Short stories part 2

In class, we read the short story The Falling Girl. Everyone in my group finished reading it before me and started discussing it, so I was very confused while reading. They were talking about how they thought the narrator was an old woman looking back on her life and watching it flash before her eyes. The only mention of an old woman, however, is when the narrator talks about how, on the lower floors, only old women fall to the ground.

Due to the fact that this story only talks about women falling from this building, I considered that the author was making a statement about women in general. The first thing that popped into my mind was eating disorders. Women are constantly comparing themselves to other women, just like Marta did with the girl that was falling above her. The girl above her fell faster and was going to reach the goal before Marta, which reminded me of the phrase "you can never be too thin." Women and girls (not excluding the boys and men who have eating disorders, but in order to make a point, I am focusing on the women and girls) will starve themselves or binge and purge in order to lose weight as fast as they can instead of eating healthy and exercising. Marta and the other girls could have just taken the elevator down to get to the party, but they wanted to get there as fast as they could, so naturally they jumped off the building to get there. Skydiving is faster than waiting for the plane to land, right?

The whole point of the story is that people will kill themselves in order to get what they want. Again, comparing this to an eating disorder, people will starve themselves or binge and purge themselves to death on the premise of being thin. Society has killed hundreds of people with the idea that human skeletons are beautiful, just as society has killed hundreds with the idea that they needed to get to the party as fast as they could. So fast, that they forgot there are stairs and elevators that could take them down safely.