Susan Bordo Reading The Tender Body Summary

We, the women of the world, have been labeled. We have been judged, priced and placed in window displays as the mannequins for the advertisement of our own personal bodies. We are sale pitches of the capitalistic ideals of the able bodied, not only in the terms of weight, but also in shape, figure and ability. Susan Bordo’s article ‘Reading The Slender Body’ and the effect this ideal has on all women both mentally and physically. In this discussion I analyze Bordo’s ‘Reading The Slender Body’ and how Neo Catholic, Christian ideals, capitalism and male dominance have greatly crippled societies values towards certain minority parties, such as disabled women, and women that are considered to be the antithesis of the idle slender body and the able

body.
Susan Bordo approaches this subject reflecting on the late Victorian era.

During this time people began to shift their values of weight toward the even later Grecian ideals of ‘dieting’, which was essentially starving themselves, for their own personal principles such as finding self worth in religion or in politics. So ultimately this slender body ideal grew until it became imbedded into our culture. Others looked at begin fat almost just as immorally as Christian sin; mind and body needed to be free of all impurities and fat became one of them. Bordo elaborates on this growth by stating,

“In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, the practices of body management begin to be middle-class preoccupations, and concern with diet becomes attached to the pursuit of an idealized physical weight or shape; it becomes a project in service of body rather than soul. Fat, not appetite or desire became the declared enemy, and people began to measure their dietary achievements by the numbers of the scale rather than by the level of their mastery of impulse and excess.

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Soon after this ordeal, capitalism took hold of the slender body expanding into our media which systematically began changing our standards and beliefs. These media representations of weight and the perfect body took over magazines ads and commercials, the majority of them objectifying the female body by exploiting women with smaller frames and aiming their ads towards all females who weren’t apart of the slender body and saying “Hey, your body is disgusting, you should look like her who is the real epitome of beauty, buy our product so you can be like her!”
However the slender/ideal body does not only disfavor the ‘fat’ but also the disabled. In a recent article by Gillian Giles titled “You Do Not Exist To Be Used.” Giles reflects on her childhood growing up as a disabled person and how society distinguishes self worth based on productivity. Since the American government is based on late undeveloped Christian religion and stems from the base of capitalism, productivity had become our moral obligation. Civilization is made to progress, we as the people of the 21st century are expected to be productive with our lives and in our community. However in Giles opinion this dehumanizes us, and suppresses the people whom cannot even truly be considered as productive such as people with disabilities and also people of the subcategory body type, fat. Gillian explains her opinion on the productivity of the body and how capitalism is weakening society.
“In evaluating our life purpose and the value and purpose of others within a framework of capitalist productivity we not only shame and isolate bodies that aren’t valued as productive we unleash a form of body terrorism that communicates that it is not one’s body that should be valued but rather what that body can effectively produce.”

Often enough begin a person with more weight than the slender body can be socially similar to a person with a visible disability. Weight and external abnormalities are the first things that are passed through judgment when encountering a stranger. These attributes also come with ridicule whether verbal or not. With disabled people it may be pity, be wilderness and sometimes disgust, but usually it is just discomfort at the idea that this happened to a person, and it could ultimately happen to themselves. With fat, the ridicule is mostly accompanied by disgusted which often destroys self-confidence and can mentally cripple a person. It is not only this that these two subjects have in common but also the cynically belief that these people have no use in society. If a woman is fat, she is ultimately ‘not attractive’ or ‘delicate enough’ to attract a man in the way she is suppose to so ultimately there is no real value or use for her. With disability it is a very similar ideal, women are looked at as objects so if there is something wrong with her external appearance, its obvious to society that she can not live by her reproductive obligations as a woman.
So if this idea is so widely discriminating and dehumanizing why exactly has it expanded into a lifestyle? Like all other forms of suppression this slender body is a way for men to maintain power over women. Young girls are raised to look at their bodies as something that needs to be controlled and maintained in order to appeal to the man’s beauty ideals. Just like in the late Victorian age men were expected to be the provider and to be powerful both mentally and physically. Susan Wendell is one of the first to write about women and disability in her article “Toward A Feminist Theory Of Disability”.
“Of course, acting on behalf of one’s health can be a virtue, and undermining one’s health can be a vice, but “success” at being healthy, like beauty, is always partly a matter of luck and therefore beyond our control. When health is spoken of as a virtue, people who lack it are made to feel inadequate. - But just as treating cultural standards of beauty as essential virtues for women harms most women, treating health and vigour as moral virtues for everyone harms people with disabilities and illnesses.”

Even though the role of women in society is changing it is still largely accepted that women should live by reproductive principles.

However when the woman begins to step away from this designated position and takes on male attributes, men cower. It becomes somewhat terrifying to men that their equally powerful counterparts have begun to take their place in society. So in order to suppress, women, men imbed these specific viewpoints into the brains of developing women and they grow to become even more suppressed by the slender body.

Although Susan Bordo does describe the slender body in way that examines multiple sides of view, such as male versus female ideal bodies and how the culture of the slender body from the past effects the present. She lacks in her ending argument, that we cannot change our culture or its gender suppression. It may not be easy to change something that has been taught to all of North American society, however like Susan Wendell says in her conclusion of ‘Toward a Feminist theory of Disability” that it is about “confronting these issues” which can often help people see this new opinion, that there is not only this one slender body that is defined as perfect but there are multiple ideal

bodies.