Sabrina Strings, PhD | Rethinking Body Image

Hey, what's up, guys? This is Kayla McBride, three-time WNBA All-Star, and you're listening to Train, Body and Mind. Grind, friends, and be a force. Oh, hello. Welcome to Trained Body and Mind, a podcast exploring the cutting edge of holistic fitness. I'm your host, Jacqueline Beyer. Each episode, I connect with the world's leading experts and athletes to talk about mindset.

movement, nutrition, recovery, and sleep, what we like to call the five facets of fitness. Today, I'm talking with a sociologist whose research focuses on the ideal female body, how that ideal has changed over time, and what's behind it. Thank you.

This is one of the problems with having a beauty standard at all. And we're in a moment in which there are so many other types of figures that people want to valorize and prize. And I think that's wonderful. But we have to acknowledge the fact that we still have a standard. That's Dr. Sabrina Strings, a faculty member of the UC Irvine Department of Sociology. She's also the author of Fearing the Black Body.

a book that argues that colonization and racism have played a major role in dictating what we now consider to be the ideal female form. In this episode, Dr. Strings explains how we arrived at the thin ideal. and how that journey has redefined our language, our culture, and even what we consider to be healthy versus unhealthy. Let's start with...

what many call the Rubenesque figure. How did that emerge as an ideal and how long did it last? That's a great question. Interestingly enough, it's not one that I get that often. In reality, when we're taking a look at the history of aesthetics, we can see... that for a very long time in the Western world, curvaceous physiques were prized. Now, it's difficult for us to go back and say exactly when that began, but we do know that by the 14th century, curvaceous physiques were very popular.

in Western Europe. And there were books that were being written and there were portraits that were being done just to be able to celebrate women with curves. So I would suggest that at least from the 14th century, well into... the 17th century, there was a tremendous archive of Western Europeans really going up for the idea of a woman with a little bit of flesh on her bones. When then and how... Did a thinner, skinnier ideal come about?

The Renaissance period, this was also known as the Age of Discovery, coincided with the time period in which Europeans were deciding that it would be a good idea to travel to the far reaches of the globe in order to gather resources and also... human beings as commodities. Which is to say that the Renaissance, when a lot of these incredible developments and aesthetics were taking place, was also the beginning of the slave trade.

In the early years of the slave trade, they encountered black women in various parts of Africa and they thought, oh my gosh, what beautiful physiques these women have. But over time, there was this idea that, hmm. Actually, we think that some people in the colonies, Africans in particular, but also not uncommonly Asians, maybe they are a little bit too indulgent. They love sex, they love food, and as a result...

We think that they tend to be too fat. We want to cultivate a different type of aesthetic, one that shows that we are restrained. We know how to manage ourselves. And so it wasn't until about the 18th century that we start to see the genesis of the slender aesthetic in the West. And it was very much rooted in the notion that, well, people overseas are too big. And Europeans, white Europeans.

We actually think that we want to have a slimmer standard. And who is the we in this? I know you mentioned white Europeans, but I'm guessing it's not the men and the women. Like, who's making these rules? It's the men. So they are the ones who are heading to the colonies. And so for at least the first hundred years of this trend, it was almost exclusively men writing about it. However, over time...

Women who start to think of this as a form of capital, you know, as a resource to prove that they were also part of the superior elite race. So there were Anglo-Saxon women who eventually also started to get in on this game.

And can you describe the skinnier ideal? Like, I think maybe people might have a different idea of what that looks like. What was the general shape? That is an excellent question because we don't have a whole lot of information about that. It was mostly like an idea about restraint. They would talk about women who were more refined, more demure, more svelte.

But it wasn't as if they could give them the 36, 24, 36. I mean, it wasn't like they would give them the dimensions. And actually, that ends up being more powerful than telling people a specific form. Because if you tell people a specific form, they might... achieve it, and feel superior. But the idea with the slender ideal is that you are never thin enough. You always have to be working to be even more thin.

