Stearns Fat History Summary

Review of Stearns' Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West

Wow, I mean, your sister, she's so fat that when she wears a yellow raincoat, people shout out, "Taxi!" Your brother, gosh, he's so fat that his driver's license says, "Picture continued on the other side!" About your mother, well, she's so fat that when she walks in front of the television, you miss out on three commercials! I'm tellin' ya! Fat! Those humorous one-liners are just a few of the many out there. In the United States today, we are obviously obsessed with weight, but how did this cultural craze with heaviness start? When and why, even? Are we the only ones? Peter N. Stearns is a Carnegie Mellon history professor and dean, and in his book Fat History:
In the decade just before 1900, however, as we became more sedentary, fashion changed, and dress sizes became standardized, greater attention was drawn toward the more oddly shaped bodies, possibly creating a new public concern for body weight, especially for women. Fat-controlling devices like "reducing corsets", dieting gimmicks such as Kissiengen water, and other advertisements for products to help against weight also began to spread during this time period. Morality even came into play, as obese individuals were seen to not only be lazy and weak but also on their way toward what one may call "fat hell". Responding more to this new public worry rather than to the health risks involved, physicians were suddenly forced to address this growing interest in weight control. All of these factors helped contribute to and intensify the popular trend in the United States toward our strict standards of slenderness and indications of weakness in obese individuals. Stearns reports that the past century in France with regard to weight-consciousness is very similar to that of the United States; French weight-control moved right along in analogous stages. There is one exception, though. Instead of interpreting the obese as morally defective
What frustrated me were his chapters covering the 1920s-1990s in the United States, though. Stearns would like to assert that women have clearly been subjected to more weight concern this past century, but he then goes on to tell the reader that men have recently (as of the 1990s) become equal victims of the same regulation, quoting the director of an eating disorders program in St. Louis on page 103: "Now they're subjected to the same concerns about body image that have plagued women for years." I, however, would disagree. I would like to argue that, even in more recent advertisements, one actually sees very little "progress" in images geared toward upsetting such normative gender inequalities; without it being forcefully stated, advertisements today are still geared toward the female viewer. Men are still not subjected to the same restraints concerning the body and dieting as women are. There are many socially and culturally embedded standards of women's relations to food. Advertising has had a huge effect on how we see such in our society. Stearns states on page seventy-three that:
"American women may have had more weight problems than men in the twentieth century in certain measurable respects, which would help explain why their need for restraint