I've been feeling really grouchy about the way women's appearance is supposed to define them lately. (And then I find myself attributing it to hormones, as if it's somehow unreasonable to be angry and sad when every public representation of your sex and all of your same-sex friends seem to attribute some sort of moral value to being thin and "flawless" and then everyone denies it and implies that you should lighten up 
)
It started when I saw 2012 yesterday. I went there fully expecting a formulaic hollywood movie, and it was fun for what it was. But I was really struck (yet again - I don't watch hollywood movies that often) by the direct correlation of thinness to goodness. The main "good" female character was bone thin. Not slim. Gaunt. And her hair was dyed and her makeup was flawless at all times. She was also the mother of two children, with whose doofus-y yet well meaning, natural hair, normal body, some flaws having (that is, *human*) father she magically falls back in love when he heroically saves the day. She has no outstanding characteristics of her own apart from her sexless yet non-threateningly attractive appearance. Contrast to the morally ambiguous sex symbol of the movie (who dies miserably of course), who is somewhat curvy and blond and made the mistakes of both being the girlfriend of the (fat) bad guy and cheating on him with an attractive (too attractive, not real) but stupid other guy, who also ends up dead of course. She also gets implants at the request of her rich boyfriend and later regrets it because "she liked how she was before" (that's when we know her life is clearly no longer worth living and she will end up dead). The other "good" woman, who is single, highly educated, and black, gets to have a tiny bit more body fat than the white matron, but she has to straighten her hair and have perfect makeup. We also never learn exactly what she is a doctor of.
Although the thinness=goodness thing also appeared in male characters, maybe what really got to me wasn't so much just the thinness but the way the female characters were not *normal* in the same way as the male characters, who were permitted foibles, makeupless faces, natural hair, slight potbellies, all while being considered heroes or sexually attractive. The female characters were just so one-dimensional. And this movie was just one of the multitude of American blockbusters that all have the same phenomenon.
So then I relate it to the phenomenon of my friends (and me in the past) so much relating to myself through my appearance. To the point of feeling bad when looking "bad" to oneself (read: too fat, makeup wrong, bad hair - all things imperceptible to most outsiders). Or the sadness of sites like www.theshapeofamother.com, which was supposed to be empowering but has turned into a horror show of young mothers confessing how much they loathe themselves because their naked bodies no longer live up to a perceived *public* (seen from the outside) standard. So many women do not regard their bodies as private, autonomous, answering only to themselves. Witness the "omg she really shouldn't be wearing that" comments.
I know the feeling. It's the feeling of being outside of yourself. It's the creepy crawly feeling of yourself on your own skin, seeing your bad hair and judging yourself for it. Restricting your movement because you are not comfortable in your own skin. Relating to yourself as an object: it just means that you relate to yourself from a (fictional, culturally constructed) observer's point of view. You aren't *in yourself*. And that point of view is drilled into everyone who has access to consumer culture of any type (so anyone who goes outside), day in, day out. Magazines, movies, interaction with friends, advertisements. The message is that we must be physically "flawless" and to be otherwise is actually morally wrong, and also that *we are being watched*.
Thanks to my lovely parents who kept me away from the crap that is American mass culture as long as they could, I never really understood my friends' very real angst about their "fat" thighs, though I tried to join in the self-hate speech for a while as a way of social bonding. I never truly hated my stomach (which is where all my fat goes) even though in my less secure days I was self conscious about it. I was lucky. How can I keep my future daughters from being sucked into the cult of self-hatred based solely on physical appearance? How can I let her keep her awareness centered *inside* her body, so she can feel comfortable with her physicality, with just *being* in her human body? How did it get this bad? Has it always been this way? Did it start with the invention of mirrors? Is it possible to be angsty about what you look like to others if you don't know what you look like to others?
Anyway, that's my rant for today. It's not like I'm the first person to ever realize the above, but it just really hit me and has been making me want to move to the woods and cut off all contact with the outside world, so I had to vent to some people whose eyes might not glaze over at the first mention of "women's negative body image related to media representations". Thanks for listening.
