When I was a little girl, I absolutely devoured Nancy Drew books. I loved the suspense of the stories and solving the mysteries along with Nancy. In every novel they would explain the physical characteristics of the main characters, and when it came to physical attributes, Nancy Drew was always depicted as "a perfect size nine." I remember thinking that a size nine was what I wanted to be because I idolized Nancy Drew. However, those novels were written in the late fifties/ early sixties and while I don't think that a size nine would be considered overweight, it certainly is no longer the ideal.

When I was reading Susan Bordo's "Reading the Slender Body," I was intrigued by her argument that when women in society exert more power, than the physical female "norm" becomes more androgynous (with more of a male slant). In this way, women are inspired to become very slender and to downplay their feminine characteristics such as breasts or hips. While I can understand her theory, I think that there is another reason for the trend towards thinness and the correlation between societal gender disruptions and the skinny fad.

One thing that was evident from Bordo's and other class readings was that our society plays a major role in determining what the ideal body type is. For good or bad our society is based on a patriarchal, capitalistic system. For these reasons, I hypothesize that the "normal" female body becomes smaller when she becomes more powerful, and that this happens because it enables men to feel physically bigger and superior. This allows them to continue their power domination in at least one area. In this way the trend for thinness would be a way of widening the physical gap between the sexes instead of moving towards androgyny.