The thigh-gap obsession

Hi there readers!

For this blog post I want to focus on a particular body image that has recently been given much attention, the thigh gap. This past week in one of my communication classes, a classmate of mine brought up how it has become an obsession for many young women. I myself have heard this term floating around campus and among my friends as a new body ideal that young women are desperately attempting to achieve. The thigh gap is a wide gape between a woman’s upper thighs so that regardless of whether she is stationary or mobile, her thighs never touch.  With the help of both Jezebel and Tumblr, I’ve begun to understand why this new obsession is such a problem.  The article I discovered on Jezebel that helped me with this post may be found here. To begin I’d like to make the clear distinction that there is nothing inherently wrong with a natural thigh gap, as it is a genetic occurrence for a small percentage of women. These women naturally possess skinny thighs and wide hipbones. The problem arises from the unnatural fixation that young women have on this virtually unattainable body shape.

There is increasing concern on how young women are starving themselves to attain this hip shape when doctors have proved that it is impossible unless you possess the certain genes. I found a quote on Jezebel that expresses doctors’ main concern with this new phenomenon:

““The intrusion and presence of social media in our lives really does make it very difficult,” said Nancy Albus, chief executive officer of Castlewood Treatment Center, a suburban St. Louis facility that focuses on eating disorders. “The important distinction about thigh gap is it gives you an actual visual to achieve, this visual comparison of how your body does or doesn’t stack up.”

Evidence of this “ intrusion and presence of social media” can be found on Tumblr. By simply typing #thighgap in my search engine, numerous graphic images of dangerously unhealthy women popped up on my dashboard. Bloggers are posting pictures of incredibly unhealthy girls with encouraging scripts such as “ keep up the good work” and “ ugh I would do ANYTHING to look like you”. What happened to girl power and encouraging others to maintain healthy body image? I can’t help but trace this back to the hegemonic beauty image that pervades every media outlet. It’s almost as if women are virtually disappearing as the ideal body image keeps getting smaller and smaller throughout generations. Additionally, the ideal body image has become increasingly difficult to obtain, in this situation it is downright impossible unless genetically passed down. It breaks my heart to see young women encouraging each other to starve themselves over a physiological impossibility.  One positive light, however, in this abysmal topic is that there is some hope for body positivity with Tumblr’s contrasting body acceptance blogs. While Tumblr possesses many posts dedicated to the thigh gap and thinspiration, there are many combatting posts encouraging body acceptance.  My hope is that eventually these blogs will influence and overpower these negative images so that young women may realize that healthy IS sexy!