【美国电台节目】“白幼瘦”审美怎么来的？

TRANSCRIPT

It's New Year's - a big time for weightloss resolutions, gym membership deals and pressure all around to lose thatso-called holiday weight. So I have an uncomfortable question for you - are youtruly happy with your body? The odds are, probably not. As a country, we spend$33 billion on diet products annually. And every year, an estimated 45 millionAmericans go on a diet. I have. And if you're listening to this episode, youlikely have, too. So follow-up question - why do we want to change our bodies? Thereare a million different personal ways to answer this question - a New Year'sresolution, baby weight, bullying, medical issues, sex life, high schoolreunion, your gym buddy, your bathing suit, your family, your partner, socialmedia. But the real culprit, the puppet master pulling at every single one ofthese personal strings, is diet culture -

One of the wildestparts about this picture - diets don't work for an overwhelming majority ofpeople.

It's literally ascam built to fail, and that's what keeps people invested.

The other thing - dietculture can be sneaky and go by lots of different names. These days, it's oftendisguised as wellness or a healthy lifestyle or getting strong.

Let's hear that again - fitness and health are not the same, andfatness does not necessarily equate to being unhealthy. That might feel hard tobelieve, but stick around. Our culturally accepted health and beauty standardsare actually a mixture of one part flawed science and two parts fatphobiarooted in racism, oppression and the maintenance of social hierarchy. Theresulting cocktail is our diet culture

So how do we untangle ourselves from all of this? There's plentyyou and I can do today, right now, regardless of age or gender or body type, tostart freeing ourselves from this dangerous mindset.

OK. The first string we needto cut - language. You don't have to look too hard to find diet culture in thethings we say to each other or to ourselves.

First one - I ate waytoo much. I'm never eating again.

Diet culture.

I have to work outtoday. I took two days off last week.

Diet culture.

Wow, you look great.Did you lose weight?

Diet culture. .  

Takeaway two - healthand beauty are not absolutes. Fat phobia is harmful fiction. . Let's clarify something.

You are not afraid ofbeing fat. You are afraid of being treated like a fat person.

Author and activistTovar speaks from personal experience. Growing up as a fat person, sheexperienced constant verbal and emotional fat-phobic abuse in school.

I internalized theshame and the belief that it was my fault. And the way that I dealt with thatwas to try to become a thin person. I dieted. I starved. I obsessivelyexercised for about 20 years.

But then, in doingresearch for grad school, Tovar found a community of fat activists, a groupadvocating for the rights and dignity of fat people.

And they basicallytold me, you know, you have the right to exist exactly as you are. You don'thave to change. Like, you have the right to be fat.

The right to be fat -let's sit with that a second.

what we know is that what we think of asbeautiful is very, very impacted by socialization.

Tovar points to thehundreds of years-long practice of foot binding in China and to modern-daycommunities in Mauritania, in which fatness is considered the height of beauty.So much so, parents hire fattening consultants and girls take pills that areused to make livestock bigger.

The takeaway for mewas that no matter what the beauty standard is, women will die to achieve it ina culture where they are taught that their worth and their access to love andhumanity is based on that beauty.

So that need to work 100 crunches intoyour morning routine or that guilt you feel when you pick the chocolate shakeover the kale smoothie - it's probably not about health. It's about Americatelling you again and again that if you want to fit in, you have to be thin. 

And let's rememberhere, the face of diet culture has changed over the years. There are a lot ofvoices out there that are like, sure, maybe we used to be all about beingskinny-minis, but look how far we've come - curves are in, slim thick is queen,Kim K.

But the thing thatwe have to keep in mind is that these kinds of figures - first of all, theyrely on a person still managing their weight. I don't think that anyone assumesthat anyone in the Kardashian clan isn't going to the utmost extremes to keepthemselves in the form that they are in - you know, waist trainers, flat tummytees, surgeries, implants, everything.

Are you investing indiet culture when you think you're aiming for health? Our contouring makeup,our shapewear, booty-building workouts - all of these beauty tools might feelvalue-neutral or even positive, especially when they're promoted by nonwhitebodies. But again, says Tovar...

Even if we see peoplein our culture who are held up as ideals of beauty, who might be people ofcolor, that standard is fundamentally a white, masculine standard.