Whenever anyone talks about body image, something strange happens.
There’s this niggling reoccurring voice, claiming that body image is a silly ‘first world problem’. There is this resounding idea that if women have the time to sit around worrying about how they look, then they clearly aren’t women who are truly struggling; like the women who are starving in ‘third world’ countries. Women with body-image issues are clearly just first-world faux-feminist whingers who need to get over it!
Well I’m calling bullshit, again.
I’m calling bullshit for a number of reasons. And rather than going into a lengthy political analysis on women suffering under neoliberalism and globalisation, I will just use my own story, of my life in Vietnam.
It starts a few years ago, when I was living in central Vietnam with a local family in a rural area. It was sublime. Picture rolling green hills, coffee plantations, lush forests, very few cars, not a billboard in sight. But there was certainly a lot of poverty. Folks with no shoes, ragged clothes, living in what would best be described as ‘sheds’, school was a luxury, as was transport. But in a collectivist society, what little was available would be shared with other people.