by Caroline Weber

I want to reply briefly to the commentary generated by my posting about the fashion world's recent outcry against anorexia, and about the steps designers and editors have since taken to promote a less skeletal feminine ideal. Whereas, like designers Giorgio Armani and Valentino, I have taken this shift to represent a salutary step toward promoting healthier and more realistic views of the female body, many readers expressed concern that in fact it is simply a concession to the (distinctly unhealthy) rise of obesity in American culture. As a professor of French, I am of two minds about this response. On the one hand, I have spent enough time living in Paris to have absorbed a certain amount of the concern--knee-jerk disdain, even--that that city's inhabitants tend to express when talking about "all the fat people in America." On the other hand, French thought at least since Michel Foucault has emphasized the importance of questioning seemingly self-evident categories like "madness," "criminality," and "health." It is in this tradition that, in his book American Vertigo (2006), the French author Bernard-Henri Lévy takes a closer look at American obesity: "the new epidemic that is supposedly in the process of becoming the leading cause of death in the country, ahead of cigarette smoking and cancer." His findings seem to me useful to mention here, insofar as they apply a healthy dose of skepticism and critique to a "problem" whose problematic dimensions may in fact be (problematically) overrated. As many readers of this blog surely remember, Garrison Keillor roundly condemned Lévy in his review of American Vertigo for The New York Times Book Review last year, on the grounds that the Frenchman promotes unfair stereotypes of fat Americans. Truth be told, however, Lévy does more to dispel than to uphold this anti-American caricature so beloved of many of his countrymen. In reading studies written--in the exaggerated "state of emergency" tone the press loves to use when it declares war on crime, drugs, terrorism, or now obsesity--Lévy notes that "the method of calculation used [in such studies], the well-known BMI (body mass index...), places the bar so low that if the same measure were applied to many European countries, roughly the same percentage of people would be affected." Lévy goes on to review "studies from Cornell University and the National Center for Health Statistics; ... a study by Glenn Gaesser, a professor at the University of Virginia; [and] an essay by Paul Campos on the 'myth' of obesity," all of which, "not content with denying a cause-and-effect relationship between the increase of BMI and mortality, demonstrate, for instance, that overweight nonsmoking white men die from cancer less often than non-overweight subjects." Not having read this literature myself, I cannot attest to its persuasiveness or medical validity. But I appreciate Lélvy's effort to cast doubt on something that too many people--French and American alike--perhaps take for granted. Certain respondents to my post about the proliferation of larger-sized designs at The Gap, featured on the cover of this month's Vogue, noted cynically that stores and fashion magazines are simply going where the money is: with the majority, i.e. with fat people. As Lévy points out, though, the weight-loss industry itself is a huge money-making venture, one whose marketing strategy makes enormously effective use of "the prestigious testimonials of science and medicine." What is more, he continues, contrasting the skinniness industry with its ostensible opposite, the fast-food business, "inventing obesity--that is to say, claiming first, the being fat is a disease; second, that this disease must be treated; and third, that it will never, despite treatment, be completely cured--creates a type of dependence that is at least equal to that produced by the inventors of flavors, fragrances, and packaging that are designed to develop a loyal following among junk-food consumers." Similarly, we might ask, do the new images of, and clothing for, curvier women that I discussed in my last posting really have any more commercial foundation, motivation, or power than do the old images of, and clothing for, underweight women? Flipping through the piles of fashion magazines I keep next to my desk, I would say that, notwithstanding the fashion industry's recent move to include larger women in its imagery, the answer is no. Do not certain businesses and discourses sustain the culture of anorexia just as surely as other businesses and discourses enable the culture of obesity? As I reach now for my non-fat latte and my low-carb muffin--rewards for a long, punishing work-out at my expensive New York gym--I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.