“The pressure to be thin” is a figment of one’s imagination.
I’m fed up (no pun intended) with influencers and their fans crying that they’re inside this relentless pressure cooker to be thin.
They are always vague about the source of this pressure, even when they’ve never actually been overweight. They say it’s society, but rarely get more specific.
How does society pressure anyone to be skinny?
Does society barge into our homes and threaten to come back in two months to destroy our prized possessions unless we could demonstrate fitting into a size 2 mini skirt?
Is this “societal pressure” some kind of huge gaseous cloud that hovers over girls and young women, threatening to gut them unless they can effortlessly slip into a size 2 pair of jeans?
The only pressure to be a waif is that which resides inside these influencers’ heads. And their followers’ as well.
To be fair, I’ll point out that in some professions there’s indeed a pressure to maintain thinness, such as modeling and ice dancing.
But the extreme majority of women who’ve chosen to exist inside that pressure cooker are not in those professions; they’re not studying ballet or trying to win the Boston Marathon.
I know a young woman who was once obsessed with having a thigh gap.
I have no reason to believe that her parents manipulated her from an early age to believe she’d be worthy as a human being only if she had pipe cleaner thighs.
She came up with the demented idea — completely on her own — that she’d be more likeable if she had a thigh gap.
Teens and women who think like this tend to get sympathy, while a teen boy or young man who spends hours in the gym trying to get the biggest muscles possible is given far less mercy. Go figure.
Not Being Fat is NOT the Same As Thinness
It’s not that there’s societal pressure to have a twiggy figure.
The pressure – for lack of a better term – is to not be fat.
Many obese, especially morbidly, people report being frowned upon, ignored, ridiculed and otherwise treated wrong due to their size.
It’s not socially acceptable to be very overweight. Though we may see very heavy people in public all the time and never witness anyone harassing them for their size, it’s a fact that plenty of morbidly obese – and even those on the low end of obesity – suffer from ongoing criticism of their bodies and eating habits by family members, including spouses.
But this is NOT a pressure to be skinny. Telling a 300 pound woman she needs to lose 150 pounds is not synonymous with telling her she needs to get a body like a younger Taylor Swift.
Harping on one’s teen to stop eating so much and that she needs to “lose weight” does not equate to pressure to be thin. Rather, it’s pressure to lose the obesity.
And yes, many parents are cruel in the way they go about this (though ironically, they permit abundant access to junk food by bringing it into the house).
And yes, fat kids at school get bullied for their weight and laughed at in gym class when they struggle to run.
We all know that. We know that very fat people get stared at when struggling to squeeze into a restaurant booth.
We know that sometimes people watch them intently as they serve themselves from the buffet.
We know that there are cases where cancer was missed because the doctor blamed the symptoms on obesity.
But nowhere in any of this is a “pressure to be thin.” Stop it already.
Find out what’s really eating at you (no pun intended) so you can stop blaming society for your inner demons.
There are clearly demons running amok in your head if, despite not being overweight, you feel a pressure to be skinny.
Ask yourself where this pressure is coming from. Don’t say “societal standards.” That’s vague, ambiguous and out of reach. It’s not tangible.
Dig deeper. Locate the source. If you’ve been seeing a therapist for years, maybe it’s time to find a new therapist who’s not afraid to help you drive a shovel into the ground and dig deep for the root problem.
That root problem is not society. It may very well be the household you grew up in – e.g., how your parents treated you.
Seeing skinny women on TV all the time is not pressure to be thin. It’s not as though those women are crawling out of your TV screen like Samara and threatening you to get stick thighs.
Stop blaming society and look within yourself for the answers.
