Adios Barbie

Scandinavian women who believe they’re too tall can get their legs shortened by having a surgeon break the femur bones and cut them down to a desirable length. Chinese men and women wanting the opposite can have a four-inch metal rod implanted in their upper legs to add height. Approximately half of Korean girls today are westernizing their eyes. Men worldwide are signing up for phalloplasty procedures—to enlarge and lengthen their penis. Parents in the U.S. can even have their children’s images photoshopped so as to eliminate nasty imperfections. Pulling on findings and facts from various countries, Orbach insightfully shows us how body obsession has reached epidemic levels around the world. So much so that she argues, “the body is turning from being the means of production to the production itself.”

The experienced psychotherapist, co-founder of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, and one of the originators of www.any-body.org skillfully dissects the numerous influences that drive the desire to alter our bodies. She adeptly pulls on multiple sources of research ranging from case studies from her own clinical practice to discoveries made in Colombia in the 1980s. What’s most exciting about Bodies is her presentation of fresh evidence from the field of neuropsychology suggesting that the brain is connected to body image. More specifically, Orbach cites a “built-in empathetic and mimicking capacity,” which allows us to learn at all stages of our lives, purely on an unconscious basis. It is not one’s DNA that passes mannerisms from parent to child, but rather this transfer occurs by simple watching. She makes a solid argument by proposing that children not only acquire particular gestures from their caregivers, but also the ways that the adults around them speak about and treat their own bodies.

Read more...Written by Adiosbarbie.com Associate Editor Sharon Haywood