This piece was written by one of our dear readers—a woman with something real to say. Each month, we handpick the best submissions for Dear Reader because we’re after that PROVOKED bite: truth, intelligence, and heart. These stories come from women our age—women who’ve lived enough to know better and still care enough to tell it anyway. Because being seen and heard matters. Because storytelling is how we stitch ourselves to one another. And because when one woman speaks her truth, another finally recognizes her own. — Susan Dabbar, Editor-in-Chief
Women have spent generations shrinking themselves. The real question is why.
At our annual family picnic, my mother turned to me with a brownie in her right hand and asked me, “Should I?”
She was 100 years old and asking her youngest daughter for permission to indulge in a treat at a family celebration. Something felt very wrong with this picture.
Wrong, but very familiar.
What We Hand Down
My mother had been on a diet for my entire life, with the scale deciding her attractiveness and her worth. I watched her behave as though she could never be small enough to fit into the space the world allotted her. And she worked on it her entire life, from exercising with Gloria on the living room floor to frequenting a local Curves well into her 90s.
When she was about that same age, I asked to borrow a rather fitted sheath dress. She commented that I’d have to wear a girdle to hide my round belly. Her head snapped up when I responded, “Oh, no! This bump is my badge of motherhood.” She drew in a sharp breath: “Oh, I never thought of it that way. I always thought we were supposed to keep our stomach flat.”
My eldest sister told me that she ate only one hard-boiled egg for lunch because it took more calories to burn a hard-boiled egg than the egg itself contained. She was 25. I was 11. In my eyes, she knew everything.
Two generations believed in and passed down the “tradition” that a woman’s worth was inversely proportional to her size and rested entirely on her appearance. The chief instrument was the scale.
Thin by Another Name
Botticelli’s rounded, voluptuous Venus, once the icon of feminine beauty, was replaced by the stick figures of Twiggy and then Kate Moss. Our medical system, based on data from the male of the species, began using weight as the criterion for health. But did we ever really leave behind or get beyond thin, small, white, and blond as ideals of feminine beauty? When it became politically incorrect to espouse those ideals, we reshaped ourselves around words like strong, healthy, and beautiful from within.
In trying to be the perfect woman, we elided what was buried deep beneath our awareness and simply moved along the surface, using “fit” to replace the word “thin,” while still equating the number on the scale to attractiveness. Still, underneath it all, we continue to subscribe to the dictum that a woman’s worth lies in her attractiveness, and that attractiveness is determined by the cultural mores set by men.
”Healthy” was ”thin.” We renamed the cage.
Breaking the Cycle, Eating the Brownie
We claim to be free from dietary restrictions and from appearance-based judgment. Yet, no matter what form it takes, we feed this subservience.
This isn’t really about carbs, metabolism, or muscle mass. It’s about control—how our autonomy and self-love have been subjugated to someone else’s desire for us.
And how we—through generations—perpetuate it.
Just when I thought we were headed in a healthier direction—weight positivity, greater awareness of weight discrimination, deeper conversations promoting beauty from within—the Ozempic trend descended upon us. And we’re buying it hook, line, and sinker. Thin is back in. In the biggest way.
This shift backward from the mantras of healthy and strong to “objective: thin” hits my gut with the most profoundly patriarchal punch.
When my hero, tennis star Serena Williams—former champion and spokeswoman for positive self-image—began doing ads for GLP-1s, my heart sank. It showed me that the wellness era was a rebrand, not a liberation.
I have no judgment about this. I’m as much a participant as the next woman, and the ones on either side of her. But I see it. And I cringe.
What I want to see is a movement of soulful, radical, militant acknowledgment—and then rebellion against this imprisonment. Freeing ourselves to eat the brownie is as good a place to begin as any. Freeing ourselves from the albatross of the scale is better.
Because we’re in this together—our daughters, our granddaughters, our sons and grandsons too.
We carry this weight until we decide, together, to put it down.