So I'm curious where we stand today with the idea of the muscular women, because I think more and more women are working out. I know I hear a lot of people say, I don't want to be thin anymore. I want to be strong. But have we as a society... come to welcome and accept that? Or is that still stigmatized in some way? Yeah. So...

For a woman, you're always caught between two poles. You're expected to be slender in a particular way, but you are also expected to be toned. And so you're never quite clear what is the right look. is a way in which women are always on the hamster wheel trying to figure out what is the appropriate way to appear in society. So if you're a too buff,

you're going to be stigmatized. If you're not buff enough, you're going to be stigmatized. And it's never clear exactly where you fall on the spectrum until, unfortunately, someone makes a comment about it. Well, and am I missing something? Because I don't sense that there's been an equivalent evolution or even any standards in the ideal body image for men, right? I mean, so men, for the most part, are not... subjected to the exact same pressures. And don't get me wrong, there are...

Definitely men who have eating disorders. And in fact, eating disorders amongst men are on the rise. And this is something that we should definitely talk about because for so long in American society, we have been focused on what's going on with women. Because obviously dieting can constitute a form of oppression. You know, the expectation that women have to diet and have to look a particular way. But because of that, conversations around men and men's bodies and their physical expectations.

are often more quiet. And so we definitely need to start doing more work to figure out what is happening with men. But historically it is the case that men have been able to be more expansive in their physiques, take up more space. have dad bods. without being ridiculed. And in fact, they have found favor with a number of cishet women who think, you know, I prefer a man who's a little bit, you know, more fleshy, a little bit more meaty to grab onto as opposed to being so muscular and hard.

Sabrina, I'm curious, what was the spark for writing your book, Fearing the Black Body? You know, a lot of it had to do with conversations I had with my grandmother. When I was growing up, my grandmother would often pull me into conversations about what we would call bodily aesthetics, but it just didn't feel like it to me at the time. It just felt like a little niggling concern that my

grandmother had that she had brought with her on her long journey. So my family made the trip from Atlanta, Georgia to Los Angeles as part of the Great Migration in 1960. And so this meant that for the first time, my grandmother was living in a community.

that wasn't fully integrated in the way we think of as integrated today but she had the opportunity to live and work around white folks this was not something that would have been possible in the south and For her, it was so peculiar that there were so many white women that she met who were on diets.

decades on in the 1990s. I'm in high school. And I remember coming home one day and having her be like, Sabrina, come here, come here, come here. And I like ran into the living room. What? Now look at Victoria, who is a character on Young and the Restless.

Victoria is dying to be thin. Why are these white women killing themselves to be thin? But there were other times where I would just come home and she would be, you know, old black grandma sitting around with a bowl of greens, like eating the greens and then gesticulating with her fork. Why are these white ladies always on a dot? That's a great question. Right?

But as a kid, especially as a Black girl, it wasn't something I thought about that much. It wasn't as if I felt like I could be any size because there was always pressures to be thick, but not fat in the Black community. But it was years later when... I was living and working in Bayview Hunters Point that I interviewed a couple of women who told me that they didn't want to take their HIV medications. This was an HIV medication adherence clinic.

They did not want to take their HIV meds because they feared they could gain weight. And I thought, oh my gosh, you could die. You know, death is on the line here, but you would risk death. In order to, quote unquote, maintain your figure. So for me, this was the beginning of really questioning this. Because in reality, in our society, we have all these expectations.

And they just seem like they are natural. Well, of course we would expect people to be thin. And then so these kinds of interactions led me to believe, wait, some of these suppositions are... deeply problematic, and we have not spent enough time investigating them. So I decided to go to graduate school to study this phenomenon. So I want to go back to that thin ideal just for a little bit longer. It seems to me like...

There are three forces that came together to dictate what this ideal female body should look like, at least in the West. Racism, patriarchy, Eurocentric worldview. Would you agree? Yes. It mostly boils down to those things, yes. Can you unpack those for us? How did those land us where we are? How did we get here? Yeah, right? Exactly. So one of the things that... race science did was that it created a rationale for the ongoing enterprise of slavery.

people like to forget the fact that slavery really began in the late 14th century. And in the beginning, it was just a question of picking up people who were Black from the continent of Africa and taking them to various colonies throughout the globe. So because of all of the mixing that was going on from people from different continents, what we had was a whole class of persons whose identity wasn't immediately clear just based on skin color.

