Sunbathing topless is a French thing, whereas wandering around entirely naked is a German-Austrian thing
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/ 16 September 2008
For many people with serious illnesses, blogging offers a way to cope and share their stories, writes Joanna Moorhead.
It’s 10am on a stiflingly hot Monday morning and I am in a delivery room with one of the unluckiest mothers on the planet. She is Dahara Laouali, and at the moment she is lying on a narrow, dusty hospital trolley pushing her baby into the world. Although the birth is imminent, Dahara is making no noise at all. This is Niger, where the tradition is that mothers labour in silence.
Like every other Western woman, I am more than aware of what the idealised female body looks like. I see the taut celebrity tummies in magazines and pert breasts on TV. Although these images are relentless, at least motherhood used to give women a bit of a breather from trying to live up to them.
Amid a government campaign to persuade the nation’s children and their parents that they must stay fit and slim, a new British study shows that girls as young as five are unhappy with their bodies and want to be thinner. According to a recent study of girls aged between five and eight, nearly half (46,9%) wanted to be thinner. Just 11 of these girls (14%) were actually overweight.