Women's
Editor
Women Assume Overweight
Women 'Sloppy,' Thin Women 'Mean,' Glamour Magazine Survey Finds
Posted: 05/04/2012 10:10 am
How
much does physical appearance, specifically weight, influence women's first
impressions of each other? A new survey released Thursday by Glamour magazine
sought to answer that question. The poll, conducted on the magazine's behalf
by Rebecca Puhl, Ph.D.
at Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity,
asked 1,800 women ages 18 to 40 to envision a female stranger who
was either "overweight" or "thin," then
choose one of a pair of words to describe her -- the examples Glamour's
article on the survey gave were ambitious or lazy.
"Neither" was always an option, wrote contributing editor Shaun
Dreisbach, but fewer than half of participants took it.
The
results showed that participants were six times more likely to call an unnamed
overweight woman "slow" than they were to apply that label to a thin
woman. They were seven times more likely to call the heavier woman
"undisciplined," nine times more likely to call her
"sloppy," and 11 times more likely to call her "lazy" than
they would the thin woman they envisioned.
When
they pictured a thin woman, those who took the survey also assumed she
possessed a host of negative traits. They were twice as likely to deem her
"bitchy," "mean" or "controlling" as they were an
overweight woman. They were four times more likely to call the thin woman
"vain" or "self-centered" and eight times more likely to
think her "conceited" or "superficial" than they were a
heavy woman.
In
perhaps the best indication of the pervasiveness of weight stereotyping among
women, Puhl found that heavy women were just as likely as thin women to
describe and overweight woman as "sloppy," and slender women were
just as likely as heavy women to assume a thin woman would be mean.
Dreisbach
summed up the findings, "The overwhelming conclusion? All women are now
judged by their size."
While
that could be an overstatement -- the attitudes of the 2,000 women surveyed
probably don't represent the attitudes of every woman on the planet -- the
survey does support the already substantial evidence that weight negatively
affects how women are perceived, in some cases hurting them financially as well
as emotionally.
Earlier
this week, a study out of the University of Manchester found that obese women had more trouble
getting a job, lower starting salaries and fewer leadership
opportunities than average-weight women. The study seemed to confirm previous
data indicating that being any heavier than 70 pounds under the
average weight, gaining any weight at all or having a baby face (chubbier
cheeks, less pronounced cheekbones) could lead to lower wages and reduced
career opportunity.
In
an essay published in the Guardian Thursday on the Manchester
University study, Susie Orbach, author of "Fat Is A Feminst Issue,"
offered an astute assessment of what's causing this level of weight-based
judgment and discrimination:
Fat shaming is a new and
vicious sport ... Children and their parents are being shamed
for looking different than the thousands of Photo shopped pictures we see
weekly on our screens ... No wonder society has a thing about fat.
The
paradox of consumer culture is that we should and must consume -- our economy
depends on it -- but we should at the same time do so discreetly and
expensively. Fat challenges this idea. Fat dares to show. Fat is disdained
because it is read as greed and an inability to choose or say no...
We
value holding back and then assign to fat people the contempt we can feel for
our own longings.
But
the negative attitudes toward thin women that the Glamour poll
revealed also rang true for both experts and individual women the magazine
interviewed. Dreisbach pointed out that historically art has often depicted
allegorical figures of evil and various vices as slender females. Explaining
why thin women are viewed negatively today, Amy Farrell, Ph.D., a professor of
women's and gender studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn., and author
of "Fat Shame,"
told Glamour, "Not only is a skinny woman assumed to be tight with
her calories and, therefore, tight with her emotions ... she's also pushed away
as someone who is not sharing in the same struggles as the rest of us."
Even
the one positive quality many participants immediately attributed to the
overweight woman they pictured -- that she was "giving" -- has
negative implications for thin women, psychologist Ann Kearney-Cooke told Glamour.
"It just fits into the stereotype that thin women are not that way."
All
of which seems to at least somewhat validate the heavily criticized claim Daily Mail columnist
Samantha Brick made in April that women had snubbed her
throughout her life simply because she is physically attractive (which in
Western culture almost always involves being thin).
It's
tempting to read the Glamour survey the way Brick read her own
experiences, as evidence that women are prone to judging other women and
inherently competitive with one another. But Orbach's explanation makes a lot
more sense. The fact that heavy women thought negatively of heavy women and
thin women immediately associated unfavorable personality traits with thin
women suggests that this is not about warring factions among women, the fat
versus the thin.
The
problem, the enemy, here is the belief system we've developed around weight.
The new survey offers more evidence of its hold on women and its ability to
divide and isolate and exhaust us. But it also challenges us to somehow detach
ourselves from what Orbach called our "thing about fat." And then to
do something really amazing with all the energy we no longer let that
"thing" consume.
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