It`s Saturday night, and you`ve made reservations at that new eatery in River North de rigueur among your acquaintances. It`s the place to see and be seen.
Of course, you`re also enraptured with the prospect of sampling the myriad appetizers and desserts that have garnered accolades from simply everyone you know. Who wants to spoil the fun by ordering cottage cheese and iced tea? So you assuage your conscience by promising to work out a bit longer and harder on Monday.
How to live the chic lifestyle and maintain a chic figure? That`s a problem–albeit an elitist one–that increasingly brings women to Beila Kunis, a registered dietician who has been in private practice for 15 years. The women ”pig out” at the hot restaurants, she says, ”then repent their self- indulgence by dieting during the remainder of the week or increasing their exercise routine or both. They want to eat at the trendiest restaurants, but they also want to fit into a size 6 bikini.”
Society fosters such self-indulgence, Kunis says. ”We are living in a land of enormous material abundance, freedom and personal identification. This is still the `me generation.` We spend our dollars on short-term goals like clothes, cars and dining at trendy restaurants. The desire to eat is locked into our whole sense of identification.”
Unfortunately we don`t know how to use restraint, she says. ”We accept food out of politeness, as a gift, use it as solace, as an adventure, a reward, as a preliminary to a sexual encounter or a prelude to a business relationship. It`s a conflict between our palate and our emotional attachment to food.”
One woman fighting the battle of the bulge (who preferred anonymity)
dines out with her husband about four times a week. Like so many of the 40 to 50 women between 25 and 55 that Kunis sees weekly at Diversey Clinic, this woman works and doesn`t have time to cook during the week.
”Eating out is enjoyable. We never had so many different kinds of restaurants as we do now, so there`s more temptation,” she says.
Her problem is typical: She cannot maintain the same weight. ”I yo-yo back and forth. I have self-discipline during the day but weaken at night. I shouldn`t have dessert, and I have dessert, or when I`m watching TV, I snack when I shouldn`t. I can`t stop at just five potato chips. I have to eat the whole bag. Once I open my mouth it`s my downfall.”
At some point in their lives women try to resolve the conflict by going on a diet, Kunis says. ”They hit 30 and may be 15 or 20 pounds overweight. For 8 or 10 weeks they are on a diet, and then they go on vacation, get a new job, face a big trauma, and that`s enough to change their focus.”
After two to four years that same woman is about 15 pounds heavier, gaining about 5 pounds a year. ”She goes on a fad diet and takes off 15 or 20 pounds and then goes back to her old habits. At 40 she`s 40 pounds heavier and would now settle for where she was 15 years ago.”
What`s a woman to do? Self-discipline and a sense of proportion are ”a must” to control weight, Kunis says. ”Your primary focus must be fitness and diet. You must weigh and measure your values and come to terms with reality and accept a size 10 dress and a good healthy frame versus a size 6 and starving yourself to death.”
SOURCE: By Edie Gibson.
SWEET 15 FOR MS. MAGAZINE
It has been 15 years since ”Ms.” magazine introduced women to a new journalistic forum and the general public to an alternative form of address.
”This birthday is one we never dared dream of 15 years ago,” declares Suzanne Braun Levine, managing editor, in the July/August anniversary issue.
”Critics predicted (Ms.) would run out of things to say in the first year,” she recalls.
The magazine continues to thrive, she says, because ”we created a safe forum for women to talk about their lives. More and more are beginning to see themselves and their hopes in the magazine.” ”Ms.” has a future place in women`s lives, she adds, because ”each step toward equality takes time.” She foresees no shortage of topics.
Unlike any woman`s magazine before it, the first issue of ”Ms.” in January, 1972, offered a petition for legal abortion, a guide to starting child-care centers and the landmark essay, ”Sisterhood,” by founding editor Gloria Steinem. In the 15th anniversary issue, Steinem acknowledges the gains of the women`s movement but urges readers to continue the fight for social and legal equality.
”Especially for females of all races,” she writes, ”. . . common sense tells us that we have at least another 75 or 80 years to go.”
