Word: weightness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Developing the Student Body," Feb. 9, 1994).The call for a university-wide fitness program and available nutritional information may indeed be a worth-while endeavor, but by setting such lofty standards for the bodies of the Harvard student body, Cucci only serves to perpetuate the anxieties of our weight-obsessed culture...
...answer to that question speaks to the thinly veiled sub-text of Cucci's column, which is a simple reinforcement of societal standards of physical appearance. Cucci is not addressing himself to the gravely obese, whose weight poses health problems, but, as he makes clear, to those who could simply use some toning. (Although towards the end of the piece he issues the unsupported and out-of-left-field observation that "Too many people in the Harvard community are eating themselves into the grave...
...women well know, there is a fairly large disparity between the weight we are "allowed" to be for the purposes of health and the weight we are taught we "should" be. No one is going to die an untimely death because they're not sufficiently "trim"; much more dangerous are the eating disorders that the presumed importance of trimness leads us to adopt...
...feel better if we get in shape, Cucci and the rest of society argue. But why will we feel better? Because we will look better, not because we will be in better physical condition. Many more women diet compulsively--an unhealthy means of weight-loss--than exercise; many of those who exercise do so to lose weight, not to become healthy...
Cucci offers the peculiar contention that many students want to improve their bodies but do not know how. In fact, it's no secret that if you work out and/or diet you will lose weight. But that is much easier for some than for others, both because of individual physical constitutions and because of the ways in which eating and food are overdetermined in this society...