“They are mining bodies”: Susie Orbach tells UN Status of Women Commission

I’m very pleased to be speaking here today on this historic occasion.

It has been customary for the west to bemoan and critique the appalling forms of violence practiced against girls and women in the rest of the world – FGM, rape as a tactic of war, forced marriage.

In this focus what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves.

These include:

Self-starvation and the often bulimic response–compulsive eating and vomiting.
The surgical transformation of breasts, legs, stomachs, cheek bones to conform to the latest beauty ideal
The use of diet and pharmaceutical products to suppress appetite
The botoxing of 5 year olds
The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons. Read more>

March 18th, 2012

Tags: body image, cosmetic surgery, Eating Disorders, Susie Orbach, thin ideal, UN Status of Women Commission

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