While scrolling through social media today, I came across a TikTok post that made me think about all the research I’ve done on the backstory of body image and its connection to racism; it is another theory I found interesting and relevant. This explains how for a lot of generations the idea was to be more full figured and to have curves and this was the ideal body for many generations, however in this video the explanation was that this was happening until there was a spread in tuberculosis which during the time this was most common and afterwards women wanted to look skinny and sick the exact words used were, “they wanted to look like they were slowly dying” because people thought that the lines of tuberculosis no matter how bad it was and how many people died from it the women were considered to be more beautiful. After all, it gave them sparkly eyes and rosy cheeks, which is still the idea today; the lines also caused a loss of appetite, which came with a malnourished, thin body. This was unattainable beauty, but it could only be achieved through suffering, a, nd thit waseverely roromanticized and shown as beautiful in different pieces of artwork. For women to achieve this new look, they would take extreme measures: women would take poison, undergo blood withdrawals, and starve themselves.
It is interesting that this is another point of contention, and that many different factors might lead to this trend because both are true at the same time. I need to research this further because it is important to consider different points of view; however, this might not be as thoroughly researched as the other hypothesis, so that I will look into it further.
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