Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Are We Exporting Cultural Homicide?
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
November 2000It is difficult to think of one's own culture as harmful, but at times it is hard to evade such thoughts.
My first clue that there might be a problem was reading in the 1980s that lactose intolerance and many other food allergies are almost totally unknown in poor or famine-stricken countries.
They can't afford them.
I recently heard a physician reviewing the evidence that anorexia and other eating disorders were almost unknown in non-western cultures. As those cultures have achieved economic success and western advertising has entered their lives, women have begun to hate their bodies and begun to starve themselves.
The effect our culture is having on other cultures today makes our previous gift of smallpox-infested blankets to Native Americans appear relatively benign.
To check myself out, I hauled my undergraduate art history text off a shelf in the basement, and looked at the women of three millennia, clothed or not. Such a survey leads one to make a choice in how to understand the body. Either liposuction is the salvation of the world, or nature intends most women to be soft, fleshy, perhaps zaftig.
For most of human history the female image was portrayed more or less realistically. Even the artificially flat-chested flappers of the 1920s sported thighs and calves that would be unfashionable today.
Fashion is not the point, of course. Fatty tissue is related to healthy levels of estrogen, and it has been suggested by more than one health authority that women do well to carry a little extra weight after menopause, for the sake of the hormone balance necessary for good physical and mental health. Starving oneself and ingesting artificially produced hormones is only a weak second choice to letting the body function normally.
The situation can be even worse for younger women: most Americans can remember the tragic end of singer Karen Carpenter, whose obsession with not eating caused the fatal deterioration of her heart.
It may be worth investigating how our culture reinforces the image of the emaciated female. To what extent must modern men consider their complicity in images that diminish the life experience of women?
Perhaps fashion advertising needs to be regulated in the same way tobacco ads are controlled: "The Surgeon General has determined that under-nourishing the human body can lead to organ damage or death."
None of this is a justification for obesity, but a call for reason about the normal proportions, and the normal variety of the human shape.
The reader may wonder what any of this has to do with religion. In the first place, of course, is the moral objection to cultural norms that cause women to hate themselves or even die. That is a kind of cultural homicide; at the very least, it is what a writer of my youth called "soul murder."
The positive "not for women only" point is even more important. In the Hebrew scriptures, revered by Jew, Christian, and Muslim, God's creation of the human body with all its variety of form is called "good." People who can feel positively about their physical selves, who can be grateful for the gift of the bodies they actually have, can enjoy their physicality, their lives. Those attitudes of gratitude and joy would be cultural values well worth exporting.
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