Sometimes Singapore seems like it’s populated by anorexics. I know, I know, the pressure to be thin exists in many developed countries: it’s at the heart of Bridget’s insecurities in Bridget Jones’ Diary, teenage girls write to their Goddess Ana in America, and so on, but when I was in Boston or New York or London, I don’t think I ever felt it to be as pervasive as it is here.
At the very least, even if the “ideals” being promoted through ads and so on in those cities were of inordinately skinny women, there was a sense that to make disparaging comments about a person’s size in public would be inappopriate. Whereas here in Singapore, the newspapers are filled with ads for slimming centres which seem to depend on shame to succeed. I can’t forget the one in which this woman said that back in school they called her “fat girl” - and then displayed her current size in triumph, instead of reflecting that she went to school with some seriously mean-spirited jackasses. Why should it be acceptable to tell women that you aren’t very close to, even the ones who’re so thin that they might want to avoid walking too near gratings, that they should lose weight? Why is it acceptable to hurt someone’s self-esteem?
Sometimes you overhear women at lunch talking about the food they don’t eat so longingly you’d swear they were in some country rent by war, rather than depriving themselves voluntarily. What would my grandmother, forced to grow tapioca just to survive during World War II, make of it all?
When I was in Miami with the Girlfriend, we went to this club where we saw this fairly large-sized woman dressed sexily and dancing and genuinely having a good time and we said to each other, it’s too bad you don’t get to see this much in Singapore: it’s really nice to see someone strut out with self-esteem. And this was Miami, city of supposedly perfect bodies.
Which all leads up my theory of why people don’t make enough babies in Singapore, despite all the exhortations to do so: they’re feeling too lousy about the way they look, and when you’re feeling that lousy, you can’t really be in the mood. Self-confidence, after all, is the sexiest attribute.