Sam and I have been reviewing our older content lately to get a sense of our most read posts and topics. I’ve also revisited “the thigh gap” topic this week proof reading a paper I wrote that’s coming out in the Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (Ann Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, editors) very soon. My paper is called “Food Insecurity: Dieting as Ideology, as Oppression, and as Privilege.” It’s almost five years since I posted these thoughts here on the thigh gap. And it and any other arbitrary thin ideal that makes people, especially women, feel poorly about themselves if they don’t achieve it, still makes me sad.
Tracy
Brilliant. Your paper is a topic I’ve been researching since college, in part as a function of my own recovery from anorexia. Self starvation in the context of poverty seemed to stump more than a few ER docs leaving me to go find my own answers. I also appreciate the idea of the body as self protection and how thigh shape or size, in contrast with other social determinants of efficacy meet. For me, the body was and still is a form of communication.