Asian cultures and feminine thinness

I’m starting this thread so I can stop hijacking this thread: Nail salon bills heavy customers more because of the risk of broken chairs - is this reasonable? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board

A few people (including a couple of posts towards the end of that thread) who have experience with East Asian cultures mention that there is an ideal towards what I guess I would consider “extreme” thinness (like in China a weight of 40 kg being considered ideal). I have personal experience with Indian culture and I know that being thin is valued very highly there and valued EXTREMELY highly among the Indian immigrant community here (a buddy of mine who went to Michigan, which has a large American-Indian community, said that the boys would sit around and rank girls by various traits, including thinness). My mother (who is Indian living in the States) is approaching 60, is 5’4", weighs maybe 125 lbs, and is constantly dieting. She’s on the treadmill for 45 mins a day and probably eats about 1000 cal/day. And gets deeply, deeply depressed when her clothes fit a little tighter than she thinks they should.

Now, I know Americans like them some thin ladies, at least in the ideal. But again, I don’t know many middle aged women, or even women under say, 22, who really want to weigh 87 lbs. And if I had a friend who was taller than 5’0" and said that was her goal weight, I would think she was setting herself up for a lot of disappointment.

So, does anyone else have any ideas if this perception is accurate?

Or, am I just thinking that these ideal weights are crazy cause I live in the land of the Obese and home of the Diabetic and 90 lbs really is a reasonable weight for most women of average height? Is that weight attainable by Asian women fairly easily?

I’ve noticed in my first-hand experiences with Indian culture and my casual observations of Asian culture that “femininity” in general seems much more important over there. Like, always dressing up for everything, always looking pretty, etc. Being an unkept girl in India is just. not. cool. Like, not wearing a necklace and earrings every day is equivalent to walking around with your shoes always untied or food particles constantly stuck in your mouth here – you think of that person as slovenly and indifferent. Is the desire to be very thin another manifestation of that?

I really hope I don’t offend anyone; I realize I’m going off anecdotal observations and if people have anecdotes or data to the contrary I’m glad to revise my impressions.

I don’t know about the second one, but you can check the first question rather easily: use a BMI Calculator to plug in 90 pounds and various heights. At my height I’d be very underweight at 90 pounds. I’m 5’4". Even someone 5’ would be somewhat underweight.

I have a Canadian friend in Shanghai who has told me there’s a terrible pressure on women there to stay thin. Many of her female acquaintances eat very little breakfast, a bowl of rice for lunch, and a bowl of rice with a little meat or veg for supper. When she wants fashionable clothes, she has to have them made as the nice boutiques simply don’t carry anything in her size, which I believe is an 8. (For comparison, because I know sizing varies around the world, shops in Montreal tend to stock from 0 to 12 (with 14 and above as plus sizes), though some boutiques stop at 10.)

Oh, and she also mentioned that her Chinese acquaintances are always dressed up, as you described. Fine purses and high-heeled shoes are a given.

Yeah, but I’m wondering if there is a western bias to the BMI

My sister is east Asian, 40, 5 ft tall, and I think she weighs about 90 lbs. As far as I know, she’s not doing any crazy diet or anything like that, and she also has a fairly sedentry lifestyle. I wouldn’t say she is typical though. She’s just always been small, even by Asian standard.

Bone structure can effect weight and not be apparent. I dropped all the way down to 95 once after a hospitalization and at 67 inches/5’7" I was scary concentration camp survivor looking [I was normally at 135-145 of solid muscle at the time] I was skin and bones with very little muscle left. I have a very heavy bone structure thanks to an addiction to dairy and working heavy labor through my teens.

It would seem to me that the whole birdy thin oriental woman deal really only works at a weight under 90 lbs because of the gracile bone structure of women that do not do heavy labor [the leisure class, the same ones that previously might have done the lotus foot binding thing which is not acceptable now] combined with being much shorter. I believe the height thing is also a childhood nutritional thing as I remember reading that many oriental families increase in height in the US because of better nutritional access. I am a bit braindead from lack of sleep [it is an insomnia night] and don’t really trust my google-fu right now to be able to find it online.

It’s unrealistic to expect the average woman - even the average Korean woman - to be around 90 lbs and be healthy. My mom is 157 cm and around 40 kg and she is one of the tiniest people I know. But Koreans still cling to traditional ideas of feminine beauty - pale, delicate girls who are soft-spoken and domestic. It’s changing, but slowly. I am a size 2-4 in American sizes and in Korea I’m on the larger side of medium. It’s almost impossible to get a bra that’s bigger than an A or B cup in this country.

Obesity is slowly starting to become a problem here as well, though, so eventually people will have to readjust what they of as the norm.

A “healthy” BMI is based on actuarial data for lifespan. I could see there as being a minor genetic difference which meant that someone of race A is better at weight A’ and someone of race B is best at weight B’, but I’d very much doubt that A’ and B’ would be significantly different. It would probably only be a few pounds one way or the other.

