:: Home

The tyranny of slenderizing

BY David Kunzle

One in three Americans is estimated to be overweight, and treating obesity costs $70 billion a year. The situation is so dire that the U.S. surgeon general has called for sweeping changes in schools, restaurants, workplaces and communities to help combat the growing obesity epidemic. Fat is our secular sin, and millions of Americans are enrolled in formal dieting programs.

Oprah Winfrey hails as the “greatest achievement of her life” not becoming the world’s richest woman, but losing 67 pounds, which she regained within a year, on a liquid diet. Madonna, once soft and plump, suddenly becomes lean and allegedly sets off a wave of dieting among 9-year-old girls.

Along with all the diet programs, an array of external slimming devices focuses on instant waistline reduction. Thus the corset comes to the aid of the overweight movie star: Minnie Driver’s weight problem was cured by “The Governess” period film, for which she wore a stomach-shrinking corset. The corset also cures extra weight acquired during pregnancy: Catherine Zeta-Jones displayed herself in a waspie, a thick elasticized belt, to celebrate her postpartum loss of 50 pounds, admitting her diet had been terrible.

Like anorexia, tight-lacing is overwhelmingly a  practice of the quite young. As severe forms of body discipline, both attempt to drive out pain, gain freedom, assert absolute control over the body and extrude the soul from bodily confinement. The attainment of transcendence, the entering into trance-like or mystic states, which was the aim of the bodily disciplines of medieval saints, is common to compulsive exercisers, athletes and certain kinds of body-sculptors.

Contemplation exercises are practiced by some: Harmony Rose, fetish model, former UCLA student, pacifist and vegetarian, who has helped found a Zen Buddhist center in Los Angeles, finds the corset aids her mental concentration and enjoins a wholesome ego-destructive sacrifice. “Why do people need drugs when you can get high like this?” asks Olivia Barnard-Firth, who runs the Wicked Lady vintage clothing store in Hertfordshire, England. “High heels and corsets give me uplift that is really spiritual, transcendent.”

Bodybuilding, for so long a male domain, has been taken up by women and is arguably a form of body art. Will flex-appeal infiltrate sex appeal? In the UCLA gym where I play squash, and where the men’s team won medals galore in the 1984 Olympics, I now see the women gymnasts have taken over entirely. Women not only perform traditional ankle-threatening stunts on the beam (as men never had to), but they use the uneven bars in complete emulation of the acrobatics that were a male preserve.

We may note that the gymnastic training of very young girls into champions by their early teenage years causes serious physiological distortions, including the absence of menstruation, the result notoriously also of anorexia and occasionally of tight-lacing.

Art justifies all. Why do those who rail against shoes with high stiletto heels and pointed toes never object to classical ballet training on point as even more threatening to the feet? Ballet, which starts very early in life and is so rigorous — could this, too, be child abuse?

Kunzle, a professor in the Department of Art History, is the author of “Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture.”