The World Has Curves by Julia Savacool

Author:Julia Savacool [Julia Savacool]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781605293646
Publisher: Rodle
Published: 2009-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Right Ratio

As the Greeks understood long ago, a beautiful body is quantified not by absolute numbers, but relative ones—proportions that remain constant while individual height and weight may vary. In Jamaica, proper proportion is king. Like the Coca-Cola bottle, which comes in 10-ounce, 12-ounce, and 16-ounce versions, the perfect woman’s body in Jamaica may come in small, medium, or large, so long as the dimensions stay true. The bottom should be bigger than the top, and both should be bigger than the middle. “With this ideal,” says Anderson-Fye, “it doesn’t matter if three women are the same height and one weighs 110, another 140, and the other 170. It’s about proportion.”

The only body type that does not get respect is a skinny one. “In Jamaica, it has always been better to be 10 pounds overweight than 10 pounds underweight,” says Ferguson. In fact, Ferguson’s research with psychologist Phebe Cramer, PhD, suggests that this preference starts at a young age: 5 When shown images of other children ranging in size from underweight to obese, Jamaican girls ages 6 to 9 demonstrated significantly less bias against heavier people than their American counterparts, and in some cases showed favorable bias toward plumpness.

While the ideal holds true across the country, there are gradations: Rural Jamaicans have more prominent curves (though they are by no means obese) than urban women, who tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they are smaller, or they have “lost their curves,” as the locals put it, becoming medically obese, which is no longer considered attractive. (“Roundness,” as one local woman told me, “means she has forgotten to care for her shape.”)

Of course, as with every culture’s body ideal, there are some women who come up short—or fall flat, in the case of Jamaica’s obsession with curves. But rather than turn to plastic surgery, Jamaicans tend to favor other means of noninvasive enhancement, such as the clever use of clothing and accessories. Shoulder pads, padded bras, a bare midriff, and a bustled skirt are all perfectly acceptable devices used to give the illusion of the perfect body. In the dance halls, flesh is pushed and squeezed into impossibly tiny tops, and jeans cut to accentuate a woman’s hips and rear are de rigueur.

For those who feel fashion alone cannot produce the full-figured body they want, there is a growing selection of products that promise smaller women solutions to their lack of the requisite “bump.” In fact, over the past 3 decades, several companies have developed products to cure the undercurved population. One such prescription, sold in pharmacies across the country, was called Anorexal, which promised prepubescent girls the curves they were waiting for. (As the name implies, the product was positioned as the antidote to anorexia—not the clinical illness as we define it, but a broader concept derived from the Greek word, which means “loss of a desire for food.”) After medical inquiry and heated debate, Anorexal was deemed unsafe and pulled from shelves in the mid-1980s.

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