Global Body Your Body: Your Image


Global Body

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Hi, I'm Stephanie Heart.

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I'm 24 and for the last four years, I've campaigned here in the UK

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for teenagers to value themselves for who they are

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and not just how they look.

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But in this film, I am going to be looking at how Western culture

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is impacting body image confidence around the world.

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And what better place to start than here, Heathrow Airport,

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the biggest airport on earth.

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Planes fly back and forth to 193 destinations right around the world,

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and every day, nearly 200,000 people arrive and depart.

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It really is a global village.

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People landing here in the UK are bombarded

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with thousands of images of super-slim women and six-pack men.

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But around the world, people still hold very different views

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of what they considered beautiful or handsome.

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But it is not just about the colour of our skin.

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It is about the way we dress, style our hair and apply our make-up.

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These are the outward expressions of global diversity.

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Everywhere on earth, beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

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Let's take a look at a few examples.

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For the women of the Suri tribe in Ethiopia,

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lip plates are all the fashion - and the bigger the better.

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They stretch their lips by gradually increasing the size of the plate.

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The women start with a four-centimetre plate,

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but they can go up to a 22-centimetre plate.

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In Indonesia, the Mentawi women file their teeth into sharp points.

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Straight teeth like ours are thought to be ugly.

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In parts of Afghanistan, women want their noses to be bigger.

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The first cosmetic surgery clinic has now opened in Kabul,

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where there is a large demand for nose enlargement jobs.

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I bet you guys are thinking this is all about the girls.

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You would be wrong.

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There are many traditional cultures where it is the men

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who do the dressing up.

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Only male birds of paradise have really beautiful plumage.

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In PNG, the human males take their fashions from the birds

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that share their jungle home.

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Once a year, they come together to party and it is the men

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who spend months making fabulous outfits, hoping to get the girls.

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The Woodabe tribesman in Niger take beauty so seriously,

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that the very first toy they are given as a child is a mirror.

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The young men compete in a beauty pageant wearing extraordinary make-up

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and dance for days to impress a panel of female judges.

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Those examples are just incredible.

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But there is a problem on our planet.

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All around the world there is a takeover going on.

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Massive companies looking to make lots of money are pushing out global diversity.

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In the beauty business, it is not about celebrating cultural diversity.

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It is about creating carbon copies.

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And the impact can be devastating.

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I have come here to meet up with Philippa Diedrichs

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from the Centre for Appearance Research based here in Bristol.

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Great to see you, Philippa.

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Really nice to see you too, Stephanie.

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So there have been a few studies looking at the impact

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of Western fashion and beauty on people around the world.

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Can you tell me more about that?

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One study really stands out which was done in Fiji.

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What they did was... In 1995,

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there were very few islands in Fiji that had televisions.

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They asked lots of women about their body image

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and how they felt about the way they looked.

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Three years later, there were televisions in almost every household

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on the island and they measured the girls' body image again.

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What they found was they felt a lot worse about themselves in terms of how they looked.

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What this suggests is television and a lot of the beauty ideals

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that we see on TV can have quite a damaging effect on young girls.

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Also, looking at these magazines from Taiwan, China

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and for the black community, they have a lot of skin lightening.

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What do you think about that?

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What I find is it is really ridiculous because as you suggested

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in magazines that are targeted towards black girls or Asian girls

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or any girls which might have a darker skin tone,

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they get sold and marketed products about making your skin lighter.

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But when you look at magazines that target white girls,

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they are also told their skin is not OK either, and they should be darker.

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We get nobody winning in the situation. Nobody is perfect.

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The global beauty business is big business,

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making close to £200 billion every year.

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This is an industry whose future growth depends on making men,

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women and children around the world feel bad about the way they look.

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Selling dream products that indeed are just dreams,

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and in the process making the world a boring place.

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Let's appreciate our natural beauty and not forget how exciting

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the world is with all these different, gorgeous people in it.

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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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