Susie Orbach Losing Bodies Summary

In this essay I will be examining “Losing Bodies” by Susie Orbach, an essay on the body-shaming of women in modern western culture. She argues that our culture’s obsession with attaining the perfect body has caused women to take drastic measures to achieve modern western beauty standards. When Orbach states that we are “losing bodies”, she is saying that our bodies are no longer seen as our homes, but something in constant need of reshaping to fit into western beauty standards. For decades, the media has perpetuated a western ideal of femininity so narrow that almost no can live up to it. We constantly see this ideal displayed in advertisements, magazines, movies, television, and digital media. The “perfect woman” is consistently portrayed as thin and pale, with hair no other place than the top of her …show more content…
Women all over the world have become desperate to achieve the idealized westernized body. In Asian countries such as South Korea and Singapore, it has become increasingly common for women to have plastic surgery to change the shape of their eyes and noses to fit the western ideal. In Shanghai, leg-lengthening surgery has become popular. In Argentina, citizens can receive cosmetic surgery in public hospitals. Bikini waxes have become incredibly common among western women. Orbach argues that this occurs because of our culture’s disapproval of pubic hair on women. It is also becoming more common among western women to have labiaplasty, which is a plastic surgery procedure that alters the labia. Orbach argues that this is a result of the media’s narrow representation of what a “normal” labia should look like. Orbach also critiques the Body-Mass Index (BMI), stating that it determines what is an acceptable body and encourages people to reconstruct their bodies through dieting. This has led to a billion-dollar diet