What Does Our Girth Have to Do With Marilyn Monroe?

I just read an alarming statistic, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, since I think the whole purpose of statistics is to scare the crap out of us. Did you know that women today weigh as much as men did in the 60s? 

 I’m not sure exactly what the average man weighed in the 60s. My father came in around a hundred and sixty pounds (he was pretty average). If you’re telling me that’s the average weight for women today then, statistically speaking, that does scare the crap out of me.

I say that because, if I remember correctly, women back in the 60s weren’t exactly diminutive. They wore girdles and they weren’t on diets. If you told my mother to go on a diet, she would have hit you with a jar of Jiffy Peanut Butter.

Women thought they looked just fine back then. If a girdle didn’t do the trick, they added another girdle, or employed new space age technology known as “ribs.” These ribs weren’t much different than the whale bone found in old corsets, but once you called them ‘space age,’ women lined up around the block, figuring NASA knew how to cram things into small spaces.

All the women in Mad Men wore girdles. You can bet Peggy, Joan and Betty were strapped in tighter than a Jimmy Dean sausage. I also remember the movie “The Misfits” where Marilyn Monroe put on a two-piece bathing suit. Without a girdle, Monroe had quite a tummy, yet her heaviest weight was still under 140 pounds (her normal weight was closer to 118 pounds).

Elizabeth Hurley said she’d die if she was as fat as Marilyn Monroe, but their dimensions are actually quite similar. Marilyn’s measurements were 35-22-35 while Elizabeth’s are 36-24-36.

Marilyn’s 22-inch waist, by the way, was below average, since the average waistline (sans girdle) in the late 50s and early 60s was 25 inches. While she was making “The Prince and the Showgirl,” her waist size fluctuated so much, she gave the costume designer ulcers. Since her dresses were so tight, they had three different sizes on hand, depending on what Marilyn ate the night before.

That gown she wore when she sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK actually had more tape than material. She was in there snugger than a Jimmy Dean sausage. The song was sung in one breath, which made scientists wonder if breast size was directly linked to lung capacity.

Roseanne Barr once said: “I’m more sexy than Pamela Lee or whoever else they’ve got out there these days. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. That says it all.” Imagine all the husky women across America, raising their Budweisers to Rosanne, secure in the knowledge that being husky doesn’t make you a husky.

Here’s the problem, though. Marilyn Monroe didn’t wear a size 16 (at least not today's size 16). We forget how sneaky the clothing industry can be. Somewhere back in the eighties, they decided to fiddle with dress sizes. A size 16 in the 50s is approximately an 8 today. Marilyn’s 22-inch waist would fit into a size 0.

Rosanne may have made a bunch of husky women feel better, but they still have an average waist size 12 inches larger than Marilyn Monroe’s and nine inches larger than the average woman in the late 50s (that would be my mother).

Based on these calculations, in the next fifty years, when we’re taking vacation flights to Mars, women will need seat belts that comfortably secure an average 44 inch waist, not to mention what’s proportionately below that.

And, before men start getting all finger-pointy, they’ll have more trouble squeezing into those intergalactic seats than the women. Men’s waistlines are going up about a half an inch every year. At a popular clothing chain, one of the salespeople told me they don’t carry small-size belts anymore. “Even our medium belts tend to sit around for a while,” he said.

Imagine what it’s going to be like in 2065. If we keep eating the way we’re eating, our waistlines will be well over 60 inches. We won’t need belts, we’ll need bungee cords. And we won’t need seats on intergalactic flights. They’ll just roll us on and roll us off.

There was a time when girth was a sign of wealth. Today it’s a sign poverty. Wealthy people can afford low-calorie meals. The poor eat whatever fills them up, which is usually sugar and starch.

Rather than blame the fast food industry, our government blames sedentary lifestyles. Kids are sitting around instead of getting out there and playing.

How can they “get out there” when schools cut extracurricular activities? Even the abandoned lots where kids once played stick ball are gone. The government offers tax concessions to developers to turn those lots into condos. What concessions do they make families? They tell McDonalds to post the caloric content on their menu (I still don’t know if 500 calories is a lot or not).

Instead of making fast food restaurants post calories, why doesn’t the government offer them tax concessions to build basketball courts? Two hours shooting hoops burns over 3,000 calories. Wouldn’t that be more constructive than posting calories nobody reads?

Let’s go back to Marilyn Monroe for a minute. Growing up in an orphanage, she didn’t have fast food. Neither did most women back in those days (no wonder the average waistline was 25 inches).

Our craving for all things tasty, salty and sweet has turned us into tubbies. McDonalds says “We’re loving it,” but we’re really “lugging it.” One in three of us is obese. If this keeps up, it won’t be seats we have to widen on intergalactic flights, it'll be the whole spacecraft.

Virgin Galactic could end up looking like the Hindenburg.

What we need are programs dedicated to getting rid of excess fat. The first thing we have to do is to be honest with ourselves. Very few of us are svelte. Wearing skinny jeans won’t make us svelte. Neither will reading books on how to be svelte.

The next step is to start buying small-size belts. Once a week, we’ll have “Small Belt Fridays,” where we set aside our work and stand around looking like we’re giving birth. I know this will cause great discomfort (especially in government agencies), but think of vacationing on Mars. Virgin Galactic figures we’ll be sunbathing on the Red Planet in the next thirty years.

Do you want to be rolled off a spacecraft like a giant Jimmy Dean sausage? Or strut out like Sigourney Weaver after she’s blasted a bunch of aliens.

What do you think of waistlines today? Should we be concerned or are women just catching up to men? Let me know at: rcormack@rogers.com.

Robert Cormack is a freelance copywriter, novelist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. For more details, go to Yucca Publishing or Skyhorse Publishing.