Part 7

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Strangely, the vigor for work did not desert. It was an escape, to sit down at a desk and throw off the gnawing awareness of the human envelope. One can almost concoct the fantastic doctrine that the brain is a favorite child of the human body and before any other part is fed, is given the cream (or in this case skimmed milk) of the intake.

However, just what mental processes might have resulted from that same period, corn fed, must remain forever, to those who palpitatingly would know, in the limbo of the hypothetical.

Like almost everything else in moderation, slimming has its points. Its excellent points. Outside moderation, and ’tis of thee I sing, it takes on the proportion of menace to that half of the race which is intrusted with incubation and delivery of the species.

Biological years move slowly and science does not pretend to offer up prematurely compiled data to prove that slenderized women are necessarily better or worse breeding-machines.

Besides, my own paternal ninety-eight-pound grandmother, who produced six two-hundred-pound sons was remarked, but scarcely remarkable, for it.

On the other hand, it requires no barrage of data to logically assume and conclude that a race of undernourished, highly nervous women with a low resistance to disease and an abhorrence of bust measurements, is going to leave its mark upon tomorrow’s child.

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In Italy, Il Duce openly commands that women be big, ripe, fecund, intimating, with no particular authority for it, that these processes go together. As a rule he assumes, and rightly, that women who have many children stop being slender in the process. And so he extols the robust mother who concedes that her beauty lies not in her shape, but in her rôle as mother.

I see no reason why it cannot lie in both, unless the beauty standards of the female of an era drop so low that the proportions of a fertile adult woman must hover around those of a fourteen-year-old boy....

To be sure, for the moment, in America at least, the movement away from the boyish figure seems to be on the up and up, although the Mae West atavism seems to be little more than a half-hearted fad, and millions lie waiting for the chemist or alchemist who can present the human race with the miracle of a slimming serum.

Perhaps after that day comes we will be a happier and a healthier race and the laugh will be on nature, who for thousands of years had made us the butt of her old joke on the fats and the thins, plying some of us with her too, too ample coverage, condemning others to an immutable destiny of skin and bones.

Of the two evils, the latter, by insurance companies at least, is reckoned the least hazardous.

For myself, alas! I cannot even claim that I feel better slim than I did, not so slim. I felt vigorous then. I feel almost as vigorous now. Overweight in excess is beyond controversy an undesirable and dangerous state. If the male more easily escapes its æsthetic menace, he falls rigidly within its pathological perils. The female of the species, more’s the pity, is its social, biological and æsthetic victim.

But now that the laugh has come back to me, I want to reach out a deterring, an ancient-looking hand, to the hordes of slimming women as I observe them nibbling at celery stalks over lunch tables, swapping their diets across bridge tables, baring their backs to the rolling-machine and their breasts to camphor rubs.

And even to those who are dieting for good and authentic reason of one sort or another, I want to reach out that same ancient-looking hand to impress upon them the danger of the short-cut food fad; of following any diet regime outside a physician’s prescribed one; of succumbing to the perils of the pineapple and lamb-chop group of fantasies; of the terrible risks involved in accepting what is almost certain to be the he-says and the she-says dietary word of their not always thoughtful dieting sisters; of the falseness of current æsthetic values as they fluctuate to the season’s fashion; of the absurdity of a woman weighing one hundred and nine pounds undernourishing herself on boiled green tissue-paper.

Whether it is to his credit or due to just plain lack of self-discipline, the fact remains that with his middle-aged susceptibility to embonpoint, the male has not gone to extremes in combating his foe. True, too often he self-indulgently tolerates its perilous and heavy folds about his heartbeat, and rather than suffer the weary battle of reduction, allows himself to take on the convexity of a barrel. The spas are crowded with him, he is not beautiful, and one doubts if he is as happy as he pretends to look. But at least he had not reduced the dietary habits of a nation to roughage, bulk and greens. In fact, watching his women totter past him on their fanatical way to the altar of the emaciated false goddess of their passion, he is apt to look back rather wistfully upon the good old days when Pauline Hall was the hour-glass beauty of his dreams.

Observe the shopkeeper catering to this psychological invalidism of his women customers. The gown he hangs in his show window is shrewdly pinned back at the waist line to one third its natural size, thereby capturing with its suggestion of anemia, the eye of the woman who visualizes herself commensurate with it.

The measurements of the mannequins upon whom are draped the models of the couturières and by way of whom the measurement standards for women are devilishly established, are usually those of underdeveloped boys.

The woman of average proportion who enters such a shop in the hope of finding a ready-to-wear gown is apt to depart feeling herself Gargantuan in a land of Lilliputians.

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What thousands of normal healthy women have been driven to starvation, illness, even death, in order to more nearly conform to the adolescent standards established by the pale little mannequins who stand hours in workrooms while the standardizers and glorifiers of their puniness, drape their poor little flat chests, wind around the knobs of their sparrow-like hips, and wrap their little concave stomachs in fabrics designed to accent emacia!

One wonders what place the boyish-breasted flapper of half a decade ago, or the scarcely less spare female of today, will ultimately have alongside the respective ideals of Ruth among the corn, Mme. de Staël, Signorina Mona Lisa, Laura, Venus, Winged Victory, Lillian Russell.

More and more, today’s standards of American Beauty are being set up and authorized by the bizarre little so-called civilization known as Hollywood, home of the eighteen-day diet, the orange juice, the skimmed-milk-and-baked-potato, the liquid bread, the thyrodic bath salt, the paraffin sweat, the holy rolling-machine, the pugilistic massage, and almost every reduction fad known to this tormented year of our Lord.

By way of Hollywood, the young man is thereby automatically trained to accept his female of the species slinky, low in vitality, and concave in curve. In fact, a plump débutante in the family is more of a problem than a mental delinquent.

And meanwhile, the slimmed, the irritable, the hungry woman takes on the proportion of one of our minor menaces. She does not add to the gaiety of the nation or of the home; she is no healthier, she is prettier only according to the frail standards of a papier-maché city on the west coast where the human envelope is the stock in trade. She is a success chiefly to herself and to her sister of similar standards.

Now I am aware of a certain perverse psychology which you may suspect I am beginning to manifest. My definition of white hair is something you admire only when it is on another woman.

This is not a plea for the tolerance or toleration of excess weight, just so it is on the other fellow. It is a plea for intolerance of excess underweight.