Feminine Aesthetics: “Super Skinny Me” 30 November 2007
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty, Feminine aesthetics, Modern culture.trackback
I heard this morning a blurb about a British documentary, a documentary by two British journalists intending to expose the harmful nature of crash-diets. The journalists undertake a five-week experiment, dieting in an entirely unhealthy (and insane) manner, just like a lot of Americans seem to do.
Mary McNamara of the L.A. Times correctly observed that the drama in this particular film will be lost on most Americans. Apparently the British aren’t so inanely infatuated with being super skinny, with turning your own body into something akin to the living dead. The experimental journalists begin as very healthy people, by no means overweight. Of course, it seems as though a lot of Americans who are dieting don’t need to be either. For whatever reason these people have been duped into believing that the most respectable life-goal is to be as skinny as possible; if you can’t count your own ribs, God forbid!
These aren’t new problems though. Beauty varies, sometimes wildly, from culture to culture, and it even morphs over time within the same culture. Humans have historically acted on foolish mores (foot-binding, anyone?) relating to their appearance, and will probably forever do so.
As an artist who is constantly drawn to the ideas of beauty I find myself continually hashing and rehashing where my own perception of human attractiveness originates. Is it social? Is it deductive? Is it Divine? Is it personal? Does it stem from my idea of a healthy physique?
My hope is that my own ideas stem from and strive for a Divine idea of Beauty. My fear is that the driving force is mostly driven by popular social standards, which are generally unhealthy if not plain stupid. In reality, my own ideas are probably a mish-mash of all of those factors, however I still often fear that the social aspect pushes its way into prominence.
How does a person who realizes the unrealistic and silly nature of these social standards keep them from infiltrating his or her own mind?
I’ve learned, particularly since being married, that women can have very different physical features and still be healthy. (Men’s body types are more predictable, which is why shopping for jeans is no big deal to a guy. We can get away without trying them on and they’ll still fit.) Herein lies part of the problem, it seems, for females — who are by nature more attentive to their appearance than men: The culture establishes one penultimate standard for women who possess a wide variety of features.
I often wonder what Adam and Eve looked like, before the Fall. The mother and father of all mankind, they must have possessed all of the best physical characteristics from within the world’s population since them. The thing is, in our petty, self-serving ways we’re not remotely qualified to determine what these “best” attributes are. This reminds me of a quote by author Randy Alcorn: “To see the face of God is to behold beauty, which is the source of all lesser beauty.”
Pants are evil.
If they fit the bum they are too big at the waist. Always.
Meanwhile my husband can just buy based on size and take it home without trying anything on. It isn’t fair! And of course women’s sizes vary completely from not only brand to brand but item. I can be a size six in a skirt and a size ten in pants.
What Adam and Eve looked like before the Fall? Why, like bodybuilders, of course.
IMHO, obesity is a MUCH larger problem for Americans than the problem of trying to be too thin. But in actuality, these bodytypes (fat and skinny) are both sub-optimal. To be lean, athletic, with strong muscular shapes is the optimum in both form and function for the human body. I cannot conceive of unfallen mankind looking any other way.
To borrow from Chesterton: Bodybuilding has not been tried and found wanting … bodybuilding has been found difficult, and therefore not tried!
Of course, I realize that most people violently disagree with me!
Thanks for commenting Paul. Your different perspective adds an interesting level of discussion!
Part of why I ask what Adam and Eve looked like is because I don’t think we can know, even though it seems to me like an important question to people like you and I (and Marissa) in our artistic ways. It’s entirely plausible that they were muscular, although I’m guessing (keyword “guessing”) that they weren’t the zero body fat types either. I’m guess, regardless, that Adam and Eve probably weren’t “bodybuilders” in the sense that we think of today. Even if they were muscular, it was probably because they were the epitome of health and lived a much more active lifestyle than those of us who sit at our computers all day long do.
How did things like diet play into their appearance? From what we can tell, no one ate meat until after the Flood. All of their protein had to come from plants.
And even if we settle on a body type that still leaves things like hair and eye color up for grabs. Was Eve’s hair short or long, straight or curly, soft or wiry, black or blond — or all of these things combined???
Perhaps the problem isn’t so much as accepting ones clothing size, as ones body shape. This is especially true for women.
You can always lose weight, but if you’re pear shaped and have large hips, there isn’t much you can do about it. The superskinnyme.com website explains it quite well.
you’re either fat or skinny in america.