Does My Bum Look Big In This ™/ Text / Chloe Forde / Pic / American Apparel 4th March 2008

“Honey, does my bum look big in this..?” Husband checks his girlfriends rear end andanswers, “Yes babe.” She leans over kisses
him and says “thanks”.

Sounds like an unlikely conversation, because in the United Kingdom if your boyfriend dared say yes all he would be looking for is a lap. But in Jamaica women all over the country are trying to put on weight and running away from the dreaded size zero. Women are going to extreme measures to put on weight and the new trend is consuming a dozen pills, pills which are fed by farmers to their chickens to “plump them up”.

This miracle pill is called “the fowl pill” and costs 350 Jamaican dollars. A small price to pay for a little more junk in trunk is what many women are saying! How can it be that in one part of the globe women are dropping dead on catwalks as a result of lack of food and on the other side women are praying to god for a little more fat on their bellies and cellulite on their thighs? Crazy to reach the perfect size 16 women are putting their lives at risk and increasing the chances of breast cancer. Now this can’t be right, can it? Maybe Jamaican women have just become fed up with trying to conform to this tiny, twig like size 0. Could it be possible that one hot afternoon after training at the gym, one woman turned and said to her girlfriend, “yu know wh Chanette, mi gwan change up dis ting, mi mek it fashion 2 be a phat gyal, let us turn it into a lickle trend to be big, big batty gyal.”

Possibly just like that it swooped the nation that there was no need to die for a figure that is just too damn hard and too damn painful to obtain. Instead we will eat what we like, drink what we like, get the bus everywhere and still fit into the dress size that we dream for. However the dress size is no longer to be a size 6 but a size 16! Maybe British women came to realise that having a Marilyn Monroe figure is harder than it looks. Not every girl is blessed with that coca cola shape. And being able to have “tits and ass” is often way too
much work. Possibly after doing many stomach crunches, leg curls, squats and spending money on push up bras, high waist belts and bottom enhancing knickers one woman had a brainwave and turned to her girlfriend and said: “You know what Natalie, I can’t change my body into a shape that it just doesn’t have Let’s leave the sexy curves to J.Lo. It’s much easier to just not eat! We can run to work, drink water and eat vegetables. I know… SKINNY WILL BE SEXY!” And just like that women in the UK began to crave food, but unfortunately not as much as they craved this twig like frame of a size 0!

As much as these mad phenomenons were not created overnight by Jenifer and Channete disclosing this information to there  irlfriends, they were however created from what seems to be thin air! And to most rational beings they appear to be the most irrational thought processes one could ever conjure up! Women in Jamaica describe a size 10 as “marga” and laugh at women who are so tiny in their frame. A stretch mark is almost a reward to these women, a reward of how well they have done, a reward of the weight they are gaining! Jamaican women are currently the most obese females in the world. That’s a scary figure considering it’s one of the smallest islands in the Caribbean.

Young girls in Jamaica with naturally slender figures are asking there mothers “why god hav fi mek mi like dis” and buying the bootleg version of “the fowl pill” on their way back from school. As scary as this sounds, the reverse is happening in England. Girls as young as 10 are refusing to eat their meals and have strict regimes of exercise and dieting. Girls as young as 8 are in rehabilitation centres for eating disorders and the situation does not appear to be improving. With the increasing amount of skeletal role models on our TVs and magazine covers all we can really hope for is that young girls start to believe in the bodies they have been given. And whether that is small or big, its time to embrace what you have. All one world but in two very different places, both are seeing young and old women with extremely warped self destructive images of themselves. What is this distorted image we seem to have developed? Can we not love our naturally wobbly jelly, flat tums, big or small boobs, and toned physiques? Are we dying to be thin or crying to be fat? Why do we continue to ask the question, does my bum look big in this?

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