The-F-Word.org

During the early stages of my eating disorder, I found myself wandering the marbled halls of the Cincinnati Art Museum every Saturday afternoon. There is something so inherently calming in wandering alone amongst such treasures of antiquity. Before long, I noticed what struck me as an uncanny similarity amongst the works of great painters like Rubens and Vouet.

Most, if not all, women featured in early paintings are fat.

I found myself asking “why?” Why is fat considered today to be transgressive of acceptable beauty standards? Why was I literally and metaphorically killing myself to rid myself of perceived fatness? That simple epiphany has formed the driving force in my graduate research on the subject.

So, I tend to get a little giddy when I see a historic-based piece, as The Atlantic has published. Despite its jargon-laden title, “The War on Fat” is a fantastic, fantastic article recapping the war on fat(people) over the past century.

The author, Elizabeth Wasserman, has clearly drunk the obesity epidemic Kool-aid, for sure, but she does a wonderful job combing through previous The Atlantic articles to glean a brief, yet well-researched purview touching upon some of the primary driving forces in the evolution of fatness as something to be revered to something to be reviled.

Of course, the limited nature of Wasserman’s perspective - using only The Atlantic features - limits the scope of her work. If you’d like a more detailed history on the transformation of fat in cultural consciousness, I recommend you check out Peter Stearns’ Fat History, Don Kulick’s Fat: An Anthropology of an Obsession, or Laura Fraser’s Losing It.

One of the articles Wasserman references is a 1919 piece, with a kind of early call for fat acceptance. An anonymous, presumably male writer, opines his excitement at seeing a ladies’ dress advertisement celebrating “Stylish stouts.” It was only an ad, but the jubilant writer saw in it the dawn of a new era, “an epochal adjustment of fashion to fact.” He declared:

“The anti-fat nostrum, the recipes for rolling, the panting mountain climb, all the many-doctored advice, all the beauty-parlor pummeling—all this is obsolete, for obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness; these throng authentic fashion-sheets. She has her own clothes, not the adapted ‘line’ of the lean and lovely sylph. The fat woman is no longer done out of her inheritance by a cruel and carping world. She has become a ’stylish stout.’”

Keep in mind, this piece was written in 1919. We’ve come a long way, baby, but it appears we have yet to arrive.