Excerpt:
As The Handbook Of Obesity Studies notes, "In heterogeneous and affluent societies such as the United States, there is a strong inverse correlation of social class and obesity, particularly for females." In other words, on average, poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected on to some other distinguishing characteristic.
In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into Wal-Mart... ah, that is something else again.
Richard's post about John and John and Wendy's got me going. I began to remember Susan Faludi's words from her book "Backlash" from years back, as well as another book on the Dutch Golden Era -- the title escapes me for the moment. Campos says more ...
Thinness has a metaphorical significance in America today. Americans - and especially American elites - value thinness for precisely the same reason someone suffering from anorexia nervosa does: because not eating means not giving in to desire. Strangely, what the American elites consider most desirable is a body whose appearance signals a triumph of the will over desire itself. Thus, bodily virtue is not so much indicated by thinness per se, but rather by an achieved thinness. Ultimately the war on fat is both a cause and a consequence of the transformation of the Protestant work ethic into the American diet ethic.
It's a lengthy piece, but a worthy read.
