The Culture
   It is certain that anyone living within our current society feels the effects of the culture's empasis on thinness and beauty. This empasis resonates in particular throughout the female portion of the poplulation. Hornbacher mentions and questions the culture throughout her memoir. Thinness in our cluture is strongly correlated to perfection, control, success, and power. A particularly important quote I found within her book about her feelings of what she associated thinness with:

                    "I beleive that my power-it was a general sort of idea-would be incrementally
                increased with each pound lost. There is plenty of research to suggest that I was
                not alone in this belief. Studies of girls show that they associate thinness with
                both academic and social success of any sort. I saw it as the ticket out of the
                torrent of untoward thoughts in my head, out of the self that was simply not good
                enough.(85)"

    Many people channel the desire and drive to be thin, in other words closer to perfection, into extreme forms of dieting edging closer and closer to starving themselves. Hornbacher details her 14 years of eating disordered living, and the drive, the need to attain acceptability in her eyes, her parents eyes, and society's general eye.
 
 

Women Within a Beauty Obsessed Culture

`   Women, throughout time, have been forced by society to adhere to certain standards of beauty.  The current standards of ideal beauty are harsher and less easily attainable than ever before. These harsh ideals have an overwhelming negative effect on females, as well as society in general.   The lengths that women go to in attempt to achieve these impossible ideals has reached  outrageous proportions.

  Women have played a subservient role in society throughout history. They have also been subjected to conform to certain societal standards of beauty, both willingly and unwillingly. Our  current culture is beauty obsessed. What constitutes beauty changes over time, but the overwhelming trend of beauty is thinness. The standard of what constitutes thin has grown increasingly thinner as time passes.  What was considered thin in the 1940’s and 50’s is considered fat, or overweight, by today’s standards.  Since the 1960’s the trend has been the thinner, the better.

 Women have been bombarded by the media with impossible standards to replicate, and the toll has been negative and blatantly obvious. The toll is apparent in the dramatic increase of eating disorders since the 1960’s. Eating disorders including anorexia and bulimia have become widespread and develop during  late adolescence to young adulthood. They are a symptom of the critically low self-esteem and distorted body image of girls and young women in the United States. Many women complain that they are fat, when in actuality many of their weights are within the healthy acceptable ranges. Many women believe they are fat because they don’t resemble the ideal, they turn to such dramatic and fatal measures, like eating disorders.

    American women have been assaulted with impossible standards to replicate in order to achieve being thin. In a culture that emphasizes self worth on the desired look, thin, eating disorders are rampant. The effect of the importance of beauty and thinness has a negative effect on women in our culture.