Idealistic Body Form

During our discussion in class we started off talking in groups about our readings. The group that I was in we talked about all of the summary discussions as one whole thing. We mainly focused on how people are so obsessed with their bodies. As a group we tried to figure out why being skinny is the idealistic body form in society and why women would put themselves in harm’s way in order to look skinny.

In our group I made a point that I had learned from my Art History class a year ago. One of the first images that we were shown was a Paleolithic miniature statue called the Woman of Willendorf or Venus of Willendorf as you can see on the image below provided by Wikipedia. That statue of a heavy set woman was the idealistic body form for women around that time because having that body type was a sign of longer life span and fertility and women were seen as beautiful. Women who were skin and bones around that time would not have lasted long.

Eventually, somewhere along the line people started to see thin women as having the beautiful idealistic body form. In our group someone wondered how we have become so obsessed with being thin. I found an article online written by Kate Fox called Mirror, mirror; she provides three reasons why our society is obsessed with the way we look. “Thanks to the media, we have become accustomed to extremely rigid and uniform standards of beauty.TV, billboards, magazines etc mean that we see 'beautiful people' all the time, more often than members of our own family, making exceptional good looks seem real, normal and attainable. Standards of beauty have in fact become harder and harder to attain, particularly for women. The current media ideal of thinness for women is achievable by less than 5% of the female population.”

It really is hard to go against all the pressures of how the media portrays women and how they should look. I hope that people will look past all of those lies and realize who they are and that they are special in their own way no matter what they look like.

Fox, Kate. Mirror, mirror. http://www.sirc.org/publik/mirror.html

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf