We live in a strange world.
Here in London, its all about weight watchers and cup a soup diets where one’s life is consumed by counting points and calory intakes. The day to day office life is spiced up by ‘weigh-offs’ and talking about ingenious ways to fool your own body and your mind into thinking that you are full even though your soul is probably starved. But, then who am I to comment for I have found myself at times intrigued by this whole ‘its not really a diet’ phenomenon.
But, what I can do is perhaps put things into perspective for all the women out there on a diet. As you are probably aware the perception of beauty is different in different parts of the world. And in a certain corner of the world girls are actually treated like pigs – poor sucklings who are fattened before the slaughter. In Mauritania, young girls are sent to ‘fat farms’ so that on their return they are more roundly and in some cases obese and thus more eligible for marriage. So while we are obsessed with starving ourselves and the self – inflicted permanent ‘lent’ is the talk of the town, some girls, who live in a part of the world that most of us have probably not even heard of, are being force fed like animals.
It is a strange world isn’t it?
It’s easier to see and appease a starving body than a starving soul and hence, the preference to try to “perfect” the body and not the soul. We humans are not that advanced as we would like to think.
And it’s quite strange that girls are sent so that they can be fat in Mauritania. That practice perhaps is worse than dieting, in principle. Dieting is at least “self-inflicted” while it sounds like sending girls off to become fat is inflicted externally.
An intriguing observation, those two binaries of bodily ideals. Yet, both are somehow united in some kind of violent, controlling attitude towards the (predominantly female) body.
I would possibly disagree with the above evaluation. Self-infliction is rather far away from self-empowerment, and should not be mistaken for such. The perniciousness of incorporated, internalised eating regimes or bodily ideals is that they do not offer much space for rebellion. If the mind disciplines itself without the need for express external repression, it is all the more difficult to think in an emancipatory way at the same time. Whereas in terms of external infliction, the subject of repression is easily located. Those women certainly suffer from oppressive structures but at least they are not in the position of being at the same time the perpetrator of their own victimhood.
This is not meant to be apologetic, the treatment of women in this article certainly is shocking.
Beauty lies not in the size of your waist but the sparkle in your eye. Leena Patel