It’s hard for me to put this into words, but I’m going to try. A starving woman is a quiet woman. She is bound, both physically and mentally, by a pressing need to be thin. As she is constantly bombarded with images that tell her that she is not good enough, that she will never be worth anything if she is not thin, that she will never be happy until she loses those last ten (or twenty) pounds, she is distracted. Her mind can never truly be hers, and that is exactly the point. When women discovered that they no longer had to submit to their husbands and spend their lives as homemakers, they began to pose a distinct threat to male spheres. They entered the workforce. They demanded rights and privileges that they had previously been denied – and they needed to be silenced.

And so was introduced this idea that a woman can never be ‘good’ if she is fat, or even has fat. What was once considered normal side-effects of puberty and genetics were now a disease, and a disease that a woman could easily cure herself of. Easily is defined, of course, as devoting most of your mental and physical resources to fitting that ideal. Women’s minds began to fill with calories and exercises, and they become weak. They would rather lose weight than accomplish any other goal in their life, and they are no longer a threat.

Not only are women weakened mentally, they are also weakened physically. Those ten to twenty pounds that most women think that they need to lose in order to be happy will also most likely cause them to fit the medical definition for semi-starvation. In Nazi concentration camps it was determined that 900 calories was the minimum number of calories needed to sustain human functioning- today’s diets often encourage women to eat less. When she is hungry, she is weak. Her mind literally cannot function because it does not have enough calories to do so, and she is docile. The perpetuation of the thin ideal has caused the systematic silencing and diminishing of women. Women are less threatening when they are hungry, when they are small, when they are distracted. A woman’s worth is now seen to center around her weight. After all, if her weight is a curable disease, it is her own fault if she fails to overcome it. And, as a heavy woman is an unworthy woman, what does it matter what you accomplish if you are still fat?

Never mind that there are no real links between health and weight (in fact, more health risks can come from constant dieting than being overweight). Never mind that women’s bodies often have a set weight, and dieting will do nothing but cause them to yo-yo back and forth for year upon unhappy years. The double-edged sword is in place. Women are weak when they eat too little – they are frail, and thin, and hungry. Women are weak when they eat too much – they have no self-control, they are mentally feeble. You literally cannot win. You are forced to suffer in silence.

There is something very sick about weight in today’s society, but it is not the weight of our women. I could go on about the power play and history of denying women enough food, but I’ll stop there.