ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the long-standing interest among feminist scholars in the pressures on women to conform to narrowly defined and unrealistic body expectations. Feminists have criticized the fashion industry for promoting images of ultra-thin female bodies, which encourage women to lose weight. Institutionalized mechanisms lead both scientists and journalists to dramatize and moralize. Scientists have an incentive to dramatize in a context where the language of crisis and imminent doom seem in a mass society to be the only way to get anyone's attention. In many instances, the press used poetic license to paint a picture of sloth and gluttony. Americans are gobbling down more calories than ever, resulting in a 50 per cent increase in the nations obesity rate, begins the first line of one typical news report on the 1999 study of the obesity epidemic.
