MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Majority of Argentine women dissatisfied with their bodies and looks

Tendency to obesity and the Barbie culture turns some women “neurotic”

An overwhelming majority of Argentine women, 95%, are dissatisfied with their bodies and the main reason is over weight, according to a public opinion poll released Saturday by one of Buenos Aires main dailies, Clarin.

Besides over weight, Argentine ladies most common complaints are cellulites in legs, flaccidity and the lack of skin tan, in that order.

Only 5% of those interviewed said they felt fulfilled with their bodies. The opinion poll was undertaken by D’Alessio Irol, marketing experts, and interviewed 876 women.

Furthermore, only 5% of interviews admitted liking their image, the rest was dissatisfied with some part of their body.

A majority, 90%, revealed that at some moment of their lives they felt overweight, whether they had too many kilos or not.

“On the one hand we have those women who feel a real and concrete dissatisfaction and believe their image is out of aesthetics standards, even when we are only talking of some cellulites and some striating. The fact they can’t have a treatment because of money, time or fear generates anxiety and makes them feel miserable”, said Maria Luisa Rijana, from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Aesthetics Clinic.

“The other group has a virtual, illusory dissatisfaction, they want to imitate certain bodies or faces; they visit the surgeon with a photo of a celebrity but their expectations have nothing to do with their real lives. This group generates the most chaos because it ambitions a perfection non existent with surgery or any possible treatment”, she added.

Actually three out of ten Argentine women want that “magic solution”, but none of those three even do some exercise.

“In a society which has a tendency to obesity and at the same time is critical of women’s overweight, the double message turns some women neurotic. The middle class woman in Argentina does not put overweight because it is censored and punished in many daily life ways. In the old days she kept at home, looking after the children. Now a day she has become a slave of a highly competitive and conflicting world: she must look after the children, work and keep thin and pretty”, said Jorge Braguinsky from the Nutrition Department of the Favaloro University

“We’re living the Barbie culture, the problem is that a real flesh and bone Barbie would be 1.70 tall, weight 41 kilos and her sizes would be 99, 55 and 83 centimetres, which is madness. This is apologetic of curves and a “light” consumer society, branded as healthy”, argues Marcelo Bregua, psychologist from UBA.

Jorge Patané, head of plastic surgery at one of Buenos Aires main hospitals says “models are not static. Botticelli’s women were wide wasted and big breasts: they were not sexual but reproductive objects. In the seventies we had Twiggy, no buttock, no breasts and today she would be described as anorexic. Women are visual objects, what matters is their reference or parameters”.

Finally Braguinsky revealed that those which most complain or are disenchanted because they believe they suffer from cellulites are under 24.