JOIN USThere is no such thing as the ideal body
Today a rising number of women are trying to identify with the image of the women they see in television and films. The frequent representation of these women in the media are responsible to send messages to young girls about looks and clothes that are ideal and anything that looks any different should be viewed with prejudice.
Alka Pande, the author of Shringara: The Many Faces of Indian Beauty, is an art critic, cultural theorist, teacher and curator. “Very few women are actually comfortable with their body. A woman’s body is as important in advertisements as a tyre is to a car. With the advent of capitalistic thinking, the body of a woman can also be branded,” says Pande.
“In India people have identified a woman’s body with a symbol of beauty and sexuality. Ironically, women are worshipped for the same reason they are looked down for. The patriarchal gaze is not only prevalent in men but also amongst women in our society,” adds Pande, who has written extensively on gender and sexuality.
“An ideally beautiful body is one in which the inhabitant feels beautiful in. I think that happens when one's insides and outside match,” says Megha Joshi, a feminist artist.
But what happens if the insides and outsides don’t match? Joshi says, “It is very dangerous to sane living. If we continue to accept the images being bombarded at us, generation after generation is going to suffer the conditioning of the mind to accept that X=beauty. ‘Designer bodies’ are already becoming popular. By resisting the dominant aesthetics that are being thrust upon us, we will mar the progressive disrespect a women has to go through because of this conditioning.” Joshi recently held an independent art exhibition called ‘I:Object,’ in which she had murals and paintings
depicting woman’s body in unusual ways.
Her art show highlighted the fact that the body does have sexual organs but
sexual, sexuality and sexualisation are different things. One is constantly confused between the form and function of the body. Women are sexual, of course. They have every right to use that sexuality. But the sexualisation and objectification of the female body causes a lot of discomfort and inequality for women.
Sharmada, a student of Sociology in Jawaharlal Nehru University says, “In an era of smart phones, Facebook, Instagram etc - everything is documented. And this sort of documentation is relatively more public. With validation in the form of likes, comments and shares on social media - it is hard to not be affected perhaps. I feel like there is this social pressure women feel they need to live up to. And day by day, there comes along a new treatment or product for so-called beauty enhancement.”
Dr J M Wadhawan, Head of Department, Psychiatry at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital says, there are conditions such as anorexia nervosa (an eating disorder cultivated through the irrational fear of weight gain) and dysmorphobia (a disorder that makes one believe that a certain body part of their body is unusually defective and is worthy of being hidden or fixed), are a few of the major diagnosis amongst women these days.”
We do not know to what extent these ‘diseases’ can go into the body and mind of a young woman, but what we do know is that when we greet little girls with “how pretty you look” from the moment they begin to understand words, we unwittingly put into their minds the concept of beauty and the role it plays in our lives. This stress we put on outward appearance is the only external factor including, our customs, culture, society, religion that contributes to this obsession.