Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Don't touch this thread, you'll get it all fat...

Thanks for starting the topic, Haus...I was actually planning to initiate a thread on body image and fatness.

Forget going back to "tribal history" - portiliness was a sign of financial success less than a century ago...I can remember seeing those catalogue ads in the old Sears-Roebuck thingys for patent medicines guanranteed to make your children "fat as pigs." In a good way. The Victorian ideal for "healthy" men was paunchy and barrel-chested.

And there are still a lot of regions where largeness...relatively overweight rather than under...is considered attractive (in both genders), or at least a good thing. India in a vague fashion comes to mind for more rounded/curvey people, but South India, especially Karnataka, is definitely an exception to the standard Western body aesthetic. Samoa, too, as well as many other Polynesian cultures still consider a certain type of fatness attractive, although the specifics of the aesthetic escape me.

My personal theory on American attitudes towards fatness, and specifically obesity, are strongly codified with modern stereotypes of region and social class...although I wonder if such a codification would carry across racial tropes.... Anyway, my point would be almost a Mintzian-by-way-of-Marx analysis of how food consumption and resulting body image signifies identity.
First of all, fatness equals nonactivity in many people's eyes...not simply laziness, but mental inactivity, indolence, apathy. At the same time, it marks lack of thrift; over-consumption. In many ways, it's like an extension of the Protestant Ethic to the body image.

The easiest target of the mapping is the poor, but most particularly the Southern rural poor that are typically marked "welfare moms" and "white trash," a group also consistently stigmatized as stupid, indolent, etc. There is a leap to associate mental and physical inactivity, thus reinforcing an image of an irredeemable subset of the population. The Jerry-Springer watch-the-freakshow aspect of this is pretty strong, not to mention the whole self-esteem by contrast thing. Of course, all of this judgement tends to overlook the economic prefactors to consumption that leads to obesity, that obesity is more likely amongst the poor given the staple diet that they find affordable (high-starch, high sugar...what Sidney Mintz described aptly as "proletarian hunger killers"). In the realm of the "white collar" one finds specific professions associated with fatness, but by extension also with "fat" mental traits...a certain kind of not-achieving personality.

Leanness and fitness are signs of success, by contrast...the ability to have time to do exercise is a marker of financial success as measured by opportunity for leisure activity, as well as possession of the intelligence to care about physical health (because ego maintenance is one of the sacred virtues of the modern age).