This is weird and not good.
Erin, a 25-year-old from St. Louis, Mo., who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy, said that before she heard the term through social media, she remembers feeling pride when she saw a space between her thighs. “My legs didn’t touch, and that was cool,” she says. “I used to be able to wrap my hands all the way around my legs. And that was kind of like a trophy for me that I could do that. I just wanted my legs to be as small as possible.”
Experts fear that the focus on thigh gap is driving a small number of women, especially teens, into behavior that could lead to eating disorders and other destructive habits. “We have seen an increased trend in which adolescent girls and young women are engaging in extreme dieting in pursuit of a so-called thigh gap,” says Tania Heller, medical director of the Washington Center for Eating Disorders and Adolescent Obesity in Bethesda.
Our bigger problem is that people are eating too much and exercising too little (I know this is my problem), but I had never heard of “thigh-gap.” We seem to make things as miserable as possible for young girls. I’m reminded every time I go to the public pool how few women can measure up to society’s ideal for female beauty. It’s even worse when girls think they need to go further than that and be able to wrap their hands around their thighs.
I see the results on the street in Manhattan a lot, and it’s very upsetting, especially since the quality of food makes a big difference in dieting, so they’re probably really starving themselves (sometimes see shopping for food; even more upsetting).
Interesting column that lays out the larger issues
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/opinion/mark-bittman-rethinking-the-word-foodie.html?_r=0
Emaciation chic…
I’d take a step back from focusing on girls and body image and posit a more generalized desire for people to attain something most people are incapable of having or doing. If it wasn’t the thigh gap, it would be something else.
There is a basic desire for social stratification and the ability to set oneself apart from the masses. The thigh gap is a symptom, society’s ideal for female beauty is a symptom, and not a root cause.
Exactly. If it’s not the thigh gap, it will be the bridge (that’s when your hip bones jut out from the rest of your body such that the top of your bikini doesn’t precisely follows the contours of your body but instead has a little gap). The beauty-industrial complex is always going to invent something new.
I suspect this will have severe health consequences later in life when it is quite normal for older people to lose bone and muscle mass.
And my guess is most males, including his one, don’t even find it attractive. Quite the opposite.
There is so much in a life to worry about — like being the best person possible for the people you love. Why obsess on something as stupid as thigh ago?
Osteoporosis is significantly increased for women as they age if as teens they consume high levels of soft drinks and low levels of calcium.
Also, emaciation is associated with low estrogen which is a factor in osteoporosis. (Went to a lecture last week)
Fat thighs with lumps like Crisco are a turn off, but so is the starving look. A nice, well muscled thigh is attractive.
Ladies, don’t jump on us. the rules are asymmetrical but we didn’t make them. (Actually, the rules made us)
please, the “my experience is normative” thing needs to wither away.
You like fat thighs with cellulite? Whatever floats your boat and I’m sure lots of women are happy with you.
that’s a start; step 2, rephrase your comment:
Fat thighs with lumps like Crisco are a turn off to me, but so is the starving look. I find a nice, well muscled thigh attractive.
Ladies, don’t jump on me. I’m just giving my personal view
there, fixed it.
I’ll lay money that my views are shared by at least 75% of my peers.
Wow, that’s kinda nuts.
I like women of all shapes and sizes, of course, but I LOVE really sturdy legs, like the kind women who run have.
Reminds me of Sunday cartoon, years ago. In two panels, first a wife, then her husband are seen on a scale after showering. The wife is agonizing about being too fat (she wasn’t) and having a wrinkle. The husband, balding and unattractive looks in the mirror and says, “Hey guy! You’ve still got it!”
Many first-world females have had their simple human instinct for self-preservation overwhelmed by the cultural psychological disease which demands ever more perverse and largely unachievable “beauty” standards. These demands aren’t happening in second- or third-world cultures.
Thigh gap as a beauty standard? That’s sick. I feel anger with the commercial forces which have placed this warped pressure on women.
I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps what we’re seeing is less a response to standards of beauty promulgated by the beauty industry and more a response to other factors.
In the 1960s Twiggy was at the top of the fashion model heap, but there wasn’t a sudden increase in anorexia among teen and young women to mold their bodies to look like her. They just copied her eye make-up.
#1 is money. Look at the numbers of cosmetic surgeries per year. Hundreds of thousands of women purchase breast augmentation every year. (Oddly have never met a woman that admits to have done so.)
