on a few kilos can't get into a sample size on a casting and gets reprimanded by her agency. She begins to diet, loses the weight, and is praised by all for how good she looks. But instead of staying at that weight, and trying to maintain it through a sensible diet and exercise, she thinks losing more will make her even more desirable. And no one tells her to stop.

To me, this sounds like utter nonsense. If the desired weight was below the girl/woman's natural set point, there's nothing "sensible" she can do to maintain it. As every adolescent girl on a diet in the history of adolescent girls on diets knows, once you split what you eat from what you feel like eating (plus more vegetables than you might prefer, because health), anything goes. I'm not sure how easy it is to diet down to some artificial point, and then maintain that weight, rather than yoyo-ing all over the place, even if kale and green juices are involved, and caffeine and nicotine avoided. Indeed, one reason some grown women choose not to diet is... vanity. If you're comfortable at a certain weight, struggling to weigh just a bit less may well backfire and cause you to weigh however much more.

And in any case, is it really that much better to idolize the 5'10" and 110 lbs than the 5'10" and 105? It may make it a little bit more likely that the models themselves are in good health (although plenty maintain that size via dangerous artifice), but does it make that much of a difference for ordinary women, who will look nothing like these women (girls) regardless?

In a perverse sense, knowing that the "ideal" is so ridiculously not-gonna-happen, knowing that there are maybe three dozen good reasons why we're not it, before we even get to questions like whether or not we are, in ordinary situations, easy on the eyes, is something of a relief. It's all been Photoshopped, the models are like seven years old, and they're not even allowed pasta. It all just feels so irrelevant.

It's difficult to come away from the piece without wondering if Clements's main objection to the current width of models isn't that maintaining it actually makes them bad models - lacking the energy and other physical attributes (hair-shininess, good skin) needed for the job. That, or I'm far too cynical where this particular issue is concerned.