The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty." Her reproductive value, as the "aesthetic" value of her face and body today, "came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.

Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture's fixation on female fatness or thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself.

But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we

implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's

bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community.