After trying to make some sort of sense out of the ridiculousness of David Kleban’s column “Have You Lost Weight?”, I am left with nothing else to do but wonder if we go to the same school.
The perspective that this column takes is not one of thoughtful awareness, but rather one of the all-too characteristic ignorance that erodes away at the efforts of those who work so hard to abolish destructive body images at Duke.
He, like so many others, is simply missing the point.
Implicit in sentences such as “there are some who want to rid our culture of any factors that encourage people to avoid [obesity]” is the notion that the problem of obesity is somehow as pressing as that of the “few who develop pathological eating habits.”
To note the fallacy of this reasoning, I simply ask Kleban and those who share his perspective to do one thing.
Look around you. How many clinically obese students do you see walking around campus every day? How many have you seen since your time at Duke? Now ask yourself, how many dangerously-thin individuals comprise this student body?
If you are honest with yourself, you will realize that the concerns of the Duke community are justifiably focused on that which is posing the greatest threat to the health and well-being of so many young women: eating disorders.
Kleban is right: obesity-related health issues are among the most serious threats to American life today.
But let’s be honest: the incidence of such problems at this University is nowhere near that of the national average. The obesity epidemic is not and should not be our greatest health concern at Duke.
What Student Health educational programs have done and should continue to do is take a realistic stance on the major problems afflicting the student body, recognizing that assuming a passive approach to the “innocent” thinking that perpetuates such problems is tantamount to encouraging the spread of poisonous thought patterns that lead to these disorders in the first place.
Yes, the billboards on the C-3 want us to “do away with [bodily standards] altogether,” and rightly so. I, for one, am sick of seeing so many talented young women held to absurd standards imposed by Kleban’s and so many others’ “devotion to healthy and beauty.”
A healthy medium does exist between being weight-conscious and becoming obsessed with thinness, and it starts with developing your own standards without regard for what you see on TV or read in The Chronicle.
Health is about more than a dress size, and beauty is about more than what you see when you look in the mirror. I can only hope that the women of Duke who have read Kleban’s column will be smart enough to realize that his or anyone else’s approval of your looks or body size is the last thing you need.
Emily O’Brien
Trinity’ 06
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