Real Style by Patricia McLaughlin April 2, 2006

 “Myth America: Is how you look as important as you think?”

 Woman A: “Sandra Day O’Connor made such a tremendously important contribution on the Supreme Court!”

Woman B: “Yes, but why did she stop coloring her hair?”

Don’t laugh, you know you’ve heard the equivalent a million times. Marie Curie may have discovered radium, but judging from her pictures, she never figured out how to control her frizzies. Eleanor Roosevelt, looking back on a singularly accomplished career, wished she’d been prettier. Madeleine Albright’s memoir records her long losing battle to lose weight along with her triumphs as secretary of state. Georgia O’Keefe looked wonderful in those early Stieglitz portraits, but she really let herself go later. And so on...

Even now, in supposedly liberated America, no woman is counted truly successful unless—along with unlocking the secrets of the universe, making great art, setting foreign policy, whatever—she looks good while she’s doing it. It wasn’t enough that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels: She also had to be beautiful, while Astaire, basset-faced and half-bald, could get by on charm and talent alone.

Condoleeza Rice hits the trifecta: She has the brains to be secretary of state, the body to wear high fashion, and she plays the piano, too!

Truly, it’s no wonder so many women are nuts, one way or another. Any sane person would be.

And it’s no wonder that many women, like those in Margo Maine’s and Joe Kelly’s new book, The Body Myth, resort to starving themselves, or half-starving themselves, or bingeing and purging, or compulsive exercising.

How many? Nobody knows because, Maine explains, nobody asks. Nobody tracks eating disorders in adult women. Many doctors notice if you’re eating too much and not exercising enoughj, but most don’t bother to ask patients if they’re eating enough, or exercising too much. And if a woman does see her doctor because she’s worried about the unhealthy grip food and thinness have on her soul, she’s likely to be told, as more than one of Maine’s patients has been, how great she looks.

In this culture, thinness is success, and you don’t argue with success.

Besides, we tend to think of anorexia and bulimia as problems of girls, problems they ought to outgrow--if they live long enough. (The National Institutes of Health, Maine points out, estimates anorexia’s mortality rate as 12 times higher than that of any other cause of death among girls aged 15 to 24; it has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses.)

It’s also hard to spot adult eating disorders because the obsession with thinness that underlies them is pervasive. We think it’s normal to be willing to do almost anything to be thin. And that, Maine says, is because we buy in to the “body myth” of her title, the myth that that “our self worth (and our worth to others) is (and ought to be) based on how we look, what we weigh, and what we eat.” 

Assuming that it’s every woman’s duty to look wonderful is already problematic: For one thing, it just isn’t possible for every woman to look wonderful, especially not when you define wonderful as looking like Kate Moss or Reese Witherspoon or Barbie. What makes it worse is our assumption—against considerable evidence—that we ought to be able to control the size and shape of our bodies.

According to Maine, various studies have concluded that anywhere from 40% to 70% of the factors that control body size and shape are genetic. Flip through your family album, she says, and you’re likely to see bodies—your mother’s, your aunt’s, your grandmother’s-- that look like yours, or that look like the body you’ll eventually grow into.

Oh, no, you’re thinking. Don’t tell me I’m going to turn into my grandmother! Hate to break it to you, but it happens.

And anyway, as Maine argues, what sense does it make to “criticize an adult woman because she no longer has the body of a 16- or 20-year-old.”

Think of the time we waste—not to mention the money—trying not to look the way we look. Imagine if all the time and energy invested in trying to lose weight, smooth out wrinkles, tame cellulite, deflate eyebags, etc., could be applied to ending hunger or curing cancer. Or even to something that’s at least fun.

One thing the obsession with looks has going for it is clarity. Life is complicated and confusing. What do you really want? What should you do—about work, relationships, children, etc.? It’s often hard to know; there are a million answers.

But how do you want to look? The ridiculous narrowness of the body ideal our culture promulgates makes the question a no-brainer. There’s no room for doubt. The same thing that makes the current exaggerated body ideal unattainable for 98% of us makes it weirdly compelling. Losing weight, Maine says, becomes “a simple answer to complex dilemmas.” It never hurts to lose a few pounds.

Until, as Maine’s patients discover, it does. 

A century ago, she says, most of the bodies a person saw belonged to other real people, and were all shapes and all sizes. Now each of us lives in a virtual world created by media: We see many more images of bodies than actual ones, and nearly all of the female bodies we see on TV, in movies, in magazines, etc., are virtually identical: relatively young, very slender, perfect. Each of us is, in effect, a solitary ugly duckling surrounded by swans. 

How can the body you see in the mirror not suffer by comparison? 

Every Sunday, RealStyle goes to 100 subscribing newspapers in the United States and Canada (combined circulation: 60 million) from Universal Press Syndicate.

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