What Happens When Women Start Taking Up Space?
It’s revolutionary
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being “discovered” by a TV casting agent at the mall. I dreamed of being welcomed into the Ivy League. And I harbored another, more private dream, one that felt just as enticing: I longed to become the smallest version of myself possible.
I didn’t probe deeply into why I aspired to physical smallness. It seemed obvious: Nearly everyone I knew idolized diminutive women, from Rachel and Monica on Friends to the newly and triumphantly svelte Oprah. I hoped someday to be as lithe as the models whose baby-tee-covered bodies filled the pages of my YMs and Seventeens. When Kate Moss proclaimed, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” I took notes.
I was average-sized, but I believed that once I became a leaner me — through conviction and discipline — I would be a better me. A fully realized me. Like so many ambitious girls, I wanted to be big and small at the same time — to live a big life in a small body.
I didn’t yet see that aspiration for what it is: a cultural trap.
But now, after years researching women’s body ideals for a forthcoming book about the history of exercise culture, I understand why this fantasy of bodily transformation flourished alongside my dreams for a life of name-in-lights…
