Rosalyn Leban

Think about your idea of beauty. Is it a full-bodied girl with a little bit of chubbiness around the hips? Or maybe a boy with muscles like rocks? A girl who can fit into size 00 clothes?

In all likelihood, your idea of beauty comes from the media. And right now, that means skinny. Skinny is “in” right now. We see it on the covers of magazines, where models with tiny waists dominate the covers of all kinds of magazies. We watch this bias on T.V., where the Project Runway designer Ven Budhu insisted that he was “shocked and disappointed” to work with a plus-size person, rather than a size 0 model, saying that it was “unfair” to him to have to work with a person with a fuller figure. We watch fat people get made fun of in well-loved shows like “Friends,” where Monica, a beautiful, skinny Courtney Cox, hates her former, fat, high-school-er self. We don’t think anything of it; after all, it’s natural to like oneself better when one is pretty than when one is ugly.