And so within race science, there was the idea of who can control themselves and who deserves to be controlled. And the notion was that, well... White Europeans, we know how to control ourselves. But we notice that Africans in particular lack these qualities. They're overly invested in their sensuous appetites. So what we need to do is we need to understand how we should be in the world as a model. We need a new aesthetic for ourselves. And we want to adopt.

a more thin ideal. So this is how race came into play. Interesting. All right. And this ideal, which tends to be specific to women, would you say that there's an obsession to achieve it? Or to encourage people to achieve it? I think the obsession is in the encouragement. I think that's probably the right way to look at it. Got it.

Probably most of the people listening to this show have thought to themselves at some point, you know what? I just want to be in the body that I'm in and love myself. I mean, that's a wonderful place to be. And the reality is that more and more people are moving in that direction. But the fact of the matter is that we don't yet have the ability to go outside with all of our self-love and be embraced by the community that surrounds us.

we are still being subject to the terms of colonization. Even though it seems like we live in a free and fair society, at least some of us may think that. It's not as if we can be... full of our own self-love and not face tremendous stigmatization, phobias, and ridicule when we go outside. I mean, there are consequences, reactions, pushbacks to all of this. And for example, there's...

this ever-growing body image vocabulary, I guess, that's emerged. And it seems to be building and building. It includes words and phrases like fat tax, fat acceptance. As a sociologist, how do you make sense of these labels? These labels help us to understand the contours of fat phobia and the oppression that fat people face. But they all go back to the same problem, which is that people don't get to be the size that they are and be respected and live with dignity.

And so the fat tax is a real thing. Absolutely. Fat people can expect to be taxed both emotionally and also financially. I mean, psychically, if you are a fat person, you go outside. No matter how you feel about yourself on the inside, you know that you are going to...

to confront the judging, stigmatizing eyes of people who think that you are living your life the wrong way. They have no idea what you eat. They have no idea how much you exercise. They don't know anything about your genetics, your family history, anything. that you are living your life the wrong way. There's another fat tax. It is a literal financial tax because we have evidence that shows that fat people have fewer opportunities when it comes to employment.

And when you are working at various locations, you might even be incentivized to lose weight or to be thin. So I have a student who's in my course right now, and he told me that he used to work at a grocery store. that would incentivize people to lose weight. And they would actually do their waist to hip ratio measurements in order to be able to determine if the person was worthy of a 20% discount.

or 30% discount in the store. And I was like, no, this can't be, you know, this can't be. And it's just like, what could possibly be the rationale for this? And how is this not a blatant form of employment discrimination? But apparently, because I Googled this, this particular establishment has been doing this kind of thing for at least a decade. Along those lines, there are phrases like...

body positivity, which seem to, in their own way, I guess, kind of become movements. What is hearing the phrase body positivity make you feel? I feel conflicted about this term because on the one hand, we should be able to celebrate our bodies, to inhabit them to their fullness, to delight in our bodies. At the same time, there is this way in America in particular in which people like to...

gloss over very serious forms of structural oppression by just thinking positively. It's like we can think our bodies are great as we want. We can feel however we want to feel about our bodies. That doesn't change the fact that we are going to be stigmatized. traumatized, shamed, called out all manner of other types of disrespect if we don't look in a way that society deems valid. And for women, usually that means beautiful. And this is one of the problems with having a beauty standard at all.

And we're in a moment in which there are so many other types of figures that people want to valorize and prize. And I think that's wonderful. But we have to acknowledge the fact that we still have a standard that was rooted. in colonization. There's still the expectation that women be tall and thin and white. And if you cannot achieve these things, you're not typically going to be considered one of the most beautiful people not in this country.

So if you are a woman and you love your body, that's wonderful. You can be as positive as you want to be. But they're forgetting the other side of the equation, which is that society might still be negative about your body. So when I hear that term, I think it's...

