American Beauty:
How Thinness Became the Ideal

In American society, thinness is equated with beauty and health, while fatness is associated with laziness, lack of self-control, unhealthiness, and unattractiveness. These flawed and oversimplified ideas are widely accepted and used to justify the belief in thin superiority. The concept of thin superiority for women in America, along with its accompanying justifications, can be traced back to racist origins.

When enslaved Africans were brought to England, a multitude of black stereotypes spread throughout the Western world; black people were seen as fat, lazy, carnal, and gluttonous. Anything that shared some similarity with black people, or how England viewed black people, was considered unattractive, mainly fatness.  

The distaste for both blackness and fatness is evident in media from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Over time, the overt aversion towards blackness gradually diminished in media and society, but the pervasive influence of the thin ideal has endured to the present day.