Fat Bottomed Girls

The BBC ran a story last year about the “Bobaraba” craze apparently a duo called DJ Mix and DJ Eloh have started a craze for posterior enhancement in the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivore). You can read the whole BBC story here

It seems that nowhere is safe from the influence of media in some way. What is worrying is that the preparations being purveyed to increase the size of lady’s backsides are at best useless and at worst positively dangerous, being unlabelled and unregulated.

I’m not particularly pointing the finger at anyone here, I mean the song is about African women having big butts. Can’t say I have a problem with that, in fact if the song espoused the virtue of having no butt, a la size zero catwalk skeletons, then I would be howling my criticism. What it does show is that even when someone has a perfectly well-formed and adequate bodily feature they are susceptible to media pressure.

As TV and other media enters more and more homes in previously inaccessible places I can see this happening more frequently. Not just with distorted body image and the snake oil salesmen trying to take advantage of it. Look at the scandal of selling baby milk into the developing world as a replacement for breast milk rather than a supplement to it/replacement should a mother have trouble producing enough milk to feed her child.

I think this shows how easy it is for one aspect of a person’s anatomy to be given hugely disproportionate significance and create a potentially dangerous fashion.