The woman with size 9 feet who says there’s no such thing as a normal body shape
KATHRYN HUGHES SOCIETY Am I Normal? Sarah Chaney
Wellcome Collection £16.99 ★★★★★
Sarah Chaney spent her early adult years feeling ashamed of her feet. Every time she went into a shoe shop and whispered to the assistant that she needed a size 9 she knew what was coming next: a reaction that hovered between disbelief and disgust. A size 9? For most of her 20s, Chaney stuck to wearing one pair of unisex trainers.
Her point is that the shame of not being normal ambushes most of us at some time or another. It is that moment of mortification when we are suddenly convinced that there is something weird about the way we look or love or eat or speak that makes us wish that the ground would swallow us up. Actually, says Dr Chaney, who researches the subject for a living, most of the time we are comparing ourselves to an ideal that is decades out of date. Take feet. A 2014 survey by the Royal College of Podiatry suggested that UK feet have gone up by two shoe sizes since the 1970s: the average size for a man has risen from 8 to ten, and for a woman from 4 to 6. It won’t be too long before Sarah Chaney’s size 9 shoes are completely ‘normal’, so much in demand that her new problem will be that they keep selling out.
Delving deeper, Chaney explains in this riveting book that the idea of ‘normal’ is a relatively recent one. For centuries it was simply the term used by mathematical boffins to describe a right-angle. Since everything from chairs to clothes were handproduced for a particular client, there was no reason to worry about how you shaped up next to anyone else. Instead of getting obsessed with whether your inside leg measurement was the same as your neighbour’s or your brother’s, you could just get on with being you. Poor people didn’t even have this burden: they kitted out themselves and their homes by rummaging through second(or third-) hand markets until they found something that fitted, more or less.
It was only with the coming of insurance tables at the beginning of the 19th Century that people started fretting about averages. How tall was the ‘average’ woman in London, how long would the average man live? Now there was money involved – insurance companies made their profits by betting against averages – the statistics started coming fast and furious. You get the impression that there was always someone hovering in the wings with a tape measure and a slide rule.
But it is what happened next, suggests Chaney, that was most damaging. ‘Average’ started getting muddled up with ‘normal’, which started turning into ‘ideal’. A case in point: in 1945 an American newspaper ran a competition to find the woman whose vital statistics came closest to a sculpture called Norma, which had been created by Dr Robert L. Dickinson by measuring 15,000 American men and women (there was also a Normman, Ken to Norma’s Barbie). Yet despite 4,000 women entering the competition by sending in their vital statistics, not one fitted Norma’s ‘typical’ statistics exactly. The winner’s trophy went instead to the girl who came closest, 24-year-old Martha Skidmore, who insisted on telling the press that she was nothing special.
There is a serious point to all this. Chaney points out that, for all Dr Dickinson’s boasting about taking the measurements of ‘ordinary’ Americans to calculate Norma’s ideal form, he was only interested in young, white, middle-class bodies.
As a result his ‘average’ was based on a fraction of the American population. This had dangerous implications for everyone’s wellbeing. Figures for healthy weight and blood pressure were drawn from statistics gathered by US insurance companies, whose policies were primarily purchased by betteroff white Americans.
Only recently has it become clear that the link between BMI and health varies for different body types: people of Asian descent may have a higher risk of diabetes and heart dis
ease at a size that would be deemed ‘normal’ for white Europeans. Black women, meanwhile, have a lower risk of health problems at larger sizes.
But it’s when it comes to the way our minds work that Chaney suggests we really need to throw off the idea that there is a normal. She is brave in offering herself once again as a case history. She explains how 15 years ago she was sitting in the local library when she became convinced that the women at the next table were jeering at her, exchanging sarcastic judgments under their breath.
Today Chaney is pretty sure that work stress had made her temporarily paranoid. But if she had gone to a doctor, she might well have found herself at the beginning of a diagnosis for something far more serious – after all, she was then at the ‘average’ age for the onset of schizophrenia.
The moral of the story, indeed of this engaging book, is that instead of ruminating endlessly on the worried (and unanswerable) question Am I Normal?, we should be asking ourselves instead whether normal even exists and why, quite frankly, anyone cares.