Body Image

Body Image The essay titled “The Body of the Beholder” by Michele Ingressia from the textbook To the Point is about how black girls and white girls view their bodies. If you were to make a comparison Michele Ingressia says that they view their body images in very different ways. She writes about how black girls don’t mind gaining some weight while white girls do. They are always dieting to have the perfect body but never satisfied with what they have. This essay seems to be a very persuasive because it provides facts and statistics to back up what she has to say. In the first section of her essay Michele Ingressia writes about how obsessed white girls are with staying thin and how African American teens are in fact satisfied and happy with their bodies saying that they’d happily add fifteen pounds if they knew it would land on their hips. Also stating that overweight black teens carry a lot of pride regarding how their bodies look and how many of them say they look more beautiful that way and used their mothers as examples. White girls on the other hand said that their mothers may have been beautiful when they were young. Here her argument is clear and well stated. She uses studies from a team of black and white researchers from the University of Arizona showing that “while 90 percent of the white junior-high and high-school girls studied voiced dissatisfaction with their weight, 70 percent of African American teens were satisfied with theirs” (449). She interviews African American teens and one girl named La’Taria Stokes says she likes the remarks guys make about her hips and says that she knows she’s fat but she doesn’t really care. Michele Ingrassia cites anthropologist Mimi Nichter, who is one of the study’s coauthor, who says that “In white culture, the window of beauty is so small.” In this section Michele Ingressia has clear evidence from studies that back up her thesis. She has studies from researchers and has direct quotes from teens.