Be happy as you are!

It's summer below the equator. For Brazilians, that means Carnaval is approaching.

Many people have heard about it, seen pictures or even been to one. Brazil is widely known for it; the colors, the music, the euphoria, the women. Brazil has exported a body standard from it.

It wasn't until the beginning of this year when I heard about this new Brazilian butt-lift, though I guess it had been going on for a while back. I think there's a whole workout program with the same name. The article I read showed a picture of Izabel Goulart, a Brazilian supermodel, in the last Victoria's Secret fashion show. This miraculous surgery could seemingly turn your "derrière" into one that looked like hers. There is one other body intervention I'm aware of carrying the Brazilian name and I guess many women outside of Brazil have also heard of it, which is the Brazilian wax. The Brazilian body has become a brand.

The famous Drum Queens who parade in the avenues during Carnaval festivities have a different body type than supermodels. When this time of the year comes, Brazilian websites become flooded with news about the Drum Queens' preparation, saying how much weight they have loss and how they have intensified their work-out routines. Don't get me wrong, these are beautiful bodies and beautiful women who have worked really hard to look like they do.

But last week I came across an article about a fifteen-year-old girl who had become the youngest Drum Queen to ever parade for a Samba School. I don't always pay much attention to these kinds of news, since most of the Drum Queens are celebrities, such as actresses or socialites, and even though I think that there should be more women with average body types represented in the media, it's a fact that a certain body standard exists and I'd say the majority of women who work with their images are still very concerned about that. I'd even say that for Carnaval Drum Queens, it's comes to me as an obsession.

The teenager mentioned in the article is the daughter of the president of the Samba School she's parading for. She grew up in the Carnaval business, but this is the first time she parades as a Drum Queen.  In the article I read, she had given an interview talking about her excitement, boyfriends, her father's jealousy, the costume she'd wear, her inspirations and her training.  

Most Drum Queens parade with tiny costumes and some of them parade naked, with their bodies painted. The objectification of Brazilian women due to the overly sexualized way they are perceived during the Carnaval parades has been discussed over and over again. There are several layers to this discussion, such as the Brazilian tradition, what is thought to be the target audience's desire, the international export and the national exposure to the festivities' sexual connotation alongside with many other aspects. Yet what is the impact of having a teenage Drum Queen parading in 2014's Carnaval?

Many Brazilian young girls and young women grow up inspiring themselves in Drum Queens, who already are or instantly become influential public figures. Brazilian women see other curvy women parading and are therefore able to identify themselves. There is obviously the downside of objectification, but on the other hand, more women tend to embrace their curves because they're proud of their bodies, which is a great thing. But then again, it takes many hours working out plus a carefully monitored diet to achieve the Drum Queen body kind perfection. I believe that most women don't have the resources and much time to dedicate to their bodies; hence, to accomplish the body perfection they crave for, it takes shortcuts, which aren't always the healthiest options and which might initiate an obsessive pursuit leading to eating disorders and unnecessary body interventions.

It isn't a good message for girls when a fifteen-year-old is crowned a Drum Queen and publicly speaks of worrying about her weight and how her body will look like when she's parading. For starters, it's too early to expose such a young woman to this highly sexualized position. Somehow it even makes me think that crowning a teenage Drum Queen reinforces that it's okay for foreigns to come from abroad looking for sexual tourism with a minor. Brazil exports a body image, so by exporting the image of a teenager parading as a sex-symbol along with other grown women, it might influence many girls to want the same thing, to worry too much about their figure, to want to be in the same position as she is and to be as desirable as she seems to be. Even if she doesn't look like a teenager and even if she's arguably mature, she's subjected to sexual viewed position, whether she likes it or not. People won't look at her like a teenager; they will look at her like an adult woman.

Girls at that age are starting to figure their sexualities out and they are getting to know themselves. A fifteen-year-old shouldn't be forced into pulling the germinating sexiness out of her, even if she wants it or has it. She shouldn't be put in this position and she also shouldn't have to endure with the body related charging she didn't have before this "job". As teenagers, we all want to grow up very quickly, but part of the ripening process is learning to accept the way we look. Instead of being women obsessed with perfection we should be women obsessed with being comfortable in our own skins. We should take advantage of what we see and what we find beautiful in our own conditions, respecting our body types. We should learn how to be patient and not to follow unachievable trends. We're not bound to look like anything, specially because of society’s requirements, and we surely mustn't submit young girls to feel obliged to look like grown women.

