"The body is covered, so there isn’t that pressure, of ‘oh, I don’t look right in these jeans, or my stomach is hanging out,’" she says. "It’s not a concern to us. It’s not our reality, because we don’t dress that way."

Knight says she has never met a Muslim with an eating disorder, and can’t imagine one who would want plastic surgery.

Makeda Knight on Muslim beauty.

She would like to wear the veil, a longer scarf that leaves only the eyes showing, in order to get even less attention from men. But the one time she tried wearing a veil, a man approached her to say she had pretty eyes.

"I mean, what does it take?" she asks, exasperated.
She views the American media from a distance.

"When I see people who are anorexic or bulimic, I feel bad for them," Knight says. "In this society it’s hard not to fall into that trap, it’s a constant bombardment -- I never thought of a Barbie doll as being anything, but it really is."

Growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, "where everybody’s West Indian," also padded her from the media’s influence, Knight says . While growing up, the women in West Indian song lyrics were always "thick, and had big butts and big breasts."