I was pleased to listen to an NPR series called "The Hidden World Of Girls" where they explored adolesence and emerging womanhood in different contexts aroudn the world. The first story was about Jamaica and the body standards there.

As I have been recently struggling with a GI disorder, body image has become an important issue in my life right now. The pressure on young people like my self to fit a certain body ideal is difficult and is something I think may resonate with several people in the Amplify community.

The focus of the story was the different paradigms of beauty that many young Jamaican girls are pursuing from the anorexic European standard of thinness, skin bleaching and most unique the chicken pill phenomenon. The chicken pill is what is used by the agricultural industry to make chickens grow faster, but young Jamaican girls are looking for a way to grow fuller breasts and hips.

The explanation for this desire for a voluptuous body is explained in the interview NPR did with several Jamaican academics and young women:

"Most males, they love to see women with big bottoms. The whole idea of Coca-Cola bottle shape" Carol says. " 'I don't want a meager woman,' that's how the men would speak. ... They're figuring if you look meager, you look poor, in the sense that you're not being taken care of.

Women take the chicken pills to get broader hips and bigger bottoms," says Carol's son Jason. "In our Jamaican culture, we love a girl that has a lot of shape."

According to Carolyn Cooper, professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, "big bottoms" reveal power — but there are competing norms of beauty in Jamaica.

The NPR article is titled "Taking Surprising Risks for the Ideal Body" which I think is a bit misleading. Young girls here in the United States take numerous risks for the ideal body with everything from dieting, eating disorders and over-exercising. Although it is true that the chicken pills are especially harmful because they contain arsenic and can have a wide variety of ill effects, there are also evident harms from eating disorders and the desire to be thin. I think what suprised the NPR journalists the most is the idea that these young women would take so many risks to become curvy which is an idea that runs so counter to our cultural milleu.

I analysis I found at the F-Word blog was particularly compelling to me because I think it really gets to the heart of the issue here. It is not so much that women are stuffing themselves or starving themselves to fit an ideal but instead the fact that they are facing so much pressure and that the same sort of pressure does not seem to be present (to the same extent) across gender lines:

Fat bottoms. Chicken pills. Bleaching powders. It all may seem strange and bizarre to the rest of us, but the whole discourse of dissatisfaction and anxiety about the body is a common thread among most, if not all, cultures.  In Jamaica, women take chicken pills.  In America, we down Fen-phen and diet pills.  If women have anything in common with our sisters worldwide, it’s that the natural body is never enough

I hope that people can recognize that although this is a distinct cultural pattern, that it also represents this widespread trend of pressure for females to fit an ideal body. And that is what I appreciate about this peice because I think they are trying to show that despite our differences and variations, we all share a common humanity and common human experiences. Unfortuantely the subtext of gender inequality is not covered in as much detail as I would like but that is a different matter.