But it’s even bigger than that. Here’s how deep it goes:
Amelia conducts a children’s choir, and she has to teach her kids to breathe. At ten, eight, even six years old, they already believe that bellies are supposed to be flat and hard, and so they hold their stomachs in. You can’t breathe deeply, all the way, without relaxing your abdomen, and you can’t sing if you can’t breathe. So Amelia has to teach children to breathe. Amelia’s young singers show that the BIC doesn’t just teach us to ignore our needs for food and love; it doesn’t even want us to breathe. Not all the way.
Relax your belly. It’s supposed to be round. The Bikini Industrial Complex has been gaslighting you.
We’re not saying the people or companies that constitute the Bikini Industrial Complex are out to get you. Frankly, we don’t think they’re smart enough to have created this screwed-up system on purpose. But we’re far from the first to recognize there’s money to be made by establishing and enforcing impossible standards by which we’re told to measure ourselves.
Stigma Is the Health Hazard
What is the cost of the Bikini Industrial Complex’s success?
There is, of course, the financial cost: the aforementioned hundred-billion-dollar global industry thrives on our body dissatisfaction, and the less effective it is at making our bodies “fit,” the more money it makes, as we try product after product, trend after trend.
And there is opportunity cost: With the time and money we spend on worrying about the shape of our bodies and attempting to make them “fit,” what else might we accomplish? Along with that comes “self-regulatory fatigue”; if you’re using up decision-making and attention-focusing cognitive resources on choices about food, clothes, exercise, makeup, body hair, “toxins,” and fretting about your body’s failures, what are you too exhausted to care about, that you would otherwise prioritize?
There’s also the chronic, low-level stress—like the rats with tilted cages and flashing lights—of navigating an environment filled with images of the ideal and people who believe in it. Even if you don’t buy in, they’ll be there to say, “How nice for you that you don’t care,” or “No, don’t give up on yourself!” or “Aren’t you worried about your health? What about your (my) insurance premiums?” What they’re really saying is, “How dare you? If I have to follow the rules, then so do you. Get back in line.” As body activist Jes Baker says, “When a fat chick who hasn’t done the work, who hasn’t tried to fix her body, who doesn’t have any interest in the gospel we so zealously believe in, stands up and says: I’M HAPPY!…we freak the fuck out. Because: that bitch just broke the rules. She just cut in front of us in line. She just unwittingly ripped us off. And she essentially made our lifetime of work totally meaningless.”19
That “freak-out” leads to another cost: the discrimination. People of size are paid less at work, experience more bullying at school—not just from other kids, but from teachers—and have their symptoms dismissed or ignored by doctors, and thus go longer without appropriate diagnosis and treatment when they have actual medical problems.20
Then there is the cost in human health and life: Dieting—especially “yo-yo dieting,” repeatedly gaining and losing weight—ultimately causes changes in brain functioning that increase insulin and leptin resistance (causing weight gain, which leads to dieting, and so on), which leads to actual disease. And eating disorders have the highest mortality of any mental illness—higher even than depression—killing 250,000 people a year.21 The thin ideal makes us sick. And it kills some of us.
And although a rising proportion of men struggle with body dysmorphia, and the cultural pressures around men’s bodies are intensifying (“dad bod” notwithstanding), this remains a distinctly gendered issue.22 It is women’s time, money, mental energy, opportunity, health, and lives that are being drained away in the endless pursuit of a “better” body, and it starts as soon as we “gender” a child’s toys. Very young girls’ exposure to dolls with unrealistic body types increases their desire to be thin.23 This despite the fact that the Lancet meta-analysis found that the health risk associated with low or high BMI was “far greater”—quoting the researchers—for men than for women. And yet who gets more flak from their culture and even, yes, from their doctors about their weight? Women, of course—twice as much as men.24 Why? Because we’re the “human givers”; we’re the ones with a moral obligation to be pretty—that is, to conform to the aspirational ideal.
It gets worse. The body ideal is built into the physical infrastructure of society, from the size and shape of airplane seats to the weight-bearing capacity of medical tables. One friend of ours couldn’t get a mammogram because the machine at the doctor’s office didn’t hold over 250 pounds—outrageously inexcusable, when 5 to 10 percent of American women over the age of forty weigh more than 250 pounds.25
This grotesque discrimination means that it is dangerous to be a fat person in the world—not because of the fat, but because of the daily discrimination, exclusion, and stigmatization.
Reasonable people may disagree about the specific relationship between weight and health. But there is no reasonable case to be made, no evidence at all, that stigma is anything but actively harmful. Which is why…
It Would Be Nice to Be Thin
Owen Elliot, daughter of Cass Elliot of the band the Mamas and the Papas, has said of her mother, “She accepted who she was, a sexy woman who was never short of boyfriends, but I think if she could have been thinner, she would have. I’m overweight right now and I’m still beautiful. But God, it would be nice to be thin and I think that’s where she was at, too.”26
That fundamental ambivalence between accepting your body and changing your body is both common and rational. Despite the accumulating evidence that people of different shapes and sizes can be healthy, the stigma around body shape pervades every domain of our lives, and the prejudice, bias, false beliefs, and stigma against fat and fat people can literally kill you.27 And this form of discrimination is not just legal but normalized, rationalized, by the incorrect idea that fat is a disease.
So yes indeed, it would be nice to be thin, because it would privilege us with the gift of being treated like actual people, no matter what. Thin privilege is as real as privilege associated with race, gender, and class. Women of color would face less adversity if they were white. Trans folks would face less adversity if they were cisgender. People on the autism spectrum would face less adversity if they were neurotypical. And, yes, fat people would face less adversity if they were thin. And none of those folks chose to be who they are. They can only choose to embrace who they are and try to tolerate living in a world that doesn’t tolerate them.