Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal -- not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut -- that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be -fit-? And how is it that having an unfit, or -bad, - body gets conflated with being an unfit, or -bad, - citizen?

Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men's and women's...