What I’m saying is that no, there isn’t a “bias” since you can’t “bias” how long a person lives. There might be a statistical difference between populations, but probably not a significant one.

One thing that skews ideal weights is that everyone lies, and doesn’t realize everyone else is lying. IME, most women believe they “carry their weight well” (i.e., don’t look like they weigh as much as they do). This is because they know what they weigh, and they know what other people claim to weigh, and they see a disparity. But that disparity comes from the fact that the other women were all shaving 5-15% off their weight. So it’s quite possible for an “ideal” weight to be a weight almost no one actually is, but that everyone thinks lots of other people are.

Hehe, I know that is true with guys and height. I’m 5-10 and have no problem with it. But most people when asked swear I’m 6ft to 6-2 because I am taller than the ‘6 footers’ they know, and people know their own height(which the probably lie about) but don’t have a frame a reference since eyes are first-person perspective. And I don’t go around in Elton John Shoes.

Asians I believe are generally more petite. The second thing is that Asians from Asia grew up with a lot less milk/protein in their diet than American counterparts. 40 years ago when my wife was growing up in Shanghai, a child needed a doctors prescription to obtain milk. This is changing quite rapidly.

I am not a doctor nor do I play one on TV, but I think growing up with less protein leads to a smaller build and lower weight. Third generation Americans in the US tend to be larger than their home country peers and generally more American sized.

Here are some of my experiences in southwestern China. While what I relate is generally representative of what I encountered, I’m an imperfect observer and what I say may not be representative of all of China. Take from it what you will.

I taught mostly college-aged young women, and yes, weight was a huge concern. As mentioned before, they saw 40 kilos (around 87 lbs.) as the “ideal” weight. My students were generally shorter and small-boned. 5’0" to 5’4" was an average height for women in my town- at 5’6" I towered over everyone and elicited lots of “Oh, she’s sooooo tall.” comments. I wear a size six dress, and weigh around 125 lbs, and I couldn’t find pants or skirts in my town that would fit me, and any time I bought clothes I had to ask for large or extra large. One time I was even given a XXXL bathing suit- something I never thought would happen to me!

But even on small people, the ideal was definitely extremely thin. My students would often repeat the well-known saying “bones are beautiful” and would talk about how they would like their bones to be visible. The “most beautiful girl in the school” was so thin that her arms were concave, curving in towards the middle and flaring out to accommodate the elbow and shoulder.

My students put a lot of mental energy into worrying about their weight. It was often a topic of conversation and when I’d talk about life goals and the like, weight was always a number one concern. Like any institution with lots of young women, it got rather competitive, with the skinniest girls showing off by voicing fake complaints about their imaginary weight problems and the wanna-bes making a big show of how they are only going to eat apples for the next week (or whatever fad crash diet was popular at the moment.) Anorexia and bulimia were both common, and many of my students talked to me in confidence about their eating disorders. Even more common were public displays of anorexia, with student staging elaborate fainting episodes in class and the like. Doing so was an easy way to get some attention and earn respect for being so devoted to weight loss.

Of course, you can find this stuff on any college campus in the world. What was surprising to me was that it was everyone, not just the “popular girls.” Everyone from the misunderstood artist in black, the lesbian in men’s clothes, the geek girl- they were all preoccupied with weight. It was striking just how much of their time and energy was spent on worrying about weight. This one subject was so dominent that it seemed to sap a lot of their energy to think about and discuss other things. I spent a lot of time in my classroom trying to develop a broader self-image and trying to get my students to understand how using their energy on this was holding them back.

What I saw in the classroom seemed to me to reflect a broader cultural trend of fetishizing the “incapable female.” I remember watching music videos one night and suddenly realizing that in fully half of the videos, the woman either dies, get sick or injured, or at least falls down. These were love songs. When my students were with their boyfriends, even the most confident girls would suddenly put on big displays of weakness- for example, they’d pretend to be struggling to carry their purses, and their boyfriends would “help” them by carrying it. It was also common to see young women pretending like they were having trouble walking, and making a big show of leaning on their boyfriend for support. Others actually couldn’t walk. Everyone wore high heels, and not good ones. My students would arrive in class taking small uncertain steps like someone iceskating for the first time, the grimace of pain evident on their faces with each step. This was normal. It was normal for women to hurt. Drove me nuts.

Any sort of muscle was considered unattractive, and I’d see the students shuffling around the track at night, trying to figure out some way to work weight off without putting on muscle. The go-go girls at clubs would dance with spaghetti arms because they’d have no muscle tone. More than once I was admonished on my runs for doing something that might make me too strong.

