Whose fault is it anyway?

We’ve started out this year with a few readings about people being overweight, whether it was Fijian women or an American author. In each story, there was a different person to blame. In Ellen Goodman’s article, she wrote that as the Western culture expanded to the island, it changed the traditional Fijian way of thinking. Before 1995, essentially before television had come to the island, the people of Fiji thought women with curves were beautiful. “Big was beautiful and bigger was more beautiful—and people really did flatter one another with exclamations about weight gain.” Ellen Goodman and Anne Becker both blame the American media for this change in Fijian culture. Although the media definitely doesn’t help the situation, ultimately it is the woman’s choice what extreme measures she takes to make herself feel and look good according to her own standards. America definitely has it’s messed up standards for what looks good; however, we did not force it on the Fijians. They made the choice and the American culture should not be blamed for it.

Judith Moore’s book gives us a completely different outlook on this topic with her take no prisoner's attitude. She is mad at the many people who made fun of her and took advantage of her and she doesn’t mind voicing it. It’s not quite what most readers would’ve expected to read; I was expecting to hear a sob story telling me why I should feel sorry for her for being overweight. I was waiting for Jane Stern to say that it was a story of her excuses for why she was overweight as a child and why it continued into her adulthood. But that’s not what I received. There are real reasons as to why she gained weight as a child and she accepts them and has tried to lose weight but just can’t. There were factors that played into her weight gain; however, she did not try to blame it on someone else.