There's a show on the National Geographic channel called "Taboo" that explores a different taboo each week. The taboo featured in last week's episode was simply 'fat'. They showed a 650 pound man who can't even get out of bed, a 450 pound female model and a beauty pageant for plus size women. But the story that really caught my attention was about the women of the African country Mauritania. In Mauritania overweight women are considered to be the most attractive. The women believe that the larger they are the more space they will take up in their husband's heart. Mother's actually forcefeed their young daughters in order to make them desirable to the men. This practice has been legally outlawed but the show captured the scene of a mother actually pinching her daughters toes between two wooden rods in order to force her into drinking some mixture of milk and butter.
At one point in the segment on of the experts made a comment about how these women completely sacrifice their health in the name of beauty, which is exactly what we do in the U.S. just in the opposite way. It is frustrating to me when people truly think that these expectations of beauty are natural and just the way things are supposed to be. I think learning about other cultures and how their ideas of beauty can be completely different from ours is proof that the media and society essentially control the way we think. It's almost scary, but important, to realize that many of the ideals and beliefs that we hold as our own may not be all that original or personal but rather intentionally constructed by society.
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Grace, its actually interesting you brought this up because the other day I was watching a movie based on this. Im not sure what the name of it was but it was about this African American lady who took a trip with her two best friends to some part of Africa. Her friends were much skinier than she was and everytime they would go out she would feel like the odd one left until they went to this country where all the attention went to her because she was bigger and that was considered beautifu. I completely agree, the media is what should be blamed for all these girls who are starving themselves and binging to become like the Cosmo girl. If more people talked about the "bigger" woman being more beautiful I think the outcome would be different.
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