Cybill Shepherd: model, actress, vocalist
Alphonse Mucha's "Morning Star" (Art Nouveau period)
Theda Bara, vamp of the silent screen
Bougeureau (19th c)
18th c. sketch
Rubens' portrait of his wife
go to the next page of this essay for "The Thin
and the Fat" of beauty in art, and some eye-opening links on media biases
toward presenting realistic women's body images.
Essays:
the flu & you
Correct use of MaHuang/Ephedra & the
truth about Chinese Herbs, weight loss, and
metabolism
Past Essays:
 |
|
Female Body Image:
What Is Healthy?
Many women patients of mine say that their appetite is "too good."
They think they should be slimmer. Some feel the impact of weight (fatigue,
joint pain, difficulty exercising); others, even if they are overweight by
current medical guidelines (which, by the way, are not limited to the thinness
of runway models), have strength, vigor, and no weight-related health
problem.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, one concept is that, as long as there
is a healthy appetite, a disease (even a serious one) can improve; on the
other hand, the lack of a healthy appetite—no desire to eat—is
looked upon as a terminal disease in and of itself. We were built to eat.
As creatures with culture, food is one of the ways we can define
our culture, our community, and acknowledge our good fortune. In feng shui,
the stove is taken as an altar to wealth, because it takes money to have
fuel for a fire (electricity or natural gas, too) and it takes money to have
food to eat. Food is valuable. It is key to our thriving. A healthy
relationship with food yields a healthy body; for some women, this body may
be lean; for others, it may be round, soft, and padded, plumb, or even overweight
by medical standards.
Obsession with anything in Traditional Chinese Medicine hinders the
ability to digest, and actually leads to problems with fatigue, metabolism,
and weight. Obsession about appearance or worry about the shape of one's
body because it doesn't conform to mass media images of beauty is
no exception.
Small breasts, round bellies, thick waists, ample hips, generous
thighs, soft yet strong arms have been found beautiful
by artists for hundreds of years. . . and are still attractive now.
Now: Cybill Shepherd (model, actress, chanteuse) modeling for "Mode"
magazine, which has excellent sales figures. At the beginning of this century,
both Alphonse Mucha and Theda Bara, vamp of the silent screen, made zaftig
sexy.
19th century: Flaming June by Frederick, Lord Leighton (below). In
the past decade this image has been on calendars, posters, cards. . . She's
content, beautiful, soft and round. Over a century later, she's considered
beautiful just as she was in the Victorian era. Also: the Bougeureau painting
to the left has a similar body type (yet frontal partial nude). These
men found beauty in curves.
18th century:
the nude sketch in the left column is in the collection at the Louvre,
part of a project commissioned by wealthy nobility, a class of people who
had the means to make their world attractive.
Here are two paintings of Andromeda, the princess Perseus rescued from the
sea monster. To the left,, Rubens version (17th century); to the right,
Leighton's version (19th c). About 200 years separate the artists, yet their
rendition of a beautiful princess is similar. . . soft and pear shaped.
Aphrodite/Venus has also been rendered with similar features by different
artists from different eras; Botticelli's (Renaissance) Aphrodite born on
the waves is a ubiquitous reproduction, on cards, calendars, and the
like; Bougeureau's (19th c) is similarly soft and pear-shaped. |
