Review

An unbearable lightness

WOMANSIZE: THE TYRANNY OF SLENDERNESS
Kim Chernin
The Women’s Press, 1993, £7.99

Kim Chernin’s book, Womansize - The Tyranny of Slenderness, provides an insight into the suffering of the compulsive slimmer. Chernin argues that women’s unhappiness is not only expressed through eating disorders such as anorexia, but also through compulsive slimming. Chernin illustrates the increasingly complicated relationship between women and food in which it is commonplace for women to limit their food through tyrannical acts of self denial and obsessive behaviour.

The vast majority of women are unhappy with their weight, size and shape. The slimming industry currently makes £6m a week in the UK alone. Chernin points out that the ideal female image promoted in popular culture is represented by Christine Ollman, a leading fashion model who also happens to be 12 years old. Through examples like this Chernin demonstrates the link between a desire for slenderness and women’s oppression. She argues that aspiring towards a girl-like figure represents society’s approval of dependent women who suppress their natural curved shape as a sign of conformity.

Building on other feminist studies of women’s relationship to food, Chernin also points out that eating disorders and compulsive slimming are forms of submissive protest, described as mute rebellion. The protest is directed not against society but against the self and Chernin convincingly argues that women who punish themselves for their femaleness are intent on denying themselves pleasure. Refusing food when one is hungry is the ultimate act of self control and represents a denial of the body’s sensual needs.

Chernin implies that eating disorders can be explained through the dominance of ‘patriarchal culture’. But this does not explain the growing number of young men who also suffer. The book should have explored the link between the decline of the women’s movement and the rise of eating disorders among women and men. Are eating disorders are now more endemic precisely because there is not a collective women’s movement able to express and define women’s protest?

Nevertheless Chernin’s book is an excellent discussion of how women try to limit and contain themselves through diets. If this book reaches women who are diet victims and successfully explains their behaviour to them, then it will have done a good job.