Maybe one step in the right direction. But we can't ever think that we're going to be free, especially as women, without having some type of movement to dismantle the various forms of oppression that are causing us to feel like we have to engage. In your dream scenario, what might that movement look like? What might get us there?

All different types of folks. You know, I say women because women are often central to this narrative. But we're not the only ones who are oppressed. I mean, obviously, trans folks, gender nonconforming folks, men, increasingly even men. We all need to start thinking about how we want to live.

our lives in a different way. Because right now we're all on autopilot. We're all just doing, not all of us obviously, but many of us are simply doing the things that society tells us we need to do to be respectable. But that's not good enough because it is so... painful every day for so many of us to try and meet an ideal that serves very few. After the break we explore some more body image language.

We'll also take a hard look at body mass index, or BMI, and consider this highly controversial question. Are we medicalizing obesity to the point of disease-mongering? So is there any language, any phrases, any labels that you do feel good about that you think are taking us in the right direction? I feel like terms like fat liberation are valuable. And I'm even a little bit, let's say, curious about the term.

body neutrality. Because, you know, body positivity really forces people to try to think positive and think that will change everything. Positive thinking is great. It will not change structural oppression. And so... When I think about the term fat liberation, then I feel excited, especially as a person who is a straight-sized ally to this movement, because it's not...

just about thinking or being neutral. It's about getting free. It's about confronting various forms of oppression that are harming all of us. But we also need to have the medical industry in particular. Reconciling with the fact that for over 100 years, they have been telling people to lose weight to be healthy, whereas that is a losing narrative. People cannot lose weight and keep it off. That's first.

And there are plenty of people who are already slim and who are not healthy because they have... chosen ways to get slim that are themselves unhealthy. So there are all of these very problematic messages that are coming from different sectors. And to me, I think that families are one of the places where we're seeing some improvement.

But we're not seeing the improvement that we need to see in the medical industry. So there are many different ways in which body liberation, fat liberation can look. And those are the terms that I'm most excited about.

Well, that's a great segue because I want to throw out a few topics to you. And I want you to pick the one you want to talk about first. Medical industry is baked into that. But we've got war on obesity, the obesity epidemic, and then diet culture. where should we start? They're all interconnected. So if you want, we can start with the obesity epidemic. Okay. I would love to know, what does that make you think? The obesity epidemic is such a ridiculous con.

Effectively, there were a handful of white male doctors, largely from the United States and from Britain. who were invested in trying to reframe the terms of the relationship between weight and health. This was taking place mostly between the 1970s through the 1990s. Now, here's the major problem. They were only trying to reframe the...

tools that were used to manage people's weight. They were not trying to actually investigate the relationship between weight and health. The way that they even came about their understanding of the relationship between weight and health, which suggested that fatness was inevitably unhealthy, was that insurance companies since the 19th century had been giving them tables that showed the potential for mortality amongst the policyholders. Now, obviously, in the 19th century,

People who held insurance policies were a small segment of the American population, right? Even up into the 1950s. which is how long most of these tables were being used, we're still talking about overwhelmingly middle-class white men, which is to say that these tables didn't even represent all white guys.

much less the rest of us. And yet what they did in the 1970s through the 1990s where they said, okay, we're going to push back against these insurance industry tables. And instead, what we're going to do is we're going to use something called body mass index. They're like, it's arbitrary, but it's no less arbitrary than the insurance industry mandates. So how in the world can that be considered scientific? It's not scientific and it's harmful.

A little history lesson for people. You can probably provide this better than I can. But where BMI originated, right, which was a Belgian mathematician. He was trying to prove a mathematical mean of a population, right? And so it was... devised exclusively by and for white Western Europeans. It was never intended to measure health, to measure fat, the build of individuals. So the fact that we still...

use that today is, I think, hot take for you, right? Like science or pseudoscience. Exactly. And I think more people are coming around. to that understanding. But it's hard to let go of because it's so baked into everything that we do here. I mean, so if obesity isn't a real thing, then what can justify all of the many companies that profit from telling people to lose weight?

