Cut To Fit

The journalist Mimi Spencer wrote on 'the politics of thin' in the Times Magazine  a few weeks back ('The Body Politic', The Times Magazine, 26.01.13). Many words, and the gist of them was that she had recently made an effort to lose some weight and was feeling very smug about her newly slim figure: 'I have written for years on the subject of body shape: how true beauty comes from within, how we oughtn't to be in thrall to the airbrushed dollies in the perfume ads, how fashion is fallacy.. and I remain appalled by the exceptionally thin body ideal that has come to personify our age. And still? And still, I want to be slim.' Well, she's with the majority of us there (although she also looks a dish in her 'before' photos). She quotes Karl Lagerfeld, that fashion totalitarian, as saying, 'No one wants to see round women'. On the other hand, there's an exhibition of Ice Age Art currently showing at the British Museum here in London that seems to be larded (sorry) with little carvings of dumpling-like female figures, all apparently size 16 and above by today's standards. These might have been intended as a warning to the local women, of course, along the lines of sticking repellent images of fatties on the fridge door, but I'm guessing, in a totally uninformed way, that this was the shape to which women aspired in those good old days, 10 - 40 thousand years ago. So, no worries- another few thousand years, and we'll all be worrying about how to put on weight..