By Janaína Albuquerque

Love You for You, Despite what the Internet Says

If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you’ve probably heard of Pinterest. If not, I’ll give
you the run down: Pinterest is an online scrapbooking website wherein users are able to “pin” or post pictures and links to their favourite things. I spend far too much time on the site, making me what they call a “pinaholic.” As a pinaholic, I’ve naturally seen every category on the site. I enjoy browsing all of the items in each category, except for one: Health and Fitness. Allow me to elaborate.

It was my first night as a registered user on Pinterest. As a newcomer to the site, I took some time to
look around the site and become familiar with it. When I came across the Health and Fitness category, I was excited as I am very much into natural health remedies, yoga and keeping myself healthy. It took one click of the mouse to change my mood that fateful evening. The first “pin” I came across had a picture of a woman’s thighs with the caption “Get that inner thigh gap!” Unimpressed, I continued scrolling. The next pin: “Change your natural body shape with these 5 easy moves!” and the next: “3 moves to lose the muffin top.” The trend continued throughout the posts and with every passing pin, I felt worse about myself.

For the next few passing weeks, I became obsessed with my body. I started thinking about all of the
things I needed to change – my muffin top, the fact that my thighs rubbed together, my “apple” body
shape. Preceding my Pinterest experience, I had self-esteem and self-image issues. It has taken years
for me to love myself for who I am, for every nook and cranny, for every imperfection. I had taken many steps and progressed by leaps and bounds when it came to improving the way I viewed myself, and then I ran into one of the biggest obstacles in quite some time – the health and fitness section of Pinterest.

How silly it seems now, how trivial, how ridiculous that I allowed a website to impact how I feel about myself. At the same time I am frustrated that a section of a website that is meant to promote health and well-being can actually be in itself quite destructive. My experience with this category only opened my eyes to other issues with the site that have the potential to negatively impact female users. While browsing the Women’s Fashion category, I did not have to look far to find posts with captions such as: “Dress yourself skinny!” and “How to pick the right bathing suit for your body” (this one included a picture of different sizes of women, the larger the woman, the more cover was suggested).

Being that Pinterest is such a widely used site, I believe it is very important for women and girls who use it to be cautious and think about what they are seeing when they both browse and post on Pinterest (and all social networking and various websites, I should add). It is crucial for us to remember the following:
1. Not everything in health and wellness is truly relevant to improving your well-being
2. Not everything we see on Pinterest or any website is true and always question what you read
3. You are beautiful just the way you are

Whilst browsing the internet, you will find things that upset you. You will find things that make you
question your self-worth, your self-esteem and how you see yourself. So where do you go from here?
If you have Pinterest, post things that encourage positive thinking and that will be beneficial for your
female followers to see. If you use any other websites (including social networking sites), use them to
empower yourself and the women around you. Don’t put up with body shaming, gender shaming or any other kind of negative messaging – it is in our hands to change it, and we have the power!

Jennifer Andrews

On Beauty.

Cameron Russell is a striking brunette, blessed an Amazonian stature and the face of a Grecian goddess. She has spent the last 10 years gracing the runways for Victoria’s Secret and Chanel. In October of 2012, she took the stage for a different kind of show: a TED talk, where she denounced the fallacy behind modelling, and examined the pervasive effect that distorted representations of beauty can and do have on modern day women.

It is a discussion that is often brushed upon, but not adequately dissected or criticized. While, every so often, there is an outcry in the media of the unrealistic representations of women, there is too little research done on the deep-seated psychological effects of the modern-day images of beauty, and what that does to the average female consumer. With eating disorder rates skyrocketing, and affecting girls at younger and younger ages, and plastic surgery becoming commonplace, it is becoming apparent the media’s distortion of the female image is moving from the realm of a superficial annoyance to a social and psychological issue that has deep-seated effects.
On the unattainability of beauty

While the media is saturated with a very specific ideal of beauty, in reality, the minority of women can achieve the modern day Western ideal. Super tall and super thin, the unrealistic expectations that have been established for the modern day woman lead to poor body image and a skewed vision of what the majority of the world’s women look like.

