Chicken-Hips by Cathetine Piggot Essay

Influence is powerful in determining one’s future. Actions behaviors and opinions are all connected to impact of others and the way they shape our views on the world as well as ourselves. Self-Image is dependent on the acceptance of others, thus always changing since one’s morals and ethics do not stay the same as time goes on. Influence of others play a role on how one tends to view themselves and people around them, by either being forced to conform to a country’s lifestyle, completing constant tasks to keep up with society’s demands, or being able to be content with oneself rather than being blinded of the onslaught of constant expectations. When living in a country, we are pressured to become accustomed to what is considered common and thus adapt them in our everyday lives. In the shorty story Chicken-Hips, by Cathetine Pigott, the main character travels to Gambia to learn that its people desire women with curves rather than skin and bones, when she is teased and called, “Chicken-Hips.” She adopts Africa’s views on, “image of the perfect female body, by eating a diet of, “rice and rich oily stew twice a day,” and eventually she becomes a beautiful African. Author Alan Lightman mentions that over the past several years, friends and colleagues have become increasingly irritated with him for not being on the electronic network, in the article Progress. Even though people in his country tempt him to go on the internet he, “resist(s) getting on the Internet as a matter of principle,” because he finds it to be a destructive attack that is racing into the 20th century unmonitored. He feels like his opinions are different than the majority. In the story Chicken-Hips, the main character becomes worried that in Canada people lose weight for all the wrong reasons. She states, “I wanted to cling to the liberating belief that losing weight had nothing to do with self-love.” Alan Lightman challenges the truth behind progressing technology in order to improve human