Across cultures and countries there are different opinions on what makes a person beautiful. As we are all aware, the youth and teen culture tends to revolve around pop culture, models, musicians, fashion and personal image. Through peer pressure or the desire to “fit the mold”, Argentina is no exception to the Western view of thinness as beauty. It’s a common saying here to be “Buenos Aires flaca” which means “Buenos Aires Skinny” and unfortunately, many believe that to look like a true porteña or porteño, you need to be thin and fashionable, at any cost.
Buenos Aires has been called the Paris of South America and along with that has come the “ideal” vision of what a woman’s body should look like or what curves she should or should not have. Unlike France who have adopted laws making it illegal to promote extreme thinness, here in the city it is easy to find advertising for plastic surgery, marketing campaigns displaying extremely thin girls and women, and rarely having anything in the store larger than a western size 7.
Ironically, in the land of wine and beef, eating disorders are rampant. Argentina has the second-highest rate of anorexia (after Japan) and greatly surpassing the United States and Europe. It is number one in Latin America and is fifth in the world for cosmetic implants. The local society for cosmetic medicine reports that cosmetic surgeons carry out between 2,500 and 3,000 operations in Buenos Aires each month. In addition to cosmetic surgery, Argentines also diet and take supplementes. Statistics on nutrition say that 30% of Argentines are dieting at any one time and 43% consume low-calorie foods. Most women have either dieted or are dieting even when their weight is appropriate for their height. “In Argentina, one of every 25 adolescent girls has an eating disorder caused by an obsession with a slim body,” says Mabel Bello, a psychiatrist and president of the Association to Combat Bulimia and Anorexia.
Cristina la presidenta
Some blame the fashion and modeling industry, where stores have admitted to having clothing that no one could fit into, labeling a clothing item large when by Western standards it is a small, and model contractors keep girls under 105 pounds even though the normal weight for their size would be 120 pounds or more. Have you recently seen how ‘enhanced’ the current president of Argentina is?
In comparison, there have been worse cases of beauty obsession across the globe. I’ve picked up two articles along the way that shocked me and I personally find repulsive. “Mummy’s Little Lolita” is about an English mother and her 11 year old daughter who spend around $600US each month on beauty treatments such as fake eyelashes, hair extensions, manicures, facials, and fake tans. The second is about a website called “Miss Bimbo” where you pay money to create the “hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever” while embracing plastic surgery and extreme dieting. Canada seems to have the opposite problem with eating, 59% of Canadians are currently overweight or obese. While smoking is still the #1 cause of avoidable death, obesity is very close to being second.
Although the government and society in both Argentina and Canada are creating campaigns and discouraging eating disorders, it is still very visible in society. Here in Buenos Aires while walking down the street in the summer, most girls look starved with their stomaches showing and ribs and hip bones jutting out while smoking a cigarette. As my own experiment, my friend and I went to Burger King and bought the 3-layer Stacker Burger (three patties with all the topping.. there is a 4 Stacker but i think I’d have severe stomach problems if I tried eating that), and we walked down the busiest streets on Saturday (Corrientes and Florida) during the day eating it in front of everyone. I wanted to observe how people reacted to my very naturally thin friend and myself eating massive hamburgers in public. The reaction was rather entertaining, but also highly disturbing.
Within the 20 minute period it took us to eat the burger, young girls around 11-14 were waiting in line of a theater and looked at us with either faces of pure disgust or longing. We got pointed at 15 times, had four jaws drop when looked at, looked back at 7 times, and the best was probably a woman around 24 stopped in her tracks and gave us the dirtiest look I have ever seen in my entire life. Four english speaking foreigners passed us and didn’t give a second glance. Most of the people who stared as us were women, however a handful of men as well looked at us like we were crazy.
I don’t know what to do about the situation or who to point the finger at, I just wish that everyone was as happy as I was while eating that delicious hamburger.
Until next time!
Argentina ad campain against anorexia
Random Thought #1
Posted by khrycak on June 9, 2008
Let’s say hypothetically your favourite hockey team was the Detroit Red Wings and you’re so crazy about them all of your bathroom towels have their symbol. When they won the Stanley Cup, did you go running out rip roaring drunk into the street screaming and yelling and chanting with 10,000 of your closest friends? Did you drunk drive around honking and hanging out the window?
So River Plate, one of the famous Argentine soccer teams, won a huge game tonight and I’ve had to sit in my apartment listening to the honking and the yelling for about 4 hours now. Why do you think that Soccer creates wild, crazy, passionate fans while other sports don’t?
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