Instead of seeing their true selves, girls become trapped in a maze of fairground mirrors, with a distorted idea of what it is to be normal.
Even so, girls don’t get brainwashed into thinking thin is good and fat means failure without some reinforcement at home.
Painful though it may be to admit, the first lessons girls get about their bodies come from us, their mothers. Low-cal, low-fat, high-carb, low-protein, gluten-free… considering food is such a simple and essential commodity, we’ve made it incredibly complicated.
The 23-year-old resident of a Kingston ghetto hopes to transform her dark complexion to a cafe-au-lait-color common among Jamaica’s elite and favored by many men in her neighborhood. She believes a fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.
Simpson and her friends ultimately shrug off public health campaigns and reggae hits blasting the reckless practice.
“I hear the people that say bleaching is bad, but I’ll still do it. I won’t stop ’cause I like it and I know how to do it safe,” said Simpson, her young daughter bouncing on her hip.
Thanks leslie. You reminded me of this post that I never put up. In desperation, she (the dermatologist) continues.
“I know of one woman who started to bleach her baby. She got very annoyed with me when I told her to stop immediately, and she left my office. I often wonder what became of that baby,” said Neil Persadsingh, a leading Jamaican dermatologist.
Skin cancer, live for the moment because life is really rotten. The message needs to be about what is inside and not what is outside.
May 1, 2011 at 11:20 am
the comments on this article are not working (on my end), I can read them for all the other articles but not this one.
May 1, 2011 at 11:21 am
comments working now but original 6 are gone; repost, y’all! thx
May 1, 2011 at 3:23 pm
I don’t know what happened.
May 1, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I don’t agree that it is possible to say “it all begins at home”: this seems imo a sort of chicken-egg conundrum. A mother has to have first internalized societal demands of a narrow beauty ideal before she can pass this to her daughter. At some point(s) the input is global/societal and at some point(s) it is local/familial, unless the claim is that mothers are the root source of distorted body image both globally and locally. (I personally think that is completely asinine). I think it is a tossup as to whether a girl is likely to encounter distorted ideals of women’s bodies from tv or their mothers first.
Also, I know many women whose mothers were not obsessive who are themselves; and for example of the opposite, my mother has ranged for my entire life from being a compulsive dieter to an anorexic, yet I am not.
Also, there is no mention of the interaction between society and mothers: I think it entirely possible that mothers feel judged upon the appearance of their children and this gives them a vested interest in controlling their child’s appearance. I recollect constant battles with my mother for control of my appearance even when I was a little grade school child I am not talking about any attempt to restrict me from wearing sexualized clothing for my own benefit either: I have always refused to wear such clothes. I mean bizarre sort of control.
Also, I reject completely the idea that this happens to “children”, when plainly, it happens to girls. http://www.creators.com/opinion/david-sirota.html
May 1, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Asserting one’s own independence as a child is natural Nom. If a child didn’t do this, most mothers would be worried.
I don’t understand what is happening with the comments. All of the six are gone. No spam, no trash, just vanished. WP has quirks, and I had problems with the post so I’m thinking it was another glitch that I go trapped in.
May 1, 2011 at 9:05 pm
lol one trip to the grocery store will show that
May 2, 2011 at 5:40 am
So, you’ve noticed? hahahahahaha