Throughout history, women’s bodies have been dictated by others. In her groundbreaking book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that “women feel guilty about female fat because we implicitly recognise that under the parable, women’s bodies usually are not our own but society’s.” Within the Victorian era, particularly within the mid to late 1800s, women were encouraged to be ‘plump’ and ‘round’, because it showed men that they might make good moms and were ‘sexually available’. Within the Twenties to Nineteen Eighties, the best female form shifted towards thinness because the figure of the feminine sex symbol had “trimmed down dramatically” during this time. As beauty standards proceed to vary, women change together with them, turning themselves inside out with...
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