Russell herself quotes a PhD student who discovered that out of 677 models hired for runway shows, only 27, or less than 4%, were non-white. The current media ideal of thinness is only achievable by 5% of the population. Fashion models’ weight averaged only 8% less than the average women 20 years ago. Today the average fashion model weighs 23% less than the average woman. 25% of Playboy centerfold models meet the criteria to be considered anorexic.
Even without statistics, it is easy to see the constant onslaught women are subjected to, reinforcing a belief of inadequacy. In any given department store, there are solutions for excessive body hair (which is any body hair), for bleaching, clearing or smoothing skin, for whitening teeth, for making hair more voluminous, shinier, longer, thicker, curlier, straighter, for reducing wrinkles, for breast enhancement or for tummy reduction, not to mention makeup. One begins to wonder when and why normality became a thing to be disguised, rather than celebrated.
On individual responsibility

While there are campaigns to combat the stereotypical images of beauty that are infecting girls and women, they are insufficient in quality and quantity. It is becoming more and more apparent that the way to combat media pressure is not to attempt to change representations of women, but to embrace our own appearances.

In our individual experience, we all know friends who have flaws that would be unforgivable in a fashion magazine: crooked teeth, a few extra pounds, frizzy hair. We still, however, find normal looking women beautiful all the time. If we can find beauty in the people around us, and they can find beauty in us, no magazine and no television program should be able to tell us otherwise.

As women, we rail against the pressures others put on us. Yet, simultaneously, we do not question the standards we’ve learned to set for ourselves. What weight is low enough, what hair is shiny enough, what teeth are white enough and why? While it is reprehensible for media outlets to propagate a harmful image of women, it is far worse for us not only to condone it, but to encourage it by buying into it. 

Argentinean Aesthetics

Argentina is famous for many things: the steak, the football, the landscape and of course, the women. The country has a reputation for having of the most attractive female populations in the world, but, upon closer examination, this honour becomes a dubious one when one considers the high price at which it comes.

Notoriously preoccupied with their image, Argentinean women are unusually concerned with their weight. Argentina’s culture has adopted the obsession with appearance. It is standard practice for the stores to carry sizes significantly smaller than the international standard, causing women to believe they are bigger than they are. A 23 year old student of healthy size and weight who had been on exchange for her studies remembered shopping overseas with fondness. “I remember I went into the store and tried on the XL and they were all too big for me – I tried a medium – a medium and it was fine! I remember calling my mother to tell her, mom, in London, I’m an M! I’m never leaving!”

The wonderment at average sized being labelled as average is a symptom of a deeply rooted psychological disease in Argentina. According to the Association Against Bulimia and Anorexia (ALUBA), 1 in 10 Argentineans is afflicted with an eating disorder ; a natural result of such aggressive cultural brainwashing. It is normal for the women to calorie count and restrict their meals and the local celebrities, more often than not, have undergone significant (and at times drastic) plastic surgery.

This is not a localized problem; globally, standards of beauty have become more unattainable, and consequently, more psychologically and physically damaging. Argentina in particular may be unusual in how visible the problem is, but the psychological manipulation of women to hate themselves – through the media, through society, through shows and magazines and advertising –is indeed a global problem.

Luckily, work is being done to combat this. Campaigns have been launched by independent organizations and major companies (such as Dove’s now-famous ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’) to expose the ridiculous nature of modern ideals. Argentina itself has advocates, working for a cultural shift. Three years ago, a law was passed enforcing stores to stock larger sizes than was then-standard practice. One of the nation’s major newspapers, Clarin, ran a feature advertising the few stores that sold larger-sized clothing and featuring healthier sized models. Said the editor Andrea Rabolini, "We have never received such a tremendous reader response as we did in that one issue..It was like a huge shout of liberation."

We can only hope the trend of embracing our bodies as they were meant to be will gather momentum. After all, it is a form of cruelty to shame any woman into denying herself the enjoyment of some of the best that is available to us; of fullness, of health, of food, of life.


By Farahnaz Mohammed