So there's a very clear interconnection between these weight loss companies, the diet companies, all of the various forms of diets that are always cropping up, and the medical field. And in fact, there's an excellent book called Killer Fat. by a scholar named Natalie Boero. And which she shows all of the different corporations and often weight loss companies that were invested in lobbying the medical field in order to get obesity on the jacket as something that...

that the World Health Organization should be concerned about as an index of ill health. So it's not as if these things are disconnected. There's a very clear relationship between diet culture and the so-called obesity epidemic. Yeah. And I mean, what we're really talking about is the medicalization of obesity. And as you said it, it is big business. It is big pharma. And the R&D budgets for these, quote, treatments for obesity are in the billions. And we're actually approaching the...

10-year anniversary of obesity being categorized as a disease by the American Medical Association. So I know you are not a medical professional, but as someone who studies social behavior and interaction, how do you feel about it being considered? a medical disease? I mean, it shouldn't be considered anything at all. Fatness is just a descriptor. It is not in any way some type of medical condition. It does not have to be. And so it's deeply troubling.

That rather than trying to revisit some of these old studies that were, again, completely flimsy and coming up with new understandings of how people might lead healthy lives, instead, they decided to double down. and to claim that being fat was some type of disease. It is not a disease. It is simply a form of embodiment. Well, and medically...

Obesity is also considered a clearly established risk factor. So for things like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, some cancers, sleep apnea, several other conditions. So there is obviously a line between causality and correlation, but for some...

They don't know how to make that distinction. For some, it's very fine. Whether someone believes it's a disease or a risk factor, there is an indication, as we've been talking about, from the medical community that we should just consider it abnormal. Is this a type of disease mongering and what does this have the potential to do?

When you are stigmatized as being considered obese, you're less likely to go to the doctor in the first place because what's going to happen? You're going to show up and the doctor is going to tell you to lose weight, even if what you are presenting for has nothing to do with your weight.

So there are so many different social costs of this. This is also one of the psychic problems that are impacting people who are not considered obese, right? Because we're all supposed to be afraid of approaching the possibility. of being obese. So it's not as if it only affects people who are...

considered within that category. I like to call it, you know, the carrot and the stick. It's like, okay, well, you are fat, and so we're going to hit you with a stick you better reform. But you're thin, and so we're going to give you a carrot. And if you want to continue to get these carrots, you better continue to be thin.

There's no outside of it for people living in the United States. So BMI is one example that we talked about briefly. Obviously, we could have an entire episode on that. But would you say that the research has failed? us here in general yeah The major problem with most of this BMI research is that there are a bunch of scholars who are using this very flawed tool, and many of them will recognize that it's flawed, but it's a quick and easy way to make a statement about health.

I unfortunately was recently in the room in which a researcher was trying to use BMI to make a claim about health outcomes amongst Latinx immigrants. And my response was, hey, here's the history of BMI. Here's how it's flawed. This is problematic. You should not do that. Even the NIH recently had a webinar moving beyond BMI.

And this person's response was, well, it's still the standard. That's all they said. It's still the standard. And I thought, so you would be willing to propagate a problematic standard that is rooted in racism? even though there are so many scholars going on saying, hey, this is a problem, because it is still the standard. What do you hope to see in the research space for us to really evolve to where we can use the science about?

I would like to see research that is not based solely on correlations that are found amongst. I want people to do the kind of experimental research that can actually provide us with details about the trajectory. illness. It's not well understood why some of these things are correlated, but it does not suggest that one thing is the cause for the other. Fatness is not the cause of all of these various chronic illnesses.

Right, and it doesn't address the many, many, many other variables that could be confounding that correlation. Exactly. I'm curious about you and your personal journey and what that's been like with the awareness and the acceptance of...

Just the reality of where we are today in this topic. Yeah, you know, when I was in high school, I very much hoped to... look thick. People say slim thick now, but growing up, we just called it thick. And so you wanted to have a nice slim waist, a full bust. You definitely wanted to get the legs and the backside working. You wanted to have this kind of figure. And so it wasn't as if there were no physical goals. They were just different from what was happening in the mainstream.

