The fat wars

Last week, the Bolshoi Theater fired one of Russia's premier ballerinas for being, at 5'6" and 109 pounds, too fat. Granted, other factors such as her notorious diva-like temperament may be at hand, but it's a bit unnerving that the theater found it reasonable to make her weight, of all things, the official cause of her dismissal. And while the world of ballet is entitled to have different standards than the world at large, when The New York Times quotes her as saying, "I don't eat ice cream now. I eat spinach leaves and vegetables," to most people these statements probably sound alarmingly familiar. Among us are a significant number of people across the spectrum of body types and sizes-people who are far from being world-class ballerinas-who merely eat, or wish they could merely eat, rabbit food.

It's easy to blame our preoccupation with weight on the media and the perfect, airbrushed bodies we see every other blink. But is it just a single message we are receiving? On one hand, we should be celebrating beauty in all sizes. Plus-size models are lauded for being brave, the designers and magazine editors who hire them for being even braver. People who wear whatever they want, despite how unflattering it may be on their figures, are admired for being confident and impervious to others' judgments. On the other hand, the headlines are crammed with weight-correlated diseases and how the percentage of overweight and obese people in our country is high, too high, embarrassingly high compared to other nations. America, how dare you be superficial enough to say we need to be thin to be attractive! America, how dare you be lazy enough to let yourself become so fat!

The main problem with being overweight in this country, with the exception of health complications, is not about unrealistic desires to look like celebrities or difficulties finding clothing that fits (consider, for instance, that as a size six I had trouble shopping in Korea). People associate being overweight with, among other negative attributes, the lack of self-control. If you just weren't so lazy, the thinking goes, if you just exercised this much, ate these foods, used these machines, if you just had some willpower-you could be thin and beautiful. Overweight people generally aren't perceived to be as intelligent or interesting either. Unlike racism or sexism or ageism, which are viewed as unfair because they penalize people for what they cannot help, discrimination against overweight people, if not by law then at least in the subconscious of society, is considered reasonable. People, especially thin people, have no sympathy for those who are overweight. Being overweight is the last sin in America.

We are taught early on, along with the golden rule and numbers up to 100, that "it's only the inside that counts." Note that the other lessons we learned around the same time include that there are no winners and losers, and (ironically) that the good guys always win. But although body weight isn't inconsequential, it isn't everything, and there must be some sort of happy medium that we can find between Americans' being concerned enough about their weight that they don't have serious health problems, but not concerned enough that they discipline their eating habits by thinking, as many do in Korea, "If I eat too much I'll be fat like Britney Spears."

As if senior year of college isn't stressful enough as it is, one of my best friends, at the peak of a lifelong struggle with her weight, is undergoing a severe, self-imposed regimen of exercise and calorie-counting. To her it's not a plan for fitness or weight loss, but rather for "self-improvement," because that's what she says she's doing: improving herself and her chances for a better life. "Fat people aren't hired as easily," she says matter-of-factly as every sweet, every carbohydrate, basically every thing she craves becomes her enemy. While I want to tell her she looks great and she is great and she's my great, irreplaceable best friend and it doesn't matter at all-it does matter, though not to me. It does to the larger population that will meet her and judge her and interview her. While I've been telling myself for so many years that looks are inconsequential, my idealism is crumbling and I find myself thinking that perhaps I do understand, on some level, why her parents Fed-Exed her a bathroom scale. Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J.