Morris Cargill

WHEN DAWN RITCH, a little while ago, wrote her column about ladies who bleach and take fowl pills, she really threw the cat amongst the pigeons. Ever since that column there have beencountless articles and letters about the subject. Very few of the writers have been amused. Most have been indignant and some have even attempted sociological treaties of a kind. Even the authorities got into the act by pointing out the dangers of skin bleaching.

Those of us who are foolhardy enough to claim that we understand women know that bleaching and fowl pills are merely the latest examples of the lengths to which women will go, not only to make themselves what they believe to be attractive to men, but simply to be in fashion by doing the in thing.

There is for example nothing new about the quest for pygidial protuberance for we must remember that at one time women wore bustles to achieve the necessary effect.

Our women have never had recourse to bustles being naturally well equipped but obviously those who dose themselves with fowl pills were hoping to increase their natural advantages both fore and aft.

We must remember too that time when women of a certain class wore corsets stiffened with whalebone pulled in so tight at the waist as to achieve the then fashionable hour-glass effect at the expense of some damage to their internal organs.

It was not so long ago that the Japanese, believing that very small feet were essential to female beauty, bound the feet of their girl children so tightly that in due course they could hardly walk. Even today many of our women deform their feet and suffer from bunions and corns by wearing narrow shoes with enormously high heels.

One knows too, about the African maidens who stretch their necks by adding bit by bit a series of rings which can cause great harm. Some other girls in Africa used to put cotton-reels in their noses and their ears as an aid to beauty. I don't think they do that any longer.

One current female fashion which has not yet reached Jamaica is the present English craze for cleavages. The in thing in England or at least in London is to be sure that when you are photographed you exhibit a cleavage almost as deep as the Grand Canyon.

Bras with cement

For some reason which baffles me, this is considered to be very sexy. It is not, of course, that some of our women do not go in for cleavages, but in the case of the higglers these cleavages are not for sex but for storage.

That is where they mostly keep their dollar bills. Large breasts are also important. Any man who has had to contest a seat on an aircraft with a lady higgler knows that she uses them as a weapon. When I used to travel regularly to Cayman on the usual higgler run I became convinced that some of them also filled their bras with cement.

So it is that fashions come and go. Today its bleaching and fowl pills. But tomorrow it may be more fashionable to have skins as black as ebony, and bottoms and breasts as flat as ironing-boards. Remember Twiggy? Even now some of our tourist ladies lie in the sun to darken their skins. Alas, both sunburn and bleaching can result in skin cancer. But then throughout history women have gone to enormous lengths to achieve current ideas of beauty. The statue of the Venus Di Milo has for centuries been regarded as the epitome of beauty but, thank God, no women has yet chopped off her arms to achieve the same effect. But give them time. They may yet do so.