No Substance

Today morning while riding my bike on Bombay's busy suburban roads I saw a huge advertisement board featuring a young Saree-clad woman. The Saree was draped seductively on her thin body inviting the viewer to appreciate her two-dimensional midriff. Long, smooth, flowing hair, slender limbs and face, a fully round navel and fair skin were some of her other striking physical features. The fact that she was on the board reflects that a majority of people find such a woman physically attractive. Most men will find her worth a second look and many a women will envy her flat stomach they are working hard to achieve or maintain. Some of the aforementioned features perhaps necessitate a separate inquiry and at present we shall look at the connection between thinness and the relatively modern definition of physical beauty in a woman. The question under consideration then is how have nutrition-deprived delicate dollies come to symbolise physical beauty in a woman today? Why has fat, even natural fat important to the body for biological reasons become repulsive? The dislike towards obesity is understandable as obesity is both unnatural and unhealthy. But why does that dislike extend to natural fat? And why is a state of nutritional deficiency worshipped? Biologically women tend to have more per cent body fat than men. Just how they are faced with a social expectation which contradicts their biological reality extracts an interesting inquiry.

Too much fat and too little fat seem to be at the two extremes of a continuum which has most of us with some body fat in between. Why are women at one end of the spectrum written off and the ones at the other end adored? If the answer lies in a purely acquired concept of beauty rather than one which is intrinsic in nature then it will be perfectly natural to assume the possibility of a cultural setting in which obese people are looked at as the ambassadors of beauty and erotic beahviour. In such a cultural setting a thing such as fashion models doing different things to increase their daily calorie intake and modify their life style to accumulate great amounts of body fat will follow as naturally as the starvation diets of today.

We begin by looking at how society values women and at what is considered virtuous in a woman. For this purpose it is important to distinguish between two classes of women -- Those who are married and those who are not. Unmarried women are valued most for their physical beauty. Married women on the other hand are valued most significantly for their industry in house-hold affairs. This explains why fat and other factors which characterize beauty in a woman before marriage tend to lose importance in the face of efficient domestic administration on her part after marriage. The fact that it is a lot easier to be a fat wife than it is to be a fat college-girl should suffice to illustrate the above point. Thus we see that physical beauty is one of the two main attributes that have long since given virtue to women and this attribute has nothing to do with any other quality or capacity that will enable a woman to contribute in a profession that doesn't require beauty. In other words the value attached to physical beauty in a woman is exaggerated. However, this exaggeration has been achieved at the expense of a proportionate under-valuation of other virtues. This leads us to the word "substance" which may be thought of as that which propels an individual to achieve excellence in a domain of his/her choice. It follows that while women today are allowed to have substance and if it is evident it may be acknowledged, it is far from important. It is still perfectly acceptable for a young woman to not have substance as long as she is physically desirable. This is also evidenced by the presence of a significant number of men who are happy to play stalwart roles for their beautiful girl-friends and wives.

Given the amount of suppression womankind has experienced one may say that lack of substance in a woman is somewhat likeable and to both men and women alike.One suspects that this fondness for a lack of substance has translated directly into a fondness for women of smaller size and lower amounts of body fat. In other words the social size of the female gender has emerged in its current physical size. If lack of substance in a woman is desirable, so is lack of matter or natural fat on her body. Conversely, signs of substance in women must arouse detest and so must any natural fat on their bodies.

Foot binding in China, corsets in America and Europe are examples from the past where the emphasis was on the reduction in size of the feet and waists of women. The large magnitude of such practices leads one to conclude that measures to reduce the physical size of women derive impetus from the deeper motivation of undermining their true status as fellow human-beings comprising an integral component of human society.

The hatred for fat and large physical size shows variation in terms of a number of factors. These include differences in culture, differences in socio-economic status, and selective hatred of body-fat based on the region of the body involved.

As an example of cultural relativism one will see that both men and women in South Indian Cinema are significantly larger than their counter-parts in Bollywood and Hollywood. The markedly different perception of physical beauty in this region may have resulted from the tying together of affluence with high body mass.

In case of socio-economic status the emphasis on physical beauty in a woman is more amongst the higher classes where it prevails to a greater degree even in the later stages of marriage. This can be explained by the greater amounts of monetary resources in possession of the family which makes the wife's contribution to domestic chores unnecessary. Consequently there is greater pressure on her to remain beautiful against the run of time. In this context one may be reminded of aristocratic house-holds in 19th century Europe typically featuring plump maids and slender corset-wearing wives.

Most interesting though is the hatred of fat in one region of the body and an equally powerful attraction towards it in another. A big bosom is as desirable as a small abdomen and slender limbs. This is absurd because the human body grows as a whole and not in parts. Any significant change in the size of one body part will accompany a similar change across the whole body. Such contradictory preferences are clearly the product of man-made social forces rather than the dictates of nature and numerous methods and techniques, both semi-natural like spot-reduction and artificial such as silicon transplants have been devised and discarded in order to keep up with them. The fact that the obsession around such practices remains long after they have been scientifically falsified is indicative of the huge magnitude of motivating social forces involved.

Paradoxically flesh offers more delight both culinary and copulatory than bones. But bones seem to outweigh flesh when it comes to certain socially acquired psychological tastes.

Quotations

Some quotations -- Both mine and by others. Personal quotations are the ones without attribute. This post is dynamic in nature. I enrich it whenever I come across something interesting.

• "Give me a gun and a day's exemption from law and I can get the Indian psychiatrist to come up with an excellent diagnosis of some organic pathology in his own brain."

• "By the time the new human-being is 15 or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality." -- R.D. Laing (1967)

• "In human society at all its levels, persons confirm one another in a practical way, to some extent or other, in their personal qualities and capacitites, and a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another." -- Martin Buber (1957, referring to the importance in the confirmation of personal authenticity of human beings.)

• "We will eventually have to develop a theory of what makes all people march before we can say very much about why some people march to a different drummer." -- Bannister (1971, in reference to schizophrenia and other psychopathologies.)