Cult of the body claiming victims

Meanwhile our Super Rugby players are reportedly on the brink of developing eating disorders for the same reason as women, trying to control their body image and meet a glamorous ideal, as if sporting talent isn’t enough.

In a world obsessed with body image, one extra-large person stands out in confident defiance. Kim Dotcom’s wedding photograph last weekend saw him dwarfing a new bride, mouth open wide as if about to roll her in aioli and eat her with fries.

The large German, resident here and fighting extradition, is suing the government for proportionately large millions. The new Mrs Dotcom, 22 years his junior, is a quarter of his girth at least, but the last Mrs Dotcom was even daintier. Love is a marvellous thing. It can make the seemingly impossible, possible, sweeping girth-ism aside, and I wish them as much happiness as anyone has the right to expect.

Girthism is the new means of mocking Donald Trump and his commodious puku, in defiance of the glowing medical credentials of the White House doctor. As a taunt it’s a bit droll, coming from a country overflowing with large people who probably live, as he does, on that greatest of American exports, junk food. I actually envy people like Trump and Dotcom who are able to ignore the diet Nazis, especially this hot, sticky summer with plump girls on the streets wearing shorts revealing more buttock than is strictly necessary. How can you not envy people who don’t care? It’s endearing.

The body is an eloquent thing, a source of misery at times to those of us who don’t measure up as ballerinas. I say this because of the exceptionally large breasts of Stormy Daniels, the ‘‘adult’’ movie star who says she had a fling with Trump while his current wife recovered from the birth of their son.

She now says she was paid $130,000 in hush money.

Of the several levels of vulgarity involved here – marital infidelity at such a time among them – it’s the breasts that puzzle me. Negotiating contact with such a barrier between you would take courage, assuming that they are mostly artificial, and therefore rather solid, and that’s a point in Trump’s favour. Nothing deters him, other than good taste.

I like Stormy. She’s a smart woman, and if what she says is true, she earned her payoff; she’s bound to develop serious back pain for one thing.

Incidentally, what is so ‘‘adult’’ about adult movies? Surely not their infantile plotlines.

No sooner had Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her girthexpanding pregnancy than former deputy prime minister Paula Bennett went public with her choice to have gastric bypass surgery. Not that it’s anyone else’s business, but I guess bored reporters would start to notice her dramatic weight loss, which can apparently be up to 50kg in the first year after surgery, and ask impertinent questions.

Whatever your politics, you can’t seriously say that Bennett’s girth prevented her being a hard-working and effective politician but, like many women, she says she has battled with her weight most of her adult life. As have most women I know, in fact.

I remember former MP Donna Awatere being pilloried for saying her sudden weight loss was down to dieting when she, too, had had a gastric bypass. Again this was nobody else’s business, but she had fibbed. Former Maori Party leader Tariana Turia has also had the operation, and calls for more gastric band operations to be available from the public health system. She argues that this would reduce the rate of diabetes and other health costs, but it would be good to know the follow-up success rate of the operations five and 10 years down the track.

Meanwhile our Super Rugby players are reportedly on the brink of developing eating disorders for the same reason as women, trying to control their body image and meet a glamorous ideal, as if sporting talent isn’t enough. A report this week says they can succumb to binge eating in the midst of strict diets, and consider vomiting afterwards. That sounds like the horrible seesaw of bulimia, normally associated with anxious women.

As with young women, it’s the young players who are said to be most vulnerable to body image anxiety, and I’m not surprised. The cult of the body is designed to undermine confidence and make life miserable, as if only the physically perfect, preferably with luminescent, bleached teeth, are proper people, and everyone else should be quietly culled.