Size Six: The Western Women’s Harem - MUST READ
n any case, nothing is too serious or definite in the medina, where everything can be negotiated. But things were different in that New York department store. In fact, I have to confess that I lost my usual self-confidence. In that peaceful store that I had entered so triumphantly, as sovereign consumer ready to spend money, I felt savagely attacked. My hips, until then the sign of a relaxed and uninhibited maturity, were suddenly being condemned as a deformity.
‘And who says that everyone must be a size six?’ I joked to the saleslady, deliberately neglecting to mention size four, which is the size of my skinny twelve-year-old niece.
At that point, the saleslady suddenly gave me an anxious look. ‘The norm is everywhere, my dear,’ she said. ‘It’s all over, in the magazines, on television, in the ads. You can’t escape it. There is Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Mario Valentino, Salvatore Ferragamo, Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Lacroix, and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Big department stores go by the norm.’ She paused and then concluded, ‘If they sold size 14 or 16, which is probably what you need, they would go bankrupt.’
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Western attitudes, I thought, are even more dangerous and cunning than the Muslim ones because the weapon used against women is time. Time is less visible and more fluid than space. The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealised childhood, and forces women to perceive aging – the normal unfolding of the years – as a shameful devaluation. ‘Here I am, transformed into a dinosaur,’ I caught myself saying aloud as I went up and down the rows of skirts in the store, hoping – to no avail – to prove the saleslady wrong.
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