Probably no coincidence that as obesity has risen in this country that extreme diets and anorexia have risen as well.
To your first point, women have less control of their lives than men. Meeting cultural beauty standards lend women more power, but perhaps these extreme dietary habits, sometimes linked with exercise regimes, are also symptoms of women seeking control they are denied elsewhere.
To your last point, obesity is often caused by malnutrition. That seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true. Increased poverty, reductions in social welfare supports to individuals, and red-lining by grocery chains often combine to leave junk food as poor people’s only realistic option. It’s available in their neighborhoods, inexpensive, fattening, and fails to deliver proper nutrition.
Let’s acknowledge that much of this is peculiar to U.S. culture. Bulimia, anorexia and other inappropriate/unhealthy body issues have not taken as substantial a hold in other cultures; they’re first-world luxuries. Many second- and third-world cultures hold plump women up as beauty ideals. This likely relates to the desire to “set oneself apart” referenced by Death to Randroids upthread.
I should have written “…obesity is often paired with malnutrition.” Thanks for considering that correction.
Here I’m linking again to the Mark Bittman column because he’s writing precisely about the issue you bring up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/what-causes-weight-gain.html?_r=0
Yes, thanks for that reminder. I hadn’t read this piece yet, but your reminder spurred me on to do so. It’s good.
Bittman makes the important point here that we should create public policies which reduce the consumptions of foods we know are harming the health of children and adults while we continue to seek more comprehensive answers. He makes the financial and health problems which are deepened by waiting to act more explicit by comparing the junk food manufacturers to the tobacco industry, their moral forebearers.
wrt:
True. But far less so today than it was a few decades ago. Single women couldn’t legally access birth control nor get credit in their own names. I even experienced having to pee in a cup before getting hired by a company and it wasn’t a drug test but proof that I wasn’t pregnant.
I stand by my observation that working/middle class teens back in the fifties/sixties/early seventies were slimmer and less prone to anorexia and bulimia than today’s young women.
A nutritionally deficient diet leads to many health related issues. But not obesity. It’s not too many bad calories but too many calories. Also, obesity is not evidence of a nutrient deficient diet.
But young women today that starve themselves to be super slim do stand out as different and therefore, noticeable.
I concede to many of your points here; thanks for helping me reconsider some of my presumptions.
Foods most easily available to low-income people these days are often both calorie-rich and nutrition-poor, and many of those calories are paired with very unhealthy fats and highly refined sugars. This is how obese people can be malnourished at the same time.
It’s also worthwhile to acknowledge that many schools have responded to educational budget cuts by retreating to the ABC’s, making it less likely that children are receiving proper physical education or informative health class time.
Oh, wasn’t disputing that malnutrition and obesity can’t co-exist. Or don’t co-exist in large numbers of Americans today. Nor that food deserts don’t exist. Although those in urban and suburban areas can with effort and time the unfair burden can be overcome.
Cutting PE in CA public schools to save money began decades ago, right along with replacing the semi-crappy school lunches prepared on-site to trucking in pre-packaged total crap, and the consequences aren’t pretty.
Most of what I observe these days is at Starbucks or Peets. Not poor young people or they couldn’t afford the whipped cream topped specialty drinks and $2 cookies. They may or may not suffer malnutrition, but an extremely high percentage are overweight to obese.
Here’s the Bittman link on dieting, more pertinent to the post, but both are important
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/what-causes-weight-gain.html?_r=0
While I agree that the media’s not helping by sensationalizing niche fetishes found in the less savory forums (ahem*4chan*ahem) of teh internets, we have to also recognize the anecdotal nature of this story.
Just because WaPo found one girl who expressed pride in her bony legs, doesn’t mean it’s an epidemic. Most of the teens I know these days seem to have a pretty savvy bullshit detector, and a lot fewer anxiety issues about their bodies. (Electronics, clothing, and music on the other hand… not so much… this generation is a marketer’s dream.)
I view this story with the same kind of skepticism I apply to the local “news at 11” teasers about the new teen craze of jenkem.
Also, too: Mugshot Guy. (It’s not just males who propagate fetish memes…)
Thigh-gap is a new one for me, but I’m retired. During my adolescence, body image went from 36-24-36 to Twiggy. It was anxiety producing for many females. However, there were no tattoos, and body piercing was limited to one hole per earlobe.
