1C Lesson for Too "Close to the Bone" (367)

Part One. Lexicon

 

1. Fatphobic (link supports writer), an irrational fear of being fat rooted in a mass social neuroses that unfairly hits women.  It’s also called “thinness mania.”
2. Etiological: studying the causes of something. The noun is etiology.
3. Bigorexia, the irrational sense that some men suffer of never being muscular enough. It’s also called dysmorphia. We have to ask ourselves, is this, like the anorexia religion, a cultural problem or the whacked-out 1%?
4. Post World War II fashion and health ideas pointed toward slenderness and an abject hatred of fat. See page 370.
5. Ideal femininity became embodied by twig adolescent body starting in the 1960s and has gotten worse and worse. See page 370. Some theorize this twig body is a form of oppression to counteract the women’s movement of the 1960s, an insidious way of reversing equal rights.
6. Hyperbole, (Beauty Myth had false statistics that exaggerated anorexia and eating disorders) over-exaggerated presentation of crisis to make issue more than it really is for the purpose of self-promotion. For example, the potential for self-destruction is far greater for being fat or being in an unhappy marriage than it is being too skinny.
7. BMI, body mass index: Body mass index is defined as the individual's body weight divided by the square of his height. The formulas universally used in medicine produce a unit of measure of kg/m²: At six feet tall and 221 pounds, my BMI is 30, the definition of obese.

 

Part Two. Essay Topics

 

Question: Is anorexia, or the cult of slimness, a religion that has swept the country, as Roberta Seid claims, or is this problem limited to the fringe? 

Answer to the question is your thesis:

 

While Roberta Seid points out insightful causes to the pressures to be slim in our culture, her assertion that we are a nation that has succumbed to the “religion of anorexia” is overstated hyperbole. Her argument collapses when we consider ____________________________, _____________________________, ______________________________, and ___________________________________.

 

While McMahon is intent on dismissing Roberta Seid’s essay as shrill hyperbole, in fact her assertion that we our a nation beholden to the cult of anorexia is demonstrable evidenced by _________________________, _______________________________, ________________________________, and ________________________________