Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

by Emily Nagoski

WHY THINNESS? As Naomi Wolf puts it, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.” Thin bodies are the bodies of women who behave themselves. Like so many toxic norms of the twenty-first century, the thin ideal is a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Before that, a softer, rounder, plumper female was the beauty standard, because it was only the rich women who could afford the luxurious food and freedom from manual labor that allowed them to accumulate the abundant curves of the women in Rubens’s paintings. But in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to be able to afford a wife who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol, an advertisement of wealth, for a man to have a wife who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. “Delicate” and “fragile” became feminine virtues. This is in contradiction of everything evolution would have a woman be: robust, strong, able healthfully to conceive, gestate, birth, breastfeed, and carry multiple offspring. So that, friends, is where the thin ideal originates—in the basic assumption that a woman is a man’s property, his status symbol. Because: patriarchy. (Ugh.)