A Follow-Up To The Thing About That Starved Look

I just read this post at Slate about someone else's article bemoaning the supposed culture of shaming women for being too thin while celebrating fatness. It (the Slate post, not the pro-thin article) is really good, and it makes a good point as a follow-up to my recent post about how the supposed celebration of public figures who don't adhere quite as closely as some to the norm that says women are supposed to starve themselves as a method for being beautiful takes place in the context of not challenging the idea that those ultra-thin women are still the standard of female beauty. What it adds, I think, that I didn't emphasize very much in the original post but which is very important, is that the people who do have that skin-and-bones underweight look are in a very real sense the victims here. Of course they play an important role in perpetuating the standards that are victimizing them, but that doesn't change the fact of their victimization. And, accordingly, a large part of the point of insisting that the Gweneth Paltrow-Heidi Klum look isn't actually that attractive is to make it easier for people not to try and attain it, because it's not remotely healthy and, as the poor woman writing the article being critiqued in Slate keeps saying in a Stockholm Syndrome-y way, being that thin makes life kind of unpleasant in a lot of ways. But, in my opinion, the thing where a lot of women try to look like that to be "beautiful" won't go away just by saying that it's unhealthy, or that people who don't conform like Jennifer Lawrence are also hot, but that people who starve themselves fail to become hot themselves. That isn't, of course, to say that thin people can't be hot. For instance, I personally find both Michelle Wie and (especially in Seasons 3 and 6 of Buffy) Alyson Hannigan to be very attractive, and they're both really thin, but neither of them gives that feeling that they're thinner than they should be. That's the problem, and it shows, and it doesn't look good. Those of us who want to free society from the tyranny of forcing women to emaciate themselves need, I think, to put a lot of emphasis on that last part, for the sake of the very women who ruin their appearances by getting themselves too thin.