It took me a long time to realize like, oh, I'm probably never going to be thick. You know, my figure is not probably going to do that. And that's fine. I can just look the way that I look. I can show up the way that I show up. But when I started to do this research, when I started to really appreciate how much of this had not been studied from a racial perspective and how it needed to be.

One of the things that I had to confront was that there was so much that was going on about the so-called obesity epidemic that it felt right and true. It wasn't until after I graduated and... started to truly understand what these statistical reports meant, which unfortunately is not a whole lot, that my own thinking about this evolved. I was like, oh, there's really no there there. They keep trying to make us think that medicine has proven.

that fatness is a problem, when in reality, medicine had actually co-opted some of the ideas from various cultural spaces in order to reproduce our cultural notions. I sort of had to... come around not just on my own hopes for looking like Rihanna at some point, but also on my own understanding as to the relationship between weight and health, largely because this is misunderstood even now. And you're also a yoga teacher, right?

Yeah. So I'm a yoga teacher. I used to be a runner for years, but then I had a foot injury and had to have surgery, and so I couldn't run at the same level anymore. So I discovered yoga. When I started teaching yoga... I was in a yoga teacher training in which one of the teachers was going on and on and on about, you know, sometimes people show up to her class or, God forbid, her retreats and they're obese and, oh no.

saying some of the most vile things. And here I am, a student trying to combat her obvious... fat phobic sentiments. I'm like, you can't look at a person and know what they can do. You can't look at a person and know how much they ate. None of these things are accurate.

So why is it so disturbing for her that a fat person would have been in her yoga room? This is part of the reason why for a long time I was doing a yoga activism with people like the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. Because we were like, hey. Yoga is for all bodies. Yoga is not an opportunity for you to transform your physique into something that could get you on the cover of a magazine. Yoga is an opportunity for us to get free from those ideas.

So how about we do a practice that allows all of us to settle into our bodies and appreciate them? Awesome. Thank you. I love those ideas.

All right, we got to wrap this up as much as I don't want to. I'll give you one more and then I'll cut you loose. As a sociologist, I'm guessing that you always keep your eye on the larger societal tapestry. So given that... Where do you think we should focus our time and our energy if we want to create a society that is more accepting of the incredible diversity of shapes and sizes that we all come in?

Transformation always starts within. I think people might be surprised to recognize that they harbor some biases that they thought they were long past. Even though you think of yourself as a person who is a good human being, maybe spend some time thinking about, okay, but even though I think I'm a good human being, do I expect people to weigh a particular thing? Do I look...

at people? Do I address people differently based on their size? If people started to realize and be honest with themselves about how they are treating others... That is the first step in the transformation. But we also need to start having an organization, a group of folks, energy surrounding, combating the ways in which the medical field propagates fat phobia.

Because we can't imagine that we can be body positive and then show up to the doctor's office and have the doctor completely ridicule and shame us for our bodies. So I would say we need to be introspective. We need to change ourselves. And we need to organize ourselves in order to push the medical industry to take seriously that a person can be healthy no matter their size.

Sabrina, thank you so much for this powerful conversation. It's been enlightening. It's been super real. I'm really happy that we were able to use this platform for such an important topic. Thank you for sharing your time with us today. Thank you so much for having me.

Sabrina has me thinking about mirrors. The most common thing we think about with a mirror is ourselves. And one of the more common questions we ask in front of the mirror has to do with our bodies. Am I too fat or too thin? Too this? Or to that. And as Sabrina laid out, it's pretty clear we're measuring ourselves against arbitrarily created standards. But there's another mirror. The mirror that an issue like the idealized body can hold up to society. And that mirror...

if we look closely at it, asks far more important questions about what we value and why. And it's those questions that motivated us to have this conversation with Dr. Strings. I'm so thankful to Sabrina for shedding light on this incredibly important topic.

On the next episode of Trained, we talk with Nike yoga teacher Maria Wada about her lifelong dream of dancing with Britney Spears and how dreams have a funny way of taking us places we've never expected. This has been Trained. Talk to you soon.

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