If I had to extrapolate, I’d say there is a lot of insecurity in general. The men had a lot of sexual insecurity (as illustrated by the wide variety of traditional aphrodisiacs available everywhere), and so they wanted women who could make them feel like the big manly man. Interestingly, in traditional Chinese culture sex with a grown women is a somewhat dangerous activity that saps your manhood (although very young girls and virgins can restore it.) I think there were undercurrents of this sort of thinking in a lot of gender relationships.

Discrimination in general meant that women actually did need to keep their looks a number one priority in order to live comfortable lives. Looks were for women what money and brains were for men- it’s what people were counting on to get them ahead in life. Hiring for any job- even stuff like teachers- was often based on attractiveness. I personally witnessed an HR person at a school sorting resumes into “attractive” and “unattractive” stacks.

Furthermore, women still expected their husbands to be the main provider and support their lifestyle- my students often cited “income” as the most important criteria for selecting a husband. My students (admittedly at a bit of a dead-end school with few other options in life) were counting on marrying a rich husband. Their parents, who count on their kids to support them as they age, put a lot of pressure on them to find a rich husband as well. They felt like they had to do everything they could to look good enough to attract someone who could support them and their parents comfortably. Since 25 is the target marrying age and 27 is the official point of being an old maid, there was a lot of pressure to do this all quickly.

Anyway, that’s some of what I saw. I’m not an expert, but hopefully this is interesting.

Evensven thanks for the post. That is so interesting, and sad. It sort of seems like the college-aged Chinese women you’re talking about are like eleven-year-olds here. I remember the same sort of displays in middle school about complaining about invisible fat, etc. Although I think in our culture strength in women was also prized . . . girls in my school were very athletic. I don’t know how you survived there without going crazy. I’m pretty insecure about my weight and I think I would have lost it eventually and been like, “seriously? Is your self-worth so low that you basically consider your value to society to consist of how you look and how little of you there is? And your number one life goal is to marry rich? Do you not have any idea that you can do stuff on your own, that anything you want you can get for yourself?”

My experience with Indian culture makes me feel for those girls too. It seems to me that in Asian cultures in some superficial ways women have progressed, because most young women in India who are middle class are expected to do well in school, sports, etc, and get a job and such. But, they are still so trapped by the feminine mystique and this idea that in addition to being professionally accomplished, they also have to be beautiful and feminine and delicate and light-skinned and marry well and be a good housewife. Also, they are kind of expected to be irrational and needy with men. “Capable” women, who can perform manual tasks or take care of themselves completely or who generally seem completely in charge of all aspects of their life, and not really valued over there like they are over here. Neither is independence, especially from men.

Thanks for all the other replies as well. I have another question, particularly for HazelNut and evensven. In India, the obsession with thinness is a relatively new thing, as people became more prosperous. 50 years ago, as in many parts of the developing world, being a little plump was considered good. Has extreme thinness always been prized in Asia? Or 100 years ago would the feminine ideal have encompassed a little more roundness, as it was rarer at the time?

This is not my experience, at least for Indian people. My mother is Indian-born and lives in the US, and diets more or less exactly the same way the average American-born person does.

That is, half-assedly.

I think we have to separate South and Southeast Asian cultures here, too; Indian food- even vegetarian!- is much higher in fat (thanks to all that cream and ghee).

I once spent 4 weeks in Singapore for work. At the time, I was about 5’7" and around 170 lbs. At some point, I wanted to buy some underwear.

I found a department store that had packages of panties - the sizes were noted with little animals. I don’t remember exactly, but the smaller sizes had all kinds of cute little animals - rabbits, bluebirds, etc.

The panties in my size had HIPPOS on the package. HIPPOS! I still laugh like crazy just thinking about it!

Not just Western, but from specific populations within “Western”. I’m from Spain and a visit to the doctor some 25 years ago triggered in him an interest for “weight studies for Spain”; the sizing chart he had put me as “deformed”, his eyes disagreed.

The BMI is based on specific studies done on a specific population, but they’ve been generalized for the world. The problem extending them is, how do you define who is an outlier? (That is, who is so absurdly fat or thin that he shouldn’t be taken into consideration)
What you’re describing about being expected to be independent yet dependent, be the perfect worker, mother and husband’s complement is the Superwoman; eventually it will likely be superseded, but it will take a while (we’re still working on it in the West).

LOL. That is amazing.

I’m picturing the next sizes up as elephants and blue whales. :smiley:

“Honey, can you pick me up some new panties from the store? I need size “Brontosaurus”- thanks!”

even sven, is there some reason you have to stick a disclaimer on any and all discussions on your time in China? I’m not attacking you, by any means; I’m genuinely curious. I’ve seen you put disclaimers on your posts so many times, it makes me wonder if the mods decreed it for some bizarre reason, or if other posters pick on you or something. It just seems odd. I sure would hate having to put disclaimers on every damn thing I ever wrote about Mississippi or Americorps or whatever.