One morning, Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other fashion models in New York suddenly received pink slips from their modeling agencies. “Sorry, babe, but your brand of lanky, long-legged beauty is strictly passé. Ciao!”
Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other fashion models in New York galloped to the nearest newsstand – and discovered, to their horror, that it was true! A thousand magazine covers had been launched by a valentine-faced thirteen-year-old who stood just four feet tall and weighed only fifty-five pounds.
She was Scottish and came from the latest cultural mecca, Flinging Edinburgh. Her name was McScrawny.
At first, the fashion world was aghast. But, recognizing a lucrative bandwagon when it oom-pah-pah-ed along, they hopped aboard and began singing McScrawny’s praises morning, noon and night.
And decreeing – for everyone who’s anyone, darling – the teensy tartan ensembles that complemented her miniature charms.
Soon it became impossible to stroll down a street, open a magazine, snap on a TV set, go to a movie, glance in a store window, glimpse a billboard, or scan social media without seeing images of McScrawny. She became everyone’s ideal.
Meanwhile, Kate and Tyra and Claudia and millions upon millions of other women sank into a deep depression. Not only did they look terrible in tam-o’-shanters, they just couldn’t measure up – or rather down – to McScrawny. Yet their every waking moment was bombarded by messages that any woman larger than McScrawny was unforgivably disgusting, grossly unlovable, and utterly worthless.
So they begged their doctors to chop five or six inches from their shins. They clamored for a waist-cinching operation in which the bottom ribs are removed to produce a true wasp waist. They paid electrolysists fortunes to reshape their hairlines to match McScrawny’s deep widow’s peak.
They bought every pill, potion, gadget, and gizmo they could get their hands on. Some forced themselves to throw up nearly every morsel they ate. Some smoked their heads off. Some popped the diet drugs that suddenly began appearing in stores, plus laxatives, diuretics and amphetamines as if they were vitamins. And – it goes without saying – they dieted and exercised frantically.
But nothing worked. The harder the woebegone women tried to shrink themselves to McScrawny’s size, the more stubbornly their bodies resisted.
Just to make it worse, they couldn’t find any decent clothes. They simply weren’t being made anymore in sizes larger than 1. Which left nothing but the dowdy duds at down-market shops that made them feel they’d died and gone to Polyester Purgatory.
No employer would hire them. No doctor or lawyer or butcher or baker or corporate chief would treat them respectfully. No one wanted to date them, let alone walk them down the aisle. The husbands and children who were acquired before McScrawnymania were ashamed to be seen with them.
And their images were nowhere to be found in the mass media. In fact, the only time they were paid any attention, it was to mock them. After all, what could be stupider than weighing more than fifty-five pounds, measuring above four feet, or being beyond your teens?
All the females in the land – except the .0001 percent who were naturally McScrawnyesque – came to hate themselves, despise each other, and meekly accept the rising tide of contempt being orchestrated against them, day by day, pound by pound, dollar by dollar.
Then one day the madness simply stopped.
Poof!
Kate and Tyra and Claudia and all the other women in the land awoke from the evil trance and said to themselves: “This is stupid. It’s wrecking my life. Let McScrawny look like McScrawny. And I’ll look like myself.”
Preposterous? Yes. But only the “poof” part is pure fantasy. Much of this parable has actually occurred since 1967, when North American women, and many others, became obsessed with looking as much as possible like Twiggy, the ultra-thin teenage fashion model from Swinging London.
Excerpted from my recently published ebook No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits By Making Women Hate Their Bodies - And How To Fight Back (available at Amazon.com and Kobo.com)
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