I’d be interested to see examples. I can’t recall ever seeing Asian artwork that didn’t depict extremely slim women.
Not in Indian women, for sure - as RNATB says, Indian women diet the same way as American women. And we do tend to be heavier in the bottom and in the hips.
And in some places, it is different. Rich women in India are just as likely to be fat and heavy as gloriously thin.
I have noticed the cultural expectations are differing though. When I look at actresses from days of yore, I see what I call the Marilyn Monroe effect - women that were curvaceous and beautifully rounded in the hips and bust are now considered fat, and the upcoming crop of actresses are very thin.
I felt a lot more comfortable with my own hips after seeing a picture of Bella Dorita, who had Barcelona doing sommersaults for her in the first half of the 20th century. The picture was similar to this one.
Nowadays she wouldn’t be able to get a job advertising thinning miracles.
Here’s a few “moon-faced” women in Japanese art:
A woman portrayed by Yoshitoshi.
Shitty third world patriarchal societies are shitty. Being a woman in a shitty third world patriarchal society sucks. News at 11. :eek:
Uh, South Korea and Japan are hardly “third-world” societies.
And frankly, in most “shitty third-world patriarchial societies,” chubby women are prized over super thin women.
Some famous Tang Dynasty painters (of China) are known for depicting chubby women, from around the 8th-10th centuries AD. (And I’ve heard it said that a lot of Japan’s aesthetics are derived specifically from China’s Tang Dynasty)
There attitudes towards women are, compared to the West. Read the thread.
Really? In the following culture pairings, which culture of the two, overall, in your opinion 1) is more patriarchal and 2) puts more pressure on women to lose weight?
American vs. Ghanian
Californian vs. Mississipian
Canadian vs. Korean?
Attitudes in Korea towards women are progressing, albeit slowly. For example, I don’t get too many hostile looks walking down the streets of Seoul with my white boyfriend nowadays, whereas in the past I know couples who have been insulted to their faces. But things like laws regarding rape are still rather medieval - for example, it’s only really considered rape if the woman “fights to the death” - whatever the fuck that means. Crying and screaming aren’t considered enough. Abortion is still illegal, and dating agencies take OFF points if a woman has graduated from SNU (Korea’s version of Harvard). And generally it’s expected that men will get drunk and visit strippers in the course of business dinners, while women are expected to go home early and get to bed. The list goes on.
File:Hyewon-Dano.pungjeong.jpg - Wikipedia - the woman are not fat, but they definitely aren’t skinny either.
No, Westernization had nothing more to do with it than the influence of Eastern countries has impacted the fashion model aesthetic in the West. Two of those pictures of chubby women linked to earlier cover more than 100 years from pre-Meiji to the transitional period, but there are other, earlier periods featuring slender beauties along with times where the aesthetic was for extremely pale moon-faced women, like the paintings from the Heian period. Here are some examples from different time periods.
Something to keep in mind is that traditional art aesthetics may have nothing to do with the actual standards of beauty at the time. The style used in paintings could be centuries out of date with the ideals of the culture, even if they’re portraying contemporary scenes. You can’t really make generalizations about beauty standards from art unless it’s from the time period you’re talking about. Trying to apply pre-Meiji art to modern Japanese ideals of beauty is like generalizing about modern American aesthetics from 1890s fashions. I don’t see most men going ga-ga over tiny waists, elaborately curled hair, and small-mouthed thin-lipped smiles as depicted in American and European art from that time.
That’s true. I get flagged as “overweight” on my physicals, and for being out of the norm for the population on some blood work because I’m not Japanese. I’m at about 10% body fat, and have more muscle. Asian tend to have a smaller bone structure and less bone density, and as you noted, can be significantly more obese than their size would indicate due to a tendency to put on intra-abdominal fat and to have less lean body mass than other populations.
When my wife got pregnant, I found out that Japanese women aren’t supposed to gain much weight during pregnancy. It turns out that the risk for pre-eclampsia and related conditions goes up if Asian women gain too much weight. Depending on pre-pregnancy weight, Japanese doctors recommend not to gain more than 12 kg if slender, or up to 8 kg if overweight. I’m not sure if doctors in other countries make similar recommendations, though the information I was given said this was true for the general Asian population, not Japanese specifically.
I haven’t noticed that Japanese women actually talk about weight issues any more or less than women in the US, but the standards for what constitutes “thin” and “fat” are different. Fat for Japanese starts way, way below what most Americans would consider fat, for both men and women. Americans are more likely to consider an athletic build attractive, while Japanese advocate thinness more.
It’s not carried to the extremes that seem to be true in China, though, possibly because participation in a sport or cultural activity is semi-mandatory through the end of high school, and the sport activities are much more popular for most students. After high school, though, most people quit doing any kind of physical activity unless they join a community sports team or club. Team sports are the rule. If they aren’t on a team, they’re probably not going to be physically active.
The fashion in men right now is feminine-style thinness. Some metrosexual types want to be so skinny that they have protruding collarbones. Japanese men are much more likely than American men to think about their weight, especially thinking about it from the point of view of fashion or social acceptance. There are even some emerging cases of male anorexia, which is almost unheard of in the West, as far as I know.
Standards for women are slightly more relaxed now than when I first came here, close to 10 years ago, but a woman who would be a bit chubby in the US would be called debu (impolite: “fat”) here.
Both men and women are more likely to want to be thin rather than fit. There is next to no fitness culture like there is in the US. When I moved to the suburbs of Tokyo (which would be considered extremely urbanized by US standards) I visited 5 fitness centers to try to find a place where I could do decent weight lifting.
Only one place I visited—the US-founded Gold’s Gym—had more weights than some light dumbbells and a Smith machine. None of them had facilities for what I would consider serious fitness training. Coming from California, where most towns have gyms with far more equipment for a far lower cost, the relative lack of facilities and the difficulty of getting access to the few there are is painful.
Sports clubs primarily target women, who are more likely to work part-time, since men almost always work ridiculous hours. The focus is on activities, like dance classes and yoga, rather than fitness, per se. The relaxation facilities are hyped more than anything. Just like the US, people have memberships, but don’t use them much.