The other day, I had to park particularly close to a fence,
and I asked Natalie if she had enough room to get out of the car. She replied, “No, I can’t fit because I’m
fat.”
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My beautiful girl |
My immediate thought was slight
panic – What?? She’s not fat! Why does she think that? Who told her that? Oh no, the body image issues are starting
already!! Natalie is almost 5 and has
never said anything negative about her body before, but I realize it’s
increasingly common to find
girls as young as 5 and 6
who have already
internalized our culture’s obsession with thinness.
Wanting to find out what was behind her comment, I casually
replied, “Oh, you’re fat?”
“Yes,” she said proudly.
“I’m fatter than Georgina (a friend from school). But our other friend is fatter than both of
us, she is the fattest.”
She seemed quite proud of the statement that she was fat, so
I asked her, “Is it a good thing to be fat?”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation, looking at me as
though I obviously should have known that.
I let out a huge sigh of relief that her comment was not an
indication of a looming eating disorder.
Having come from a culture that idolizes thinness and encourages women
to be dissatisfied with their bodies, I have to admit it was very refreshing to
hear my five year old daughter boast of being fat, regardless of how inaccurate her statement is.
The influence of the Western media in shaping our standards
of beauty became apparent to me many years ago when I first moved to
Kenya. Traditionally in Kenya, being "fat" is a sign of health and prosperity. It
is a signal that people have enough wealth to buy plenty of food, and that they
are healthy enough to put on weight.
Thinness is a sign of being poor or sickly, and it can actually be an
insult to refer to someone as “thin,” whereas people will happily comment on
others being fat or “adding weight.”
In Kenya, I was surprised to find that the models in the
advertisements and the actresses on TV actually looked like normal sized women,
with attractive feminine curves. In
general, an ideal size in this part of the world might be around a 10 or 12,
and I recall only 2 or 3 East African woman that I’ve encountered in my 5+
years of living here who were on a diet.
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A current advertisement in Kampala which demonstrates the different standards of beauty in this part of the world |
How did our American culture become so obsessed with
thinness? Why are so many American women unhappy with their bodies, even those who are slender? How did we get
to the place where we consider a size unobtainable by the majority of women to
be the most beautiful?
Our standards of beauty are shaped by the culture in which
we live, and in the US the biggest influence in shaping our culture is the
media. More specifically, advertising,
which is the foundation of the media. All
of us think we are not affected by advertising, and this is why it is so
powerful. In 2011, there were 36
companies that spent 1 billion dollars or more on advertising. Corporations would not be spending this kind
of money if advertising was not extremely influential.
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How photoshop creates an unobtainable ideal |
A basic premise behind advertising is to make us
dissatisfied, so that we will buy things to address this dissatisfaction.
If a woman is satisfied with her natural appearance, she doesn’t need to
spend much money to maintain it. But if that
woman can be convinced that she falls short of the ideal, and if she can be
convinced to the degree that her appearance makes her feel bad about herself,
she can be persuaded to buy all kinds of products to feel better about herself
and help her attempt to achieve the ideal - diet books and plans, gym
memberships, plastic surgery, makeup, haircare products, slimming
undergarments, antiwrinkle creams, cellulite lotions, diet pills, skin creams, etc.
The problem is that even the women we see in advertisements
don’t really look like that. Photoshop
has enabled editors to erase every bodily flaw with the click of a mouse. The “ideal” that is being sold to us is
absolute perfection, which in reality is only possible with a computer
program. So we are all chasing after an
impossible ideal, and spending a lot of money in the process! I read a statistic that the average American urban
woman spends 1/3 of her income on items related to her appearance.
One of the more disheartening problems of this impossible
ideal is that even young girls pick up on our culture’s obsession with thinness
and begin to diet and feel shameful of their bodies at such a young age. So for now, this is one thing I appreciate
about living in Uganda. I love that both my daughter and I are surrounded by images of beautiful, normal women with healthy curves, and that my daughter feels proud and not ashamed of her body.