Making a Fantasy out of Thinness

The French government is closer than ever to passing a law banning the idealization of thinness. Pending the bill's approval in the French senate, one may be imprisoned for up to three years and fined $70,000 for having "incited excessive thinness." The authors of the bill, which directly targets pro-Ana and pro-Mia websites, also hope for it to have a spillover effect on the fashion industry, who have often taken the brunt of criticism for idealizing improbable and unrealistic images.

The problem however, is how does one define "incited excessive thinness?" Pro-Mia/Ana networks come under obvious condemnation, as their prescriptions for a healthy body and contented life drift into medical malpractice, however to charr the industry of beauty as a whole - from advertising to fashion to cosmetics - for pushing an improbable and at times impossible aesthetic-world-order seems somewhat absurd.

To what extent can the public legally condemn the individual's will to aspire to an ideal such as beauty? Granted, this ideal - beauty - is tempered by shifting cultural and societal norms and is therefore relative, however, its relativity is by virtue what makes beauty relevant.

In the recent past, the ideal Western woman was more robust, voluptuous, with a lot of time on her hands in between debutante balls and tea parties. Now she's been liberated from her heavy garments and thrown into the chaotic frenzy of bourgeois economics, where she must be more capable - mentally and physically - to take on the challenges of the world. At the same time as delimiting the bounds of the pleasure principle (more sex, more fun), society has rerouted the asceticism of monotheistic religion (no sex, no fun) and sublimated it into our five day work week. We forbid ourselves to eat carbs and instead consume our partners' bodies.

And so today, everywhere we look, a slim bodice - two-dimensional - eyes us from all perspectives of the urban landscape; threatening you with their body, their face. It is a body and a face that does not consume, perhaps nourishment, nor is consumed by you, but however, which consumes you in its very ideological nature. That is, the image of the body totalizes you - the audience (the socio-economic consumer) - it envelops your whole being and casts you back out into the world, somewhat more existentially fulfilled - if not actually physically - than before the rendezvous.

At some point or another we decided that God was the "idea" of "impossibility". That to put faith in God was to aspire to the unattainable impossibility. And at some point Kant equated the ideal of beauty with God; unattainable beauty, the presence of which aspires towards great things impossible or not.

Images of the impossible have always haunted human nature. They are the logical images springing forth from our ids and superegos, as we fantasize ourselves and each other. Why not be caught up in that wave of a dream which sweeps you out to the heavenly bodies and places you inside your the depths of fantasy?

However, the media is consistently called upon to return to Earth; to ground their messages in reality and portray believable images. One affirming response came from Nivea who, for one campaign, sought everyday-women to market their brand. It was heralded as a brave and pioneering move by a veteran beauty corporation. However, noticeably, since their gallant effort, everyday-women models have seemingly dried up.

But who wants to aspire to everydayness, to blandness. To mediocrity. What kind of bland escapist offers up reality as an ideal? This is why consumerism has done so well to learn from religion. One must put hope in the unattainable, so that the ever grinding process of perfectionism can continue. The slow grind of which deters us from death; if not, then at least for a moment.

Purging Bloggers: The Great Firewall of Chinois

Maintaining a blog is difficult in Chinois. For one, Google’s Blogspot – the Internet’s most popular blogging domain – was nationally blocked until only yesterday by the Great Firewall of Sina. This has made my first few weeks here excruciatingly difficult; that is, not being able to consult my compulsory style blog, the Sartorialist, especially when temperatures range between 1-23˚C within 12 hours.

But of course, Mother knows best, and the Great Firewall – an array of the world’s most advanced firewalls and server routers, piloted by a virtual Red Army of an estimated 30,000 techno-police – was set up “to keep the world clean for God.” But when you have Mother, who needs God!?

The majority of these techno resources are put to use assuring a high level of morality against perversions such as pornography, paedophilia, the BBC’s journalism standards and of course, Miranda Devine’s SMH column. However, a great number is also devoted towards liquidating the fourth estate. Mother’s hackers spin their way across the Web, searching keywords, tracing IP addresses and with algorithms, instantaneously and automatically block domains in order to restrict access to particular topics, such as, hmmmmm… well I can definitely think of three that begin with “T”.

At the end of the day, there is an ever-growing string of mainstream websites that are often privy to the government’s omniscient censorship. Such include Wikipedia (after not removing a dubious article on one of the “Ts”), YouTube (clearly to protect brain cells), the British Broadcasting Corporation, Amnesty International, Reporters Sans Frontiers, Blogspot and from time to time the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. One can test which sites are blocked in Chinois by visiting http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, which, conveniently, is also blocked. And of course, there are many others blacklisted, from the purely irrelevant to the particularly noxious – again, Miranda Devine.

Interestingly though, Blogger – Blogspot’s co-dependent sister domain – was not, and to my knowledge, has never been, blocked. This is significant because with Google’s blogging program, blogs are uploaded through Blogger’s domain, but then viewed through Blogspot. For example, I can login to Blogger to format and edit the Culture Spoon, however its domain remains culturespoon.blogspot.com and hence, blacklisted.

So, until very recently, we in the Chinois region – when using Google’s Blogger – could author blogs, but not view them. So why this selective discrimination? Does Mother’s army of technocratic-spies lack the acumen to suppress Blogspot’s two domains – one for input, one for output?

One theory – opined to me under the breath of a slightly disgruntled British journalist, recently removed from one of those places whose name begins with “T” – is that Mother doesn’t mind her children blogging. After all, it increases their literacy and hence, economic functionalism. At the same time, blogging is the favourite past time of Western journalists and bored Occidentals, and of course, Mother doesn’t want to suppress ALL that they have to say, especially when it’s something favourable or touristy.

So at the end of the day, people will write; it’s a question of who and what is read, and Mother – with the most sophisticated communications surveillance in the world – can at least successfully police this within her own home.

Now, allow me to offer a slightly more cynical and sinister speculation. That allowing blogging – one of the nation’s recently acquired favourite pass times – is an opportunity for Mother to easily detect those questionable elements that attempt to stir the otherwise peaceful surface of la disposition Chinois. Just as witches float, dissenters speak up, and in doing so will rise from the midst of the unconscious masses.

This most recent unblocking of Blogspot comes right on the heels of Mother’s most recent triumphant purge, in which she sent to jail, for three and a half years, a certain dissident – a human rights advocate and prolific blogger – for inciting subversion towards his homeland. Armed with no more than a blog, said dissident lambasted Mother for not keeping her promise to improve human rights conditions leading up to the coming 0lympia.

So then why open the blog gates now? Because with this latest incident, those subversive communities (pro-democratis elements) will be fired-up after five long months of trial and a blanket ban on blog reading. Opening up the floodgate, for one, serves as a warning to those who are fearful to tread water, but also as an incendiary to those who are not. By creating a public discourse, Mother can see which of her children are behaving badly and punish them accordingly.

Now that's smart technocracy.