The South Pacific Islanders thought Elvis was crazy.
Watching a copy of the movie "Blue Hawaii" that had arrived on their remote island with the mail boat, they couldn't understand why he spent all his time chasing the skinny blonde in the bikini.
"In their eyes, her short, fat friend was a much better catch," laughs Jeffery Sobal, sharing the story of an anthropologist who had been in the movie audience that night. "They were saying, `What's wrong with that Elvis? He's nuts! This other woman is much more attractive.' This is because in their culture, what we consider overweight is considered beautiful."
Sobal is an associate professor and sociologist in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. In addition to cultural and historical attitudes toward body weight, he studies its links to socioeconomic status, marital status and satisfaction, dating preferences, and other aspects of our lives. He has discovered in most cases a dual causality in which our body weight shapes our lives and our lives shape our body weight.
"Basically, you are what you weigh and you weigh what you are," he says. The attitudes of many cultures toward obesity has changed dramatically over the years. Through the nineteenth century, almost all societies equated heaviness with elevated social status. A wide girth was seen as a sign of prosperity and health, while a skinny frame meant that a person was too poor to afford enough to eat.
During the twentieth century, however, these attitudes have reversed in most developed countries. The most notable about-face has been among upper-class women. "You can never be too rich or too thin," declared the Duchess of Windsor in the 1930s, setting the standard for succeeding generations of socialites. Fifty years later, Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities satirized the modern female obsession with thinness by referring to upper-crust Manhattan matrons as "social x-rays," possessing bodies so emaciated "you can see lamplight through their bones." Our ceaseless pursuit of the "perfect" body has spawned a $33 billion-a-year weight loss industry. It also has created an epidemic of eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia among young women.
In the meantime, in less-developed countries where access to food is frequently still uncertain, fatness continues to be a sign of prestige. Sobal says that in many Pacific societies, fatness is very highly valued. In some African cultures, young women are isolated in "fattening huts" where they are fed high quantities of rich foods in the hopes of landing a prestigious mate.
"It's an expensive proposition for their families," says Sobal. "But it's done in the hope that their daughters will marry up in their society. Status, prestige, and kinship networks are considered more valuable than any dowry." He adds that although the young women aren't what we would consider greatly obese, they're probably as fat as they can get in their culture. "They just don't have the supplies of junk foods, fast foods, and convenience foods that we do," he laughs.
But developing countries aren't the only ones that have such practices. Sobal is quick to point out that in the United States and many other developed countries, young women frequent the equivalent of "thinning huts."
"We send them off to spas, weight loss camps, or diet organizations," he notes. "So in both cases societies are putting women into the body mold they consider attractive. This is because most cultures are more likely to treat women than men as objects that will be judged on their appearance."
In his studies of cultural attitudes toward obesity, Sobal has found that as thinness has become desirable, attitudes toward overweight people have gone through several changes. Through the 1930s and 1940s, as the cultural model for beauty increasingly emphasized thinness, the rejection of fatness became quite powerful. Overweight people were seen as slothful and morally bad.
Beginning in the 1950s, obesity shifted to being considered a condition best dealt with through medical intervention. The "medicalization" of fatness spawned new treatments such as intestinal bypass surgery and stomach stapling. Drugs to increase energy expenditure or reduce appetite were prescribed, and a new generation of over-the-counter weight loss products hit the market. Psychiatry and behavior modification techniques were also applied as treatments.
Even the language changed to reflect the new perspective. Rather than being fat, porky, or chubby, obese people were considered "pinguescent" or suffering from "adiposity." Instead of engaging in gluttonous or gorging behavior, they were considered victims of "acoria" and "polyphagia." Low activity levels were no longer termed sloth or laziness but "lethargy" or symptomatic of "chronic fatigue syndrome."
Not surprisingly, one of the strongest forces behind this new movement was the insurance industry. Recognizing the health risks of obesity, insurance companies encouraged thinness. At the same time, they managed to avoid covering most of the medical costs.
"They've really had it both ways," says Sobal. "They were leaders in the push toward thinness and created the first widely used weight and height tables right after the turn of the century. They helped medicalize fatness as a health condition, but they have not been willing to reimburse patients for most weight loss therapies. They may pay in extreme situations for some surgical procedures, but those patients really have to jump through administrative hoops."
The most recent phase in the social battleground over obesity has occurred just in the last few years. The size acceptance movement says it's okay to be big and is sending its message through organizations like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, and the Ithaca-based Diet/Weight Liberation Project. "Size activists" have adopted many of the strategies of other civil rights movements to disassociate obesity from the medical profession and to confront the discrimination that overweight people frequently encounter.
