That extremely thin women weren’t considered beautiful or fashionable, even by the fashion world, until a model named Twiggy became very popular in the 1960s. The majority of women in this country were born after 1950 so they’re too young to know the history of “skinny vs. fat.”

The advent of skinny being sexy hadn’t existed before Twiggy. I know because my nickname in high school was “Broom.” No one thought I was attractive. I think I paid my first date to take me to a high school dance or maybe I blackmailed my brother into doing it.  Everyone thought I was too skinny. Then came Twiggy and she made skinny beautiful. So, without doing a thing I went from being “Broom” and unattractively skinny to an overnight sensation (O.K. That’s an exaggeration but you get my point). With a flip of the advertising industry I could stop being embarrassed and start being cool, which, it turned out wasn’t that much fun anyway.

In the 1950s Marilyn Monroe had the “ideal” body and was considered one of the sexiest women on the planet. Marilyn was a size fourteen. Today she would be considered chubby or even fat.

Here is a history of women and body sizes. Maybe if woman learn to accept themselves, to stop dieting and binging, to stop denying themselves foods they like until they binge on them while swearing silently that they’ll never do it again and learn that women come in all sizes and body types, that the most important things to focus on when it comes to our bodies are health and self-acceptance, we can create a saner and less depressed and anxious female population in our culture. Learning to love yourself in the face of what Madison Avenue wants you to believe about yourself isn’t easy. Women are confronted with faulty advertising every day, almost everywhere they look, and in light of that they determine that they are unattractive, undesirable, too thin, too fat, everything but what they really are and that’s mostly just fine.

www.lilithgallery.com/feminist/anorexia/Anorexic003-EatingDisorders.html