Body Image & Latina Women

13Apr10

So I am sitting here at my computer, thinking about what to write about. I casually click on another tab to purposefully distract myself. It’s a website called TheSkinnyWebsite.com. It’s a blog that has recent and up to date pictures of celebrities who have gained weight, lost weight, are fat, skinny, have cellulite, etc. All the normal, human-like qualities that we seem so easily to critique sitting in our chairs in the privacy of our own homes. There it was then, a recent update of the weight and look that Jessica Simpson has been sporting lately, followed by some positive and negative comments about how she should “lose a few” and how she “doesn’t look confident.”

Now, this website displays women of all shapes and sizes, sometimes men too. Recently, there was post about Jennifer Lopez and there have been a few before that. In the recent post, Lopez was described as “slim, yet curvy”. Which, in my opinion is a positive critique. A recent post of Jessica Simpson had no real description of what she was. Curvy? Slim? So many times has Simpson been critiqued for her exceesive gaining and losing and gaining again, and her yo-yo dieting. But Lopez has managed to stay relatively the same in body size and look. Why is there such a difference here between two musically talented women in somewhat of the same Hollywood mentality and environment. What’s the difference here? I started to wonder.

I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say that Latina women grow up with a much different perspective of body image not only with themselves but in popular culture compared to non-Latina women.

The reason I am bringing up this topic is because there is always such hard critique on women and their weight in mainstream media in the United States. Whether it’s on a blog, a television show, a gossip column…critics are always in full force whenever a celebrity significantly loses or gains weight. But what I find most interesting is how differently women are talked about depending on their ethnic background.

I think the true fact here is that both Simpson and Lopez are curvy, healthy and slim women. But yet, they receive very different feedback about their body image and their weight. I truly believe it stems from cultural differences and upbringing. Now, I don’t know exactly the environment that Simpson grew up in, nor do I know the one that Lopez did. But I do know that there seems to be a different obsession with food and body image and weight for women across cultural lines. How many Latina women do you see talking about their yo-yo dieting? How many of them are extremely thin, then gaining the weight, then losing it again?

The cultural lines and differences in body image are definitely there, and although Latina women are still slowly making their way into mainstream American media, they are showing a vast difference in their lifestyles of healthy living and healthy body image that other women are displaying as a hard concept to grasp.

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