Sounds like a lot of ppl on this thread need to learn more about girls and body image in todays world
Women have had to be concerned about body image for centuries. Only the “desirable characteristics” change. However, what exacerbates the disconnect between one’s body and these desirable characteristics is the plethora of visual images everywhere. Some things are best left to the imagination.
When I was in college (10 years ago) my friends and I called it “clearance”.
“We seem to make things as miserable as possible for young girls”–No, I don’t think “we” do. The advertising and fashion industries do, for instance, and if “society” does, then that’s the kind of thing “society” always does. I bet most readers of this blog, if they’re parents, try to teach their daughters to pay more attention to their minds than to their bodies, and to resist the urge to conform to what “society” thinks–and they try to teach that by example.
Yes, I’ve heard of a thigh-gap, and it lead to one of the weirdest conversations of my married life that I’ve ever heard. My wife and I were at an SF convention and were hanging out with two of our friends, both good-looking women, but one in a thin sort of way and the other not quite so thin. The thin one admitted that she wished she had a little of the other’s heavy breasts. While she was envious of the thin woman’s gap between her legs. Until then I had never heard of a thigh-gap.
“Dat Gap”
Go to google images and search that phrase to see what it means. It doesn’t require any female to become anorexic to achieve, not that I’m trying to posit that women “need” or “should” try to achieve that (or any) physical trait.
Why is this a new “thing”?
First and foremost, Culture. Culture is to humans as the sea is to fish. We (often) don’t see it because we’re totally surrounded by it. Some men strive to be able to wear “skinny jeans”. For me, it implies lack of muscle, and muscle mass (and it’s ratio to body fat) is actually one of a few ways to objectively measure someone’s “body health”.
Second, we’re bombarded by info that the US is obese, that everyone is fat and getting fatter, that it’s bad, ad nauseam. Well, women already do things like paint their faces and wear shoes that are fucking ridiculous but make them feel attractive…go figure they’re going to start starving themselves to not be “obese” or fat, or whatever is looked down upon by culture.
By the way, men suffer from anorexia and bulemia too. Not nearly as much as women (95%-5%) and don’t seek treatment as much as women. Just throwing that out there…this isn’t necessarily an issue with just women.
Also, there is just so much confusion as to what is healthy, how to eat healthy, how one should “exercise”, and 1000 fad diets and pay-to-exercise programs. With all of the confusion, it can be easily simplified that one of the easiest ways to make yourself thin is to just stop eating. No?
After awhile your brain anatomy and neurotransmitters change and you are “rewarded” for starving yourself. And don’t forget that most people who suffer from anorexia/bulimia also suffer from depression, anxiety, OCD, perfectionism, etc.
Additionally, your own body perception changes once you start down the path to starving to become perfect. People who are suffering from anorexia and/or bulimia perceive themselves to be overweight. Yet, studies have taken pictures of a person’s body and put someone else’s head on it, and the anorexic/bulimic thought their body with someone else’s head looked just fine.
Finally, if you buy into the obesity epidemic (which I think is just a symptom of a food supply poisoned by sugar, a toxin) then you have to realize that MOST women don’t starve themselves, aren’t worried about “dat gap”, and while possibly unhappy with their body image, aren’t going to go out and hurt themselves to try to fit some cultural standard.
Ultimately, if you want to be healthy and have a decent body aesthetically, you simply cut out as much sugar as possible, stop eating trans-fats, and lift weights. No, women don’t become “bulky” looking, unless they use steroids (see Jamie Easton for a clean female bodybuilder.
Unfortunately, simply cutting out sugar, trans-fats and lifting weights isn’t a huge money-maker. So we’re stuck with BS fads and incorrect nutrition advice that just continues confusing people and making people think that the only way to really lose weight is drastic things like starving yourself, or purging after eating, or starving yourself by only drinking some special fruit juice, or whatever some grifter came up with to take body-insecure people’s money.
I heard of this term from my 16 year old daughter. Who, not coincidentally, is now in the psychiatric ward of an excellent Children’s Hospital and is being treated for, among other things, eating disorder. Of our three girls she is the only one who has a body type that is, on the scale of thin-average-wide, average. The other two are thin. She’s extremely fit (works out daily) and eats extremely healthily, but has succumbed to the social pressures of our place and time and was eating too little. She hadn’t reached anorexia yet, but that was the clear trend.
The good news is that today’s treatments are extremely effective, if you can get into a great hospital program. The bad news is that most don’t get into such programs.