Over the years, Ms. regularly tackled the issues of rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment on the job, pornography, the ”feminization” of poverty and teenage pregnancy, among others. ”What was considered scandalous when we wrote about it is now covered in every newspaper,” says Levine, citing domestic violence. ”But just because the issues have entered the mainstream doesn`t mean the problems have been solved.” As for the feminist image, ”You can be a fashion plate and a feminist at the same time. . . The early feminists are not being treated as the lunatic fringe anymore.”
The magazine quickly developed a loyal following. Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show that Ms. had more than 386,000 monthly paid circulation in 1974, compared to about 480,000 today. Of its 1.4 million monthly readers, an estimated 10 percent are men.
The average Ms. reader is a 31-year old woman, highly educated (93 percent went to college and 52 percent to graduate school), economically secure (median household income is $40,500) and concerned with social change
(414,000 volunteer for social organizations).
In the anniversary essay to her readers, Steinem says that although women are becoming a stronger economic force, women will not have the revolutionary force economists predict . . . if men do not flood equally into the unpaid labor force of child-rearing and homemaking,” she writes. National systems of child and health care ”should not be futuristic, but they are,”
she adds.
Ms. editors take a wishful look at the future and predict a feminist president (”preferably female, but we`re desperate”), a reversal of the military and domestic budgets and hope ”to wake up one morning and find out the ERA has been ratified.”
Milestones of the women`s movement are noted, such as the 1972 Title 9 education amendment prohibiting sex discrimination, Sandra Day O`Connor`s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court and Geraldine Ferraro`s Democratic vice presidential nomination.
Ms. reports that women are looking forward to the next 15 years with
”healthy optimism,” citing results of a national poll commissioned by the magazine. More than 60 percent say they feel extremely or very satisfied with their lives, and close to 70 percent credit the women`s movement.
”Women have come from fearing change to embracing it,” says Levine.
”That`s a major attitudinal shift. In the beginning, we wrote about women`s lives to illuminate their problems. Now we are able to show how women solve their own problems.” SOURCE: By Darlene Gavron.
ATLAS COVERS A LOT OF TERRITORY
Anne Gibson and Timothy Fast say they`ve altered some stereotypical visions of women in the United States in coauthoring ”The Woman`s Atlas of the United States.”
The 196 maps in the atlas offer a state-by-state guide on everything from numbers of women heavy truck drivers (and heavy drinkers) to percentages of women in the federal judiciary and women who died in car accidents. There are maps on the percentage of women in mental institutions, states with laws regulating sterilization and states with the highest percentage of working mothers.
And, in case you`re wondering, a map showing states with the highest percentage of female welders. Vermont is No. 1, according to the atlas.
Gibson, a 32-year-old Clark University doctoral student in geography, says she had no special knowledge of women`s studies, ”but I had begun wondering what it would be like to pursue women`s studies from the perspective of geography.”
Gibson took her idea to Fast, who at the time directed the cartography lab at Clark, in Worcester, Mass. Fast told his author-father, Julius Fast, of best-selling ”Body Language” fame, about the idea, and the senior Fast told the two to put together a proposal. A New York reference book publisher, Facts on File Inc., bought their idea, and the two plunged into statistical research and mapmaking.
”The big thing we wanted to show was whether the stereotypes or visions people had of different regions of the country were true,” says Fast, 31, who now works as a computer systems manager for an environmental consulting firm in Millbury, Mass.
The atlas is in five sections–education, family life, employment, health and politics–each preceded by a 10-to-15-page introduction.
The coauthors had some faulty perceptions themselves. Fast, for example, says, ”My preconception was that the divorce rate would be high in urbanized places like California and New York. In fact, California came out to be in the second-lowest category, and New York was even lower than that! Nevada, because of their (liberal) laws, had the highest marriage and divorce rate.”
Says Gibson, who currently is working on an atlas of Massachusetts, ”One of the things I found most surprising was that the map we did on women on college and university faculties showed that Southern states had the highest percentage of women faculty members.” She also was surprised that just three states require sex education in public schools.
Their publisher deals primarily in reference texts, but Fast and Gibson say they didn`t target their book to an academic audience. ”Tim and I envisioned something funkier,” says Gibson. ”We wanted to deal with subjects in an informative and not too strident fashion.”
The atlas is $35 cloth from Facts on File Inc., 460 Park Ave. South, New York, N.Y.; 212-683-2244.
SOURCE: By Susan Kaufman.
