The Beauty Myth

If it seems odd that an anxiety, such as one about breast shape, for example, can arise and flourish among millions of women at once, think about how powerful sexual imagery is.

There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.

dieting itself may be ‘a sufficient condition for the development of anorexia nervosa or bulimia.’

Authoritative evidence is mounting that eating diseases are

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caused mainly by dieting.

The psychological terror of hunger is cross-cultural: Orphans adopted from poor countries cannot control their compulsion to smuggle and hide food, sometimes even after living for years in a secure environment.

The psychological effects of self-inflicted semistarvation are identical to those of involuntary semistarvation. By 1980 more and more researchers were acknowledging the considerable emotional and physical consequences of chronic dieting, including “symptoms such as irritability, poor concentration, anxiety, depression, apathy, lability of mood, fatigue and social isolation.”

During the great famine that began in May 1940 during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the Dutch authorities maintained rations at between 600 and 1,600 calories a day, or what they characterized as the level of semistarvation. The worst sufferers were defined as starving when they had lost 25 percent of their body weight, and were given precious supplements. Pho-

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tos taken of clothed starving Dutch women are striking for how preternaturally modern they look.

“After losing approximately 25% of their original body weight, pervasive effects of semistarvation were seen.”

In a classic study done at the University of Minnesota, thirty-six volunteers were placed on an extended low-calorie diet and “the psychological, behavioral and physical effects were carefully documented.”

In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, the very poorest women eat 1,400 calories a day, or 600 more than a Western woman on the Hilton Head Diet. “Quite simply,” writes Seid, dieters “are reacting the way victims of semi-starvation react…semi-starvation, even if caused by self-imposed diets, produces startlingly similar effects on all human beings.”