In "Survival of the Prettiest," Dt. Etcoff hypothesizes that extremely thin models are admired because it is impossible to be that thin without working at it all the time, which means they have a lot of leisure time, so they must be rich. They are slimmer, taller, and richer than the rest of us, all things we want to be. And being bizarre or avant-garde is the domain of people with enough money not to have to care what anyone thinks. You might note that these models don't appear in magazines which cater to the middle class, but to the upper class, so the obsessions may be alien to you, they certainly are to me. Tom Wolfe called upper-class New York women "social x-rays," they are obsessed with being thin. "A woman cannot be too rich or too thin," said the Duchess of Windsor.
Chris and I were window-shopping at Expo yesterday, it's a deliberately upscale version of Home Depo, with demo kitchens showing $20,000 stoves, and granite everything, the most haut kitchen probably costs $100,000. While we were looking around, at one point an obviously rich woman, dressed to the teeth, almost bumped into me, and shot me a look, at my baggy t-shirt and sweatshorts, and my fat body, and actually made a sniffy, snooty noise. It was audible. Women like that actually hate women like me. I represent almost everything she hates in life, I am sure. |
