Essay on Depression Embodied

Society has burdened women with an unrealistically skinny model for them to live up to. “Too “Close to the bone”: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness” and “Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem" are prime examples depicting society's mold. “An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem” and “Body Image Limited” also get that message across while showing the side-effects of it. The morbidly thin mold society expects of females today can lead to feelings of depression and low self-esteem among women. The ideal figure of a women has changed over time. "Too 'Close to the bone"' says that, "Just a century ago, body ideals and ideas were the reverse of our own, undergoing the fact that there was no folk wisdom about the value of slenderness that science has recently confirmed. Indeed, the female ideal was Junoesque: tall, full-busted, full-figured, mature. Dimpled flesh---what we today shudderingly call 'cellulite'---was considered desirable" (Seid 164). A women’s plump figure was once deemed desirable. It represented wealth and having a surplus. Fat used to be seen as a silky layer to a woman. According to "Too 'Close to the bone'", "The culture of slimming as we know it is really a post-World War II phenomenon. Fashion continued to value a slender (if curving) form, and the health industry, finally convinced bf insurance companies, launched massive campaigns to persuade Americans to lose weight" (Seid 165). There was a fear that Americans were growing morally soft paralleling their physique. Ninety to ninety five percent of American women feel they do not measure up. These feelings of abnormality lead to isolation and depression. It also leads to women going to dangerous extremes such as starvation, forcing themselves to throw up, and other ridiculousness. It's almost a culture shock for a foreign woman living in America when it comes to her figure. “Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem" explains this all too well. Fatema Mernissi is a Moroccan woman that lives in America. When she went to buy a skirt in an American department store, she was told she was too big. Mernissi says, “That was the first time that I had ever heard such nonsense about my size. In the Morrocan streets, men’s flattering comments regarding my particularly generous hips have for decades led me to believe that the entire planet shared their conviction”(Mernissi 179). It's a humiliating experience for a woman to go into a store and be told she can't fit into anything they have. According to “Size 6”, “I buy my own material and the neighborhood seamstress makes me the silk or leather skirt I want. Neither the seamstress nor I know exactly what size my new skirt is. No one cares about my size in Morocco as long as I pay taxes on time” (Mernissi 181). When Mernissi had told the salesperson that in the store, the salesperson was in disbelieve. In Mernissi’s homeland, the Muslim veil is a restriction on women that covers their body almost entirely. She concluded that maybe the thinness ‘veil’ on the Western part of the world was much more imposing. As you can see from the reading, things are much different in our Western Hemisphere. The pressure the media places on women to be thin leads to negative feelings about themselves. “An Intervention for the Negative Influence of Media on Body Esteem” claims that, “Women may directly model unhealthy eating habits presented in the media, such as fasting or purging, because the media-portrayed thin ideal body type is related to eating pathology” (Haas, Pawlow, Pettibone, Segrist 405). When a woman sees the image the media places in front of her, she feels insecure. These feelings of insecurity lead her to irrational changes in order to look like that image. These insecurities also lead to depression when the woman fails to become the same as the image. The reading says, “Media exposure to female images that are thin and air-brushed is also associated with depression

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