Although the concept of size acceptance is growing, it has a hard road ahead to reverse the negative stereotyping that still often accompanies obesity. Sobal points out that overweight people are discriminated against in employment, in educational opportunities, and even in housing. He describes one study that looked at discrimination against obese renters.
"The researchers sent various people to look at rental units. Some were average size, and others were very large. The large people would go to the rental office and be told there were no units available. Shortly after, a thin person would arrive and be told, `Oh, sure. We have a nice two-bedroom unit on the third floor.' There was a statistically significant difference in the way people were treated."
The effects of such discrimination are what leads Sobal to his "you are what you weigh and you weigh what you are" synopsis of the relationship between body size and socioeconomic status. He points out that being denied access to opportunities in society suppresses the ability to become educated and get good jobs and promotions. In turn, this relegates many obese people to lower-paying jobs, a situation confirmed by an established correlation between low income and obesity.
"Recent studies show that people in higher socioeconomic groups diet more, exercise more, and pay more attention to nutrition," he says. "They have the income, the time, and the values to stay thin."
Body weight influences more than just socioeconomic status. It also affects dating habits and opportunities for marriage but not necessarily satisfaction in marriage. It begins with dating. Sobal's study of the attitudes of high school students toward overweight members of the opposite sex revealed, particularly in young men, a reluctance to establish a relationship with someone who is fat.
The study was designed to measure the students' comfort in engaging in five progressively more serious activities-studying, having lunch, seeing a movie, attending a party, and steady dating-with overweight and very overweight partners. The comfort level for each activity from studying through steady dating declined for both sexes and was lower for very overweight than for overweight partners. Young women, however, were less bothered than young men. More than 80 percent of men said they would not regularly date a very overweight girl.
Eating disorders are also a turnoff for teens. Sobal recently conducted a study of the attitudes of college students toward having a relationship with someone with anorexia or bulimia. The results indicated that although they wouldn't be as put off by an anorectic or bulimic as they would be by an overweight person, they would still find the situation difficult.
One interesting finding was that although female students seemed to have better knowledge and understanding of eating disorders, they were almost as reluctant as the men in the study to have a relationship with someone who was experiencing a problem. Although eating disorders in men are rare-about 10 women have a problem for every man-they are becoming more prevalent. Again, says Sobal, the underlying factor is our culture's portrayal of the ideal body.
"Men are being judged on their thinness much more than they used to be. Some of this results from the media. They hold up as cultural ideals males with genetically rare body shapes and virtually no body fat. Studies are showing that boys as young as 9 and 10 are being affected by this."
Since body type affects dating preferences, it's no surprise that it affects marriage opportunities as well. Many studies have shown that obese people have more difficulty attracting a marriage partner, marry later, marry less desirable partners, and marry heavier partners. Once married, people tend to put on weight, increasing their chances of becoming obese. In most cases, both husband and wife tend to put on weight together, a pattern researchers call "marital synchrony." Overall, married men in particular are heavier than unmarried people.
The obesity of one or both partners can affect marital satisfaction. Conflict can arise over weight gain, and partners can experience a decline in romantic interest. Attempts to lose weight can also cause problems. Family dynamics can be interrupted. Men whose wives lose weight may feel threatened if they perceive their wives as becoming attractive to other men. Some studies have found that the weight loss of a spouse can lead to divorce. Others have discovered attempts by family members to sabotage the weight loss attempts of an individual in an effort to maintain the status quo.
In his own analysis of obesity and marital satisfaction, however, Sobal discovered less unhappiness than is suggested by other studies. Very few obese men or women reported being unhappy with their marriages or suffering significant marital problems. Those who were unhappy tended to be obese men or men who had gained weight after the marriage. Men who lost weight reported fewer marital problems. Interestingly, obese women and women who gained weight in their marriages were less likely to be unhappy than women who lost weight.
"This may have to do with reduced expectations from their marriages among obese women," says Sobal. "They may recognize their decreased value in the marriage market in a society that stigmatizes obesity. Therefore, they are more likely to be satisfied with their current marital condition. That this is true for women but not for men shows that women are more severely stigmatized for their obesity than men are."
Because it is so deeply embedded in current society, there's little hope that the stigmatization of obesity will end anytime soon. To help obese people battle the effects of stigmatization, Sobal has developed a model that includes four coping strategies:
•Recognition-the awareness that obesity is stigmatized and the gathering of information and understanding about the stigma. • Readiness-anticipating and preparing for stigmatizing acts. • Reaction-short- and long-term coping with stigmatizing acts. • Repair-recovery from problems caused by stigmatizing acts, including seeking restitution and compensation and changing the stigmatizing actions and values of others.
"These strategies can be used by others in addition to obese people," says Sobal. "They can be used by AIDS victims and others who are looked upon negatively by society. Anytime you experience hassles, you can draw upon these strategies as resources to help you cope."