Story highlights Transport for London says it will ban advertisements that "conform to unhealthy or unrealistic body images"

Susan Bordo: Even the slenderest bodies nowadays are digitally shaved of any unsightly "excess"

Susan Bordo is a cultural historian and the author of many books and articles on cultural imagery, including "Unbearable Weight" and "The Creation of Anne Boleyn." She blogs at Huffington Post, and is currently writing a book about Hillary Clinton. The views expressed are her own.

(CNN) When I was 14, I wanted to look like Annette Funicello. That was back in 1961. (And if you are going "Who?" right now, think Sandra Dee -- but Italian.) I stuffed my bras with Kleenex, cinched my waist as tight as I could make it, and tried to be as perky as was possible for a poetry-writing Jewish girl from Newark who had never attended a beach party.

Back then, beauty culture was still in the grip of the curvy, I-was-born-to-have-babies ideals of the post-War period. But not for long. Within a few years, "swinging London" had given us a new, decidedly non-domestic ideal. Skinny, leggy, and flat-chested had always been a high-fashion look. But we knew there was a difference between a Vogue model and what was expected from us ordinary girls. In the mid-60s, all that changed. Being a mini-version of one's mom was not cool; our imaginations were caught by the unencumbered, boyish, slightly awkward allure of Twiggy, Penelope Tree, Edie Sedgwick.

Susan Bordo

That was the 60s. We dieted, sure, but most of us were still connected enough to our ethnic and racial roots (immigrant and black cultures don't tend to favor starvation beauty) or too focused on our blossoming politics to make the shrinking of our bodies into a way of life. But that coltish body and all it signified caught on big time, and by the time I started teaching college in the 1980s, my female students were writing in their journals of despising their "thunder thighs," being afraid of food ("If I eat one cookie, I won't be able to stop") and measuring their worth by the numbers on their scales.

Fast forward to today, though, and is London leading the way again?