Unbearable Weight By Susan Bordo Summary

Susan Bordo examines Western culture as it relates to the body, specifically the slender body in this chapter of her book, Unbearable Weight. Diets have been important since the Ancient Greek and Middle Ages, where the Greeks mastered their “public” selves by regulating “food intake… as a road to self-mastery” and the Christians fasted for their “inner” selves to achieve “spiritual purification and domination of the flesh” (page 185). By the nineteenth century, diet became associated with the aesthetics of the physical body and “fat, not appetite or desire, became the declared enemy” (page 185). The ideal body has no excess “bulge, fat, or flab” (page 189); this is a simply impossible standard for women to achieve due to their given biological