The Body Beautiful?

In an age saturated in advertising, and hopelessly obsessed with fame, Susie Orbach is an opponent of conformity.
With her viewpoints formed during the counter-cultural ferment of the 60s, Orbach remains a Marxist, which, in today's climate, seems almost as radical as cancelling your subscription to GQ, or putting your boot through the TV screen when the latest installment of Big Brother flashes up.
This leading feminist and psychotherapist was speaking at Zest, on Newland Avenue, and created an unsettling vision of the world in which all of us are little more than the play things of big business - causing us to view our bodies as little more than advertising boards.
"Young women are now thinking of their bodies as products, " she said. "It is measure of modernity that this thinking - 'brand thin' - is now spreading across the world."
The idea, a sort of Western thought virus which Orbach terms "body facism" has, she said, arrived everywhere from Latin America to Japan, with increasing numbers of people warping their bodies with plastic surgery or developing eating disorders. Within three years of the first TV broadcasts in Fiji during the 90s, 11.9 per cent of young women were bulimic.
But these obsessions, driven by an alliance of diet pill manufacturers and advertisers, is far from restricted to women.
"The change is happening now," she said. "Pick up a copy of a men's fashion magazine and you will find it no different to a copy of Cosmopolitan from 20 years ago."
This change is part of a wider period of re-adjustment between the sexes, which, Orbach said, is happening now the "econmomic veil" has been lifted and women have financial independence - females now expect the same emotional support which they have traditionally provided for men.
But big business has also snuck into the world of feelings - emotions have been commodified and sold back to us as pills, and now a whole swathe of the Western world is labelled as sufferers of mental conditions they do not fully understand.
"There are towns in America where half the population are on drugs for conditions they have been told they have," she said.
Orbach was, famously, counsellor to Diana, Princess of Wales, an appointment which she said had not compromised her radical politics. "If anything, class-conciousness was a great help - because I knew that the Royals were as messed up as the rest of us."
Orbach is now encouraging others to be more emotionally literate - to live and appreciate the moment, rather than endlessly speculate about the future or look back to the past. "People get in the way of themselves," she said.
'Know yourself' was the message. By the end of the evening, even Orbach had learnt something new. "I have never been cafe entertainment before," she said.