***In the magazine show "20/20," several ten-year-old boys were shown some photos of fashion models. The models were pencil-thin. Yet the pose was such that a small bulge of hip was forced, through the action of the body, into protuberance--as is natural, unavoidable on any but the most skeletal or the most tautly developed bodies. We bend over, we sit down, and the flesh coalesces in spots. These young boys, pointing to the hips, disgustedly pronounced the models to be "fat." Watching the show, I was appalled at the boys' reaction. Yet I could not deny that I had also been surprised at my own current perceptions while re-viewing female bodies in movies from the 1970s; what once appeared slender and fit now seemed loose and flabby. (186) ***
As you can see from Bordo's description, increasingly an emphasis has been placed on not just slenderness but also tautness. Even presumably zaftig women of _Baywatch_, etc. that Paul mentions display bodies far sharply defined & toned than the bodies of Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, etc., not to mention female figures portrayed by Baroque painters such as Caravaggio (see his "Martha and Mary Magdalene" [circa 1595] at http://metalab.unc.edu/cjackson/caravagg/p-carava13.htm ), for instance. I'm sure Buffy is so very fun, but some of you guys here may want to go check out old movies + Old Masters in museums once in a while, just to get a sense of historical change written on bodies. Or take Feminism 101 (though I suppose some of you _guys_ loathe to do so, well, because feminism has a theory of sexism [including sexism in representation] and other sorts of reductive analytical tools that might do violence to male viewers' subjective experiences of female bodies on display--ah, what a killjoy!).
Beyond the question of changing standards of slenderness and fit bodies, Bordo offers a larger narrative of cultural change and its implications:
***In the late Victorian era, arguably for the first time in the West, those who could afford to eat well began systematically to deny themselves food in pursuit of an aesthetic ideal. Certainly, other cultures have dieted. Aristocratic Greek culture made a science of the regulation of food intakes, as a road to self-mastery and the practice of moderation in all things. Fasting, aimed at spiritual purification and domination of the flesh, was an important part of the repertoire of Christian practice in the Middle Ages. These forms of diet can clearly be viewed as instruments for the development of a "self"--whether an "inner" self, for the Christians, or a public self, for the Greeks--constructed as an arena in which the deepest possibilities for human excellence may be realized. Rituals of fasting and asceticism were therefore reserved for the select few, aristocratic or priestly, who were deemed capable of achieving such excellence of spirit. In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, the practices of body management begin to be middle-class preoccupations, and concern with diet becomes attached to the pursuit of an idealized physical weight or shape; it becomes a project in service of body rather than soul. Fat, not appetite or desire, became the declared enemy, and people began to measure their dietary achievements by the numbers on the scale rather than by the level of their mastery of impulse and excess. The bourgeois "tyranny of slenderness" (as Kim Chernin has called it) had begun its ascendancy (particularly over women), and with it the development of numerous technologies--diet, exercise, and, later on, chemicals and surgery--aimed at a purely physical transformation.
Today, we have become acutely aware of the massive and multifaceted nature of such technologies and the industries built around them. To the degree that a popular critical consciousness exists, however, it has been focused largely (and not surprisingly) on what has been viewed as pathological or extreme--on the unfortunate minority who become "obsessed" or go "too far." Television talk shows feature tales of disasters caused by stomach stapling, gastric bubbles, gastrointestinal bypass operations, liquid diets, compulsive exercising. Magazines warn of the dangers of fat-reduction surgery and liposuction. Books and articles about bulimia and anorexia nervosa proliferate. The portrayal of eating disorders by the popular media is often lurid; audiences gasp at pictures of skeletal bodies or at item-by-item descriptions of the mounds of food eaten during an average binge. Such presentations create a "side show" relationship between the ("normal") audience and those on view ("the freaks"). To the degree that the audience may nonetheless recognize themselves in the behavior or reported experiences of those on stage, they confront themselves as "pathological" or outside the norm.
Of course, many of these behaviors _are_ outside the norm, if only because of the financial resources they require. But preoccupation with fat, diet, and slenderness are not abnormal. Indeed, such preoccupation may function as one of the most powerful normalizing mechanisms of our century, insuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining "docile bodies" sensitive to any departure from social norms and habituated to self-improvement and self-transformation in the service of those norms. Seen in this light, the focus on "pathology," disorder, accident, unexpected disaster, and bizarre behavior obscures the normalizing function of the technologies of diet and body management. For women, who are subject to such controls more profoundly and, historically, more ubiquitously than men, the focus on "pathology" (unless embedded in a political analysis) diverts recognition from a central means of the reproduction of gender (185-6)***
Yoshie