Body Shaming and craze to a perfect shape.!

The following excerpt I presented at the recent Gurgaon Literature Festival - Partho Dhang

In the wild we see animals in uniform shapes and sizes.  A zebra and a giraffe, or a tiger, or for that matter any animal carry a typical body ratio between all its body parts. In fact, over millions of years their shape and size had undergone a process of natural selection to arrive at a “finality” or the “optimum”. This uniformity is must for the survival of the species. Differences does occur but is removed from nature very quickly by a process of natural selection, leaving only the fittest and the right ones to survive.

In contrary, humans come in all shapes and sizes. Through the benevolence of the state and a constitution, every shape and size are given equal opportunity and is protected from discrimination. The result of this is in front of us. We are diverse in shape, size and looks. Even though this is accepted in society as natural, there is however a hidden hunt to look for perfection, a perfect and appealing human look and figure. This is where the concept of beauty originates.

The craze for body shape and looks may sound very recent, but it is not. Peep into old temple carvings, human portraits, historical paintings, ancient status done on men and women across cultures. We find a symmetry in all of the depicted human specimens.   

Scientists who have been researching on this subject have concluded, the answer to human body shape and size lies with evolution.

Attractiveness, as whole is a natural sign of evolutionary fitness of an individual. It informs someone is healthy and will be good at producing healthy children. Our bodily intelligence unconsciously looks for symmetry or perfection in our would-be mate. As social animals, we humans also achieve all our social goals by being accepted by others, so self-presentation matter.

This is natural. At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, neurologist had done brain imaging on people as they looked at attractive faces. The researcher discovered that areas throughout the brain become active when people looked at faces which were rated attractive; the better-looking it is, the more intense the activity. Concluding attractive faces draw attention.

Beauty is thus sort across cultures. Mocking our inclination toward self-presentation, Hollywood comedian Billy Crystal had famously said: “it is more important to look good than feel good”. This in fact has become a sort of a mantra most carry now for their living.

Furthermore, feminine beauty studies manipulated images of androgynous faces to change the contrast between the eyes and lips, and the rest of the face. The more the increased in contrast, the more female the faces looked. In fact, people use makeup just to highlight exactly the same areas and increase the contrast. Makeup in a way work by exaggerating sexually dimorphic attributes, facial contrast and make the face appear more feminine and hence more attractive.

Putting on a makeup is a reversible step to enhance beauty, but there are also drastic steps to alter one’s looks. The act such as undergoing plastic surgery are proven risks, we take just to look good.

But, then what about the culture of body shamming? Why we love to pass critical comments on someone’s body construct? The answer could be to simply to dominate and win the race to be superior. In an absence of bodily-physical competition as in other animals, the body shape becomes a tool to show one’s fitness over other. This is a natural phenomenon inbuilt in us, so acts to look good and body shaming will remain a practice in the future.

However, concept of beauty and body shape is determined by culture too. Someone who is attractive in one culture may not be judged as attractive in another culture. A critical observer might note that the 2:3 ratio, or 36-24-36 in inches, is the glamorized figure of Hollywood starlets and wonder whether the male preference was actually evolved human nature or simply a reflection of the universal exposure of people to the values expressed in modern media and movies. To test this hypothesis, anthropologists, asked the same questions about their preferences of women's figures to a short, stocky group of people known as the Matsigenka, who live high in the Peruvian Andes. They found that, contrary to the uncritical assertions about human nature, the Matsigenka men preferred women shaped just like their own women are shaped, and not like Marilyn Monroe.