Wednesday, 20 February 2008

Are you feeling Fat?

I was listening to the radio this morning, and that woman was explaining why 70% of Spanish women are content with their body. This figure is apparently very much higher than in the UK. She thinks it’s all because of cultural differences. According to her, Spanish women aren’t any thinner than women in the UK, but they’re brought up in a way which stressing the role of the woman in the family.

Another point she mentioned that they receive much more vocal appreciation and admiration which gives them more confidence.


On the other hand, in the UK they have saying which is:

You can’t be too rich or too thin

This means there’s no upper limit for the money and no lower limit for your weight if you exceed it becomes a bad thing. Obviously, this is not helping the situation at all. Every girl wants to be a size zero model in the UK.

To find more information press here>


Does anyone know about the situation in Kuwait? Are women feeling fat over there like in the UK? Or happy with their body like in Spain?

4 comments:

الزرقاء و ندى الجنة said...

Salah, your question is not very clear, at least not to me + the program is not available anymore on the site. :S

Salah said...

Sister Zarqa':

The question is about women in Kuwait. Are they too worried because they think they are fat? Is it similar to the UK or similar to Spain?

I've just checked the link and it worked alright.

The title is:

What can we learn from Spanish women and their attitude to body image?


and the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_08_wed.shtml

G said...

I'm really interested in this. I think the beauty ideal is changing rapidly here.

A personal observation:
It used to be that a woman can be too skinny. But a "boyish" figure like the models revered in the West is still not the ideal. (we're getting there slowly.)

But we're still quite forgiving of curves.

There's an interesting study done by Dove that includes a Saudi sampling (although its unclear whether they're residents or citizens) about beauty and self-esteem.

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/uploadedfiles/dove_white_paper_final.pdf

There's also a very interesting article in the New York times about the Mauritanian beauty ideal and force-feeding that ran earlier this year.(google it, the link's too long)

(Sorry about the long comment and ginormous link, but this topic is of particular interest to me.)

Salah said...

G.E&B:

This is an important study, thanks.
I understand from it the situation is not hugely different between the west and KSA.
Kuwait is probably the same.