Plus Sized Wars claimed that the fashion industry has sold women a “super skinny ideal that most of us will never achieve”. Few would argue with this. We are confronted with frequent news reports of anorexia deaths, surveys showing body image dissatisfaction among increasingly young children, and tragic stories such as the recent death of 21-year-old Eloise Parry from diet pills containing industrial chemicals.
Whether changes like these result in a decline in body image dissatisfaction and eating disorders depends on whether these problems are really caused by the fashion industry and the media. One obvious question is why is thin deemed ideal?
Male pursuit and female competition
As an evolutionary psychologist, I consider much older causes of these preferences and how they interact with modern environments. Humans have evolved preferences for mates who will help them to pass on their genes. The shape and size of women’s bodies provide signals about their health and fertility, and therefore their ability to reproduce successfully.A narrow waist in relation to the hips (an hourglass shape) and a relatively slender body are typically preferred by men. These two features, measured by the waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index, indicate better health and greater fertility. In the ancestral environment, these features would have been characteristic of younger (and therefore more fertile) women who were not already pregnant. Some authors have suggested that men have evolved to be particularly sensitive to thickening of the waist, which may indicate reduced fertility as a result of pregnancy or increasing age
Psychiatrist Riadh Abed has suggested that this once adaptive mechanism of female competition has spiralled out of control in industrialised societies. This may be due to increased competition for mates as a result of factors such as less stable long-term relationships and divorce, and greater numbers of older women maintaining a youthful body shape by using contraception to delay reproduction, and investing in modern methods of appearance enhancement. Further social pressure to be thin may also arise from scientific knowledge about the relationship between obesity and various aspects of ill health such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Abed has argued that at its most extreme, the female competition that underlies the pursuit of thinness in our society may result in eating disorders. These competitive mechanisms were useful to our ancestors, who lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, but in more competitive modern environments their effects are amplified.
Ultimately the Western fashion industry’s obsession with thinness may reflect, rather than cause, intense competition for thinness. If women do believe that thin is attractive, it seems unlikely that plus-size models will sell clothes; hence the challenges campaigners have faced in getting the fashion industry to change. However, while the claim that the fashion industry is to blame for obsession with thinness may be overstated, if the role models for young women are predominantly extremely thin, this will lead to a distorted perception of the likely physical attributes of competitors for mates, and may exacerbate the pursuit of thinness.
Does this mean that plus-size role models are a good thing? Pop star Jamelia’s controversial suggestion that overweight women should not be able to buy clothes on the high street is not helpful.
Fat shaming does not work. It is important that young people have role models who reflect the diversity of human beauty and not just an unrealistically thin ideal. However, we should not forget the obesity crisis facing our society and the extremely harmful consequences of being very overweight. In discouraging the pursuit of extreme thinness, we should also be mindful of the dangers of promoting obesity.