Undigested and Unassimilated

I don't have the energy to write much tonight, but reader Simeon sent me an amusing link:I don't know if it's genuine, but it certainly looks real enough. When I was at University I did some research into New Zealand women's magazines of the 1920s and 1930s - and there was plenty of advice for the skinny. I'm not entirely certain when it would be though - I'm not very good at picking fashions by decade, and 50 cents seems to me to be a lot of money, in any of the possible decades it could be from (yes I'm geeky about history, even when I don't have the information to sustain this geekiness).

I don't wish to return to those days - I don't think that the solution is that thin people should be told to be fatter. I just think it's a useful way of showing that our ideas of health and beauty are ideas that a constructed, and ideas that apply to a very specific place and time.