)It started when I saw 2012 yesterday. I went there fully expecting a formulaic hollywood movie, and it was fun for what it was. But I was really struck (yet again - I don't watch hollywood movies that often) by the direct correlation of thinness to goodness. The main "good" female character was bone thin. Not slim. Gaunt. And her hair was dyed and her makeup was flawless at all times. She was also the mother of two children, with whose doofus-y yet well meaning, natural hair, normal body, some flaws having (that is, *human*) father she magically falls back in love when he heroically saves the day. She has no outstanding characteristics of her own apart from her sexless yet non-threateningly attractive appearance. Contrast to the morally ambiguous sex symbol of the movie (who dies miserably of course), who is somewhat curvy and blond and made the mistakes of both being the girlfriend of the (fat) bad guy and cheating on him with an attractive (too attractive, not real) but stupid other guy, who also ends up dead of course. She also gets implants at the request of her rich boyfriend and later regrets it because "she liked how she was before" (that's when we know her life is clearly no longer worth living and she will end up dead). The other "good" woman, who is single, highly educated, and black, gets to have a tiny bit more body fat than the white matron, but she has to straighten her hair and have perfect makeup. We also never learn exactly what she is a doctor of.
Although the thinness=goodness thing also appeared in male characters, maybe what really got to me wasn't so much just the thinness but the way the female characters were not *normal* in the same way as the male characters, who were permitted foibles, makeupless faces, natural hair, slight potbellies, all while being considered heroes or sexually attractive. The female characters were just so one-dimensional. And this movie was just one of the multitude of American blockbusters that all have the same phenomenon.
So then I relate it to the phenomenon of my friends (and me in the past) so much relating to myself through my appearance. To the point of feeling bad when looking "bad" to oneself (read: too fat, makeup wrong, bad hair - all things imperceptible to most outsiders). Or the sadness of sites like www.theshapeofamother.com, which was supposed to be empowering but has turned into a horror show of young mothers confessing how much they loathe themselves because their naked bodies no longer live up to a perceived *public* (seen from the outside) standard. So many women do not regard their bodies as private, autonomous, answering only to themselves. Witness the "omg she really shouldn't be wearing that" comments.
I know the feeling. It's the feeling of being outside of yourself. It's the creepy crawly feeling of yourself on your own skin, seeing your bad hair and judging yourself for it. Restricting your movement because you are not comfortable in your own skin. Relating to yourself as an object: it just means that you relate to yourself from a (fictional, culturally constructed) observer's point of view. You aren't *in yourself*. And that point of view is drilled into everyone who has access to consumer culture of any type (so anyone who goes outside), day in, day out. Magazines, movies, interaction with friends, advertisements. The message is that we must be physically "flawless" and to be otherwise is actually morally wrong, and also that *we are being watched*.
Thanks to my lovely parents who kept me away from the crap that is American mass culture as long as they could, I never really understood my friends' very real angst about their "fat" thighs, though I tried to join in the self-hate speech for a while as a way of social bonding. I never truly hated my stomach (which is where all my fat goes) even though in my less secure days I was self conscious about it. I was lucky. How can I keep my future daughters from being sucked into the cult of self-hatred based solely on physical appearance? How can I let her keep her awareness centered *inside* her body, so she can feel comfortable with her physicality, with just *being* in her human body? How did it get this bad? Has it always been this way? Did it start with the invention of mirrors? Is it possible to be angsty about what you look like to others if you don't know what you look like to others?
Anyway, that's my rant for today. It's not like I'm the first person to ever realize the above, but it just really hit me and has been making me want to move to the woods and cut off all contact with the outside world, so I had to vent to some people whose eyes might not glaze over at the first mention of "women's negative body image related to media representations". Thanks for listening.
Different people struggle with different issues. I'm sure that patriarchy plays a huge role, tho. Our daughters are all the more reason to address sexism in all forms, IMO. I'm convinced, tho, that there have always been females who cared more than others about how they looked. It seems pretty natural. The problem is when whole segments of the female population are looked down upon because they don't look like one particular model or something.
Hi everyone! It's been quiet around these parts lately.
b/c I really think I have a lot to learn on this for many reasons. But this is what I really wanted to say about the word 'girly'... Chirp, I looked for a definition for this word and this all I came up with:
Wow.
and The Future Generation--good stuff, and easy to read, which I have to admit is important for me these days, as much as I wish it wasn't 
