Body worship, with its attendant obsessions, is not recent. Its roots are ancient, and some scholars trace it back to 60 BC, to the first Australian Aboriginal populations, the forerunners of primitive forms of cosmetic surgery and tattooing. They painted their skin indelibly, even at the cost of incurring wounds that never healed, to appear more beautiful in their own eyes and those of others. And in ancient Greece, the first Olympic Games were celebrated with naked athletes, to showcase the beauty of their bodies.
The qualitative leap in this obsession in the contemporary era is linked to the pathological drift it has taken: from the obsession with the body arise psycho-physical problems that spread like wildfire. Aside from the classic eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia), diseases such as body dysmorphic disorder, a mental disorder characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with certain parts of one's body and one's appearance, are on the rise; or vigorexia, which arises from the unattainable desire for the perfect body, at any cost, even at the risk of distorting it, against every law of nature.
The obsession that accompanies a quantity of interventions, often authentic wastes of spontaneity, beauty, and even money, considering that the cult of the body in the modern era is first and foremost an industry rather than a philosophy of life, is one of the side effects of the rampant narcissismWe look in the mirror and don't accept ourselves, because we're fragile, each full of ourselves, not attracted to others, but only to our own reflection in the mirror. Young, beautiful, charming women go so far as to violate our faces and facial expressions, puffing out their lips, reduced to mini-boats that sail through the waves of wrinkles. Attractive men, even those with their own charisma, allow themselves to be seduced by some pied piper of the new male beauty, increasingly similar to that of women, to pay their dues to the factory of touch-ups and scalpels. The cult of the body closely resembles the illusion of a life that can be extended infinitely, through fitness and wellness, as if a week at the spa were enough to become a centenarian. White hair, with their natural, timeless charm, beauty, and authority, are now considered taboo. There's always a color to choose from.
No one likes growing old, forgetting that it's another law of nature, and accepting ourselves for who we are is tiring, sometimes even painful: it means recognizing our frailties, and finding the strength to work on them, like on a construction site where there are no holidays. The cult of the body, as a shortcut to the difficulty of being, thus becomes a toxic derivative of the civilization of appearance, which erases the uniqueness of the human person and leaves us alone, in the myth of appearances, facing our daily mirror, as if we had to pass the test of a movie casting every day. In a meager tally of approvals, of approvals, or of insults and cynical jokes, which sometimes collect in the swamp of the internet, where indifference and cynicism, authentic tragedies are played out due to the obsession with the body.
Beatrice Inguì was a 15-year-old girl, a student at the Lagrangia music high school in Vercelli, and dreamed of becoming an opera singer, a soprano. Everything was normal for her age. Except for one thing: Beatrice couldn't accept her image, her weight, and considered herself too fat. Perhaps someone mocked her online with the usual viral dimension of these hateful insults, perhaps no one was able to contain her fragility, but the fact remains that Beatrice decided to take her own life. And she let herself be run over on the tracks of the Turin-Milan train. Beatrice's life, when it should have truly begun, in the sharp bend of adolescence, was gone, in a matter of seconds, on the altar of a new adulation we have built in the civilizations of the subculture of appearance: the cult of the body. You have to be thin. You have to be beautiful. You have to be liked. And those who fail to do so feel excluded from any community, considering themselves outcasts, human waste.
We should all rebel against this daily temptation to consider the body, the image, the aesthetic and virtual representation of ourselves, as the alpha and omega of our existences. We should put the value of life, never to be wasted, back at the center of our interests and our care, while keeping in mind that everyone is free to do as they please with their own bodies. And we should remember that a fat girl can be much more attractive than a skinny one. it depends on his head and his heart.
Read also:
- Orthorexia: Causes, Symptoms, Treatments, and Prevention
- Bullying in Italy: It affects up to 20 percent of children under 11.
- More connected, but more alone. Loneliness is more damaging than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Young people are particularly affected.
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