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May 18, 2006
10 Years Younger - No way!
Studying literature has its purposes, sometimes I can read a book from a while ago and I can pat us on the back for exactly how far women have come in the past couple of hundred years or so. But then all that can be battered to death by the simple act of forgetting to turn off the TV when I put my daughter to bed.
I came back down last night to witness quite the most hideous and disgusting programme I’ve seen for quite some time. A glance at yesterday’s paper tells me that this programme was entitled, I kid you not, ‘10 Years Younger; Bikini Special’. A brief synopsis goes something like this; A normal looking 37 year old mother is paraded round in a bikini in some godforsaken rotting hell hole of a beach and people are asked to guess her age. When the general opinion (48) has humiliated her enough, she gets whisked away on an orgy of surgery (face lift, tummy tuck, boob job) dowsed in chemicals (fake tan, make up and hair dye) and dragged back to the beach to be subjected to the same humiliation but dear reader, this story has a happy ending because everyone now thinks she is 30! So presumably she is now allowed to live happily ever after.
But the most repulsive is yet to come, the whole point seemed to be that this woman, before the programme, had already lost half her original body weight. But did she do it by slogging away down the gym coupled with a healthy balanced diet? Not at all, it seems she had already been under the knife, to have half her stomach removed so that she couldn’t eat normal healthy portions, so that she had to pump herself full of pills at every meal because she couldn’t absorb enough vitamins to like er well keep her alive really. Let's hear it for her! Clap! Clap! And what disgusted me the most is that Channel Four did not condemn this act quite as much as it should, or at least not on the grounds that the woman will not be able to eat properly for the REST OF HER LIFE. The only complaint was that she was left with a certain amount of sagging skin around her stomach that had to be remedied by (yes you’ve guessed it) yet more surgery.
Where were the real experts flocking out to built her confidence in other ways, so that looking like a pre-pregnancy teenager was no longer the only way she felt she could gain acceptance? Where were the experts arguing that ‘letting yourself go’ is not necessarily a crime? It just means that as you get older you have other priorities, be it kids, career or chocolate biscuits. And finally where were the experts pointing out that there are healthier ways of spending your two weeks holiday, than parading your newly falsely acquired body up and down a sizzling beach like a prize cut of meat? I for one would recommend a walking holiday along the Dorset Coast. There is no need to expose your body to prying eyes and the Mediterranean midday sun in revealing swimwear; your carbon footprint and will be drastically reduced by the avoidance of cheap flights; the scenery is, in my humble opinion, infinitely more aesthetically pleasing; and the wonderful by-product is you might even find that you lose a few excess pounds from you know, this thing called ‘gentle exercise.’
Posted by purple elephant at May 18, 2006 08:07 AM