You frequently communicate your worldview when you present yourself for strategic purposes (Chapter 2). For example, if you are meeting your significant other’s parents for the first time or attending a job interview, you will likely present yourself in a manner that expresses key elements of your culture—
Just as we learn culture through communication, we also use communication to express our culture. Our worldview affects which topics we discuss in personal and professional settings, as well as how we communicate nonverbally. It also affects the way we perceive others’ communication.
In the United States and many Western cultures, a popular worldview often equates thinness with beauty; this perception is reflected in the messages we communicate. Media tabloids, as well as personal comments on YouTube, are filled with judgments about celebrities and their weight. Following the birth of Prince George, Kate Middleton, the Dutchess of Cambridge, emerged from the hospital with a visible postbirth “baby bump,” and a frenzy of public debate ensued (Britney, 2013). Interestingly, some of the same tabloids that praised Middleton for showing off her “bump” (Fuller, 2013) later also gushed at the quick loss of her pregnancy weight (Baez, 2013). Media personalities themselves often join the public conversation too. Kim Kardashian and Jessica Simpson, for example, have lashed out via Twitter at weight-
In many other cultures, worldviews about weight and physical attractiveness differ greatly. Jessica Simpson herself discovered this when she traveled around the world for VH1’s series The Price of Beauty (Hinckley, 2010). She found, for example, that in Uganda, larger women are considered desirable, and so they prepare for marriage in a “fattening hut.” This cultural practice expresses to the people of Uganda the importance for women of gaining weight, much like the U.S. tabloids express to Americans the value of losing it.