You said we have to artificially create strenuous exercise regimes and complex diets. I am not convinced that is needed to be basically fit and healthy and look fit and healthy. I think our modern reliance on convenience foods, over-convenience in general (how often do you see walk up ATMs anymore?), and our sedentary lifestyles are just as much to blame. If you look back only one or two generations, when we most had attained an ability to be self sufficient and eat a relatively healthy diet without the threat of starvation or wild predators...many were healthier because they did simple things like mow with a push mower, walk to the store, walk to visit thier neighbors/work/school. I'm sure we all know someone who lived to a ripe old age eventhough he ate crap....but he/she was climbing trees and walking everywhere. While I certainly agree the richies have the benefits of personal trainers and the time to workout multiple times a day...I think most folks could become healthier and lead to looking leaner, etc. if they didn't rely on the convenient so much. Would they be the uber-thin? Probably not...but they wouldn't be the couch potatoes of today either. And getting active is a habit, the more you do...the more you crave (I speak from personal experience here, btw).
I happen to agree completely with these points. But my impression is that it's almost only the mavericks, the outliers on the curve, who avoid the path of least resistance, which in our day and age consists of what, in the '50s, was enthusiastically marketed as `modern conveniences'. We have developed, on a group scale, the very bad habit of seeking to avoid as much effort as possible (I've watched people in cars prowling parking lots in search of the very closest spaces to the stores served by those lots—lying in wait for the choice places!—in spite of the fact that there
were
many available spaces within a 90-second walk from the Target or Trader Joe's entrance. People would rather spend a quarter of an hour waiting for someone to pull out from a space right next to the handicapped-parking places than spend a minute and a half walking to the front entrance? On a beautiful crisp autumn day?? That sort of thing...
If I were a complete, thorough-going evolutionary psychology type, I'd argue that this kind of behavior is just, once again, the manifestation of a contradiction between our biological and our cultural realities: living things are rewarded for conserving energy—there are actually mathematical rules relating minimization of effort to long term survival in an arbitrary population, and it makes sense intuitively: do the least you have to do to get by, and you have more in reserve for a rainy day. I'm not sure this is the whole story, though; but even if it isn't, it probably does contribute somewhat to an understanding of why we seem to be so damned
lazy... and then wind up doing seemingly crazy things like running on treadmills for an hour, maybe on the same day that we hunkered down in our cars for most of a Schumann symphony waiting for the Perfect Parking Spot.
Appearances are how the game is played?....um, why? Let's look at some of our greatest thinkers and artists. While some of them were certainly popular...did they try to "fit in"? I'm sure Albert Einstein's hairstyle was all the rage in his time. And yes, EVERYONE wanted Frida Khalo's eyebrows! Perhaps it's just my personal bent...but why is it so important to fit in? I know it's a biological mechanism to be the biggest/baddest/etc. But I think our best and most creative minds actually went against popular appearance; indeed, I think popular appearance sometimes molded itself around them because they were different.
True, but again—over enough time, it's probably what happens near the median that sets the rules of the game, rather than what happens at the outliers. It was precisely because Einstein, Khalo and others had such rare talent that they could afford to be detached from the source of self-esteem that for most people comes from success in winning the approval of others. And that kind of talent will always be rare. So while there may be, in the short term, some kind of emulation of the really unusual geniuses, over the long term, most people will be hovering around the group median for their expectations.
Indeed. There was a time when fat was chic - it was a sign of wealth. In the musical version of Fiddler on the Roof, in the song "If I Were a Rich Man" as Tevye dreams of being rich, one of the indications being:
The issue is much more apparent with the female body than the male body. The standards are much stricter for the female body, and require a bone structure that most women simply do not have. Marilyn Monroe was the ideal of beauty in her time - but she was much more curvaceous than the models of today, who are so underweight as to appear to me to be physically ill. Nonetheless, the women's clothing industry centers around styles that cannot like right when worn by the average woman. Most women are simply unable to meet the body standard set by the modeling and fashion industries.
The standards for men are much more realistic; any man who is willing and able to exercise a certain amount can reach the toned appearance that is considered optimum, with a minimum of expense, assuming they have the discipline to stick with a regular exercise regime. It is also generally more acceptable for men to be slightly overweight than for women - and given the differences in clothing styles, it is often easier for men to conceal a slight or incipient paunch than it is for women.
As health becomes the guiding factor, rather than clothing size, the above may well change - and it can't be too quick in coming. None of the above even comes close to addressing other issues that affect body image and clothing, such as the marketing of very adult-style clothing to steadily younger children, especially girls... but I suspect that's a topic for another thread.
Yes—all true and, I think, crucial to the point. Women do seem to be particularly targeted by this sort of extreme, radically unrealistic body-image marketing. I suspects it's because, even now, girls grow up insecure about themselves and their bodies, and that insecurity can be translated into big bucks by the fashion/cosmetic/diet/relationship industry. Anyone who's looked at the advertising in any of the big-circulation women's magazines can see right away what kind of `hook' they're using to milk billions of dollars from femal consumers who hope to finally come up to standard, as Bette Midler once put it acidly, by buying the right stuff. (Men grow insecure too, but about very different things. All those expensive toys, and 350hp V8 fantasy trucks and so on, are pitched to the male analogue of those insecurities.) I don't have a daughter, but friends of ours do, and you can see it in them already, at age 10 and 11—and this in
Ms. magazine's fourth decade of publication.
). The time will come when society as a whole will do so too but not until we wean ourselves off the addiction to glitz, celebrity and so-called "glamour".
I actually enjoy it, as they seem real to me know. 
