Try a New Year’s Revolution
Jennifer Weiner DEC. 31, 2016, The New York Times
A. But we know him.
B. Diets can monopolize your energy, take up your time and do a number on your self-esteem. They turn your attention inward, on changing your body, not the world. And they have a well-documented tendency to fail, no matter the level of dedication or resolve of the dieter.
C. No matter what bit of 2016 has left you feeling battered and blue, the siren song of self-improvement has never sounded louder. We can’t heal the divides in the country, can’t stop violence, can’t keep death from taking the artists and actors who defined our youth.
D. By now, we’re all familiar with Mr. Trump’s standards of female beauty. Thanks to tapes leaked and public, thanks to well-publicized remarks about the women he suggested weren’t attractive enough for him to have paid attention to, a decade of chats with Howard Stern, the models he has married, the beauty pageants he owned and the compliments he’s lavished on his daughter Ivanka, we know that beauty, in the eye of the president-elect, is tall and slim and young.
E. Plus, the chorus of body shamers has never been louder, or more empowered. Mr. Trump once called Miss Universe Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy”. Ann Coulter’s new hobby is posting shots of larger women at rallies with captions like “Without fat girls, there would be no protests” prompting Jennifer Wright, the author of this article, to tweet: “As long as we’re body shaming, congrats on losing that last half a pound where a heart would be”. Bottom line.
F. But here we are, once again, in the month of New Year’s resolutions; the month where even the firmest believer in self-acceptance can find herself considering the diets despite all their drawbacks.
G. If you fit those standards, you’re fine. If you don’t? January’s when you’ll feel the most pressure to squeeze yourself inside. Before you do, consider the stakes of dieting. “A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience,” Naomi Wolf wrote in “The Beauty Myth.”
H. This year, however, the notion of self-improvement feels especially tempting. Diets, and resolutions in general, are all about hope — hope that things can get better, hope that you are going to actually learn that new language, declutter that junk drawer, lose those 20 pounds for good.
I. We can’t magically extend the term of a president who did not tweet as if he was a furious, academically challenged 12-year-old, but maybe we can at least squeeze into our jeans from the era before it all went wrong.
J. DONALD J. Trump wants you on a diet. I hear what you’re saying. “Donald Trump doesn’t even know me!”
