The 1997 survey also asked the tantalizing question: “Would you sacrifice more than five years of life to be the ideal weight?” Of the 3,452 women in the sample, 15 per cent answered “Yes”. This virulent body dissatisfaction and almost epidemic desire for thinness translates into a $50 billion a year diet industry, and has helped establish liposuction as one of the most popular forms of plastic surgery.
It is not clear why most contemporary industrialized societies have come to place so much aesthetic value on slimness in females. Certainly, there are numerous historical references illustrating a preference for a more curvaceous female body-ideal. One of the earliest is the Venus of Willendorf, a small figurine carved around 30,000 years ago, which is undeniably corpulent, as are the models in the paintings of Rubens (1577-1640) and later still those of Renoir (1880-1919).
Mervat Nasser, a consultant psychiatrist and leading authority on eating disorders in the Arab world, suggests that the traditional female-body-ideal within Arab culture was one of “curvaceous plumpness”, an ideal viewed as symbolizing family care, fertility and womanhood. This is a view shared by some African cultures, where until very recently, there was an active cultivation of curvaceousness. In Eastern Nigeria for example, brides-to-be would undergo a “fattening ceremony”, where the young women would be intentionally overfed and prevented from exercising.
The pursuit of “plumpness” does seem to confer several advantages. For example, scientists have observed a greater incidence of dizygotic (non-identical) twins in heavier women. They have also found heavier women to have a lower risk of miscarriage, faster foetal growth, heavier newborns, and in some societies the offspring of heavier women have a lower mortality rate.
Conversely, one of the tragic but logical conclusions of the relentless pursuit of thinness is a massive increase in the prevalence of eating disorders. Once upon a time, anorexia nervosa was extremely rare, more likely to be encountered in a medical text book than the clinic. The increase in prevalence is traced to the mid 1960s, a time of great socio-cultural transition in the West. Around this time anorexia came to be thought of as a “culture-bound syndrome” associated with contemporary European beauty ideals, and confined almost exclusively to the higher-socio-economic classes.
However, globalization has helped spread what some psychologists call “the thin body cult” to almost every corner of the planet. The result has been increasing body dissatisfaction and the appearance of eating disorders where they were hitherto unknown, or extremely rare. A recent study within the UAE reported body dissatisfaction levels as high as 74 per cent that is almost three quarters of the young women in the study were unhappy with their body shape and size and desired to be thinner. This finding is troubling because only 27 per cent of these young women were overweight – and more alarmingly, 21 per cent were actually underweight.
*Published in UAE's THE NATIONAL on October 4, 2008. |
