Culture of Vanity

Culture of Vanity

This article emphasizes the fall of unique culture to ‘Americanism.’ Brazilians have long been worshippers of the ‘guitar physique.’ That is slender on the top and fat on the bottom. It was once a sign of beauty and health. The shift in mentality, as of the last 30 years, is now that only poor people are fat and rich people can afford to be skinny. The article sites such Brazilian beauties as the lady of Ipanema, who in the English version is ‘tall, and young and healthy’ where in the Portuguese version it talks about the sweet sway of her butt. Now the ideal is Gisele Bunchen. Gisele, according to the article, is a Barbie. Her body is proportionate and nothing like a guitar.
The article sites how there was a correlation between the arrival of Barbie and the increased consumption of diet pills. Barbie arrived in 1970 and Brazil is now, as of 2007, the biggest consumer of the pills. Women claim 80 percent of the sales. When Gisele earned her international model status she also became the new ideal among young women.
The article then went on to discuss plastic surgery. It talked about how the idea of breast implants used to be ridiculous. It wasn’t, of course, inline with the guitar shape mentality. It was inline with the American models. Surgeons would even take soft tissues from ladies breasts and put it into her butt/hips. That isn’t the case anymore. The biggest craze in plastic surgery lately is to get your toes liposuctioned so that your feet can more easily fit into cute shoes. Thinness is now a sign of wealth and not poverty.

My personal experience of this was first hand. I lived with a couple different families during my year stay in Brazil. I stayed with families from the Rotary Club http://www.rotary.org/. They are generally, in any town, an organization of wealthier individuals. In Brazil the families I stayed with were very wealthy and all had beautiful children. Their children were also extremely thin.
My pre-Brazil assumption was that, like in the article, Brazilian women had thicker thighs and thinner tops. I wasn’t shocked by my realization, but I figured it was just an assumption that I had made.
Anyway, I learned that the girls that I hung out with often went on diet coke, pineapple diets. For 2 weeks at a time all they would eat was pineapple and all they would drink was diet coke. They were all very very thin and this sprung feelings of inferiority. I was quite a bit fatter than they were and I realized that they were judging me for it. So I attempted to do the same bit, then failed, then attempted my diet again, and then failed. I realized that these rich girls with fridges brimming at the edges and maids preparing huge lunches were all, in a sense, starving themselves.
This article shed a little knowledge on to my own insight.