Bodies and Fantasies

Never Just Pictures: Bodies and Fantasies

Susan Bordo in Never Just Pictures reveals the relationship between media, advertising and the human body. When looking in any magazine Susan explains that you’re going to find our society’s ideal body type in any of the pictures. We have turned magazines and advertising into a huge poster board of what us as Americans should live and look like. Bordo later on discusses how “ our idolatry of the trim tight body shows no signs of relinquishing it’s grip on our conceptions of beauty and normality” As a culture we’re obsessed with loosing weight or trying to maintain an absolute thinness, we think it’s beautiful and so all of hour goals are forwarded to trying to obtain that.  This fits really well with how Roxanne Edwards was trying to fit into the niche of a female body builder. These people who also want to be accepted and be thought of as a “normal” person see being thin as a way into being accepted. Thinking this way many psychologists think that this mentality is causing many girls to suffer an eating disorder known as body image disturbance syndrome, in which they see themselves as fat no matter how thin they actually are. This disease is often over looked being that our society promote and encourages thinness. Bordo also discusses that it is not entirely blamed on just a cultural occurrence it also has to do with a certain level of control. The Novelist Stephanie Grant discuses that “ If I had to say my anorexia was about any single thing I would have said it was about living without desire, without longing of any kind.” This control over not having any desire is what some people strive for it’s the feeling and look of being lustless and looking really fucked up These fashion designers have started attempting to deconstruct fashion by getting models who looked unhealthy and dead like.  Bordo concluded that “ theses adds are not telling us that beauty is trivial in relation to depression they are telling us that depression is beautiful and being wasted is cool. The question become not is fashion dead but why has death become glamorous?” All of this skinny business is pointing to the fact that we admire the strength of being dead in a way. As Susan references Freud and the way he talks about how psychologically death represents no the destruction of yourself but to returning into a state before you were you. In short this whole desire to become thin somewhat derives from our society’s way of trying to rise above what we are, above all desires.