I was reluctant to write about body image for The Significance Project because I wasn't sure that it had anything to do with my significance journey. Then, I watched a documentary called Embrace, where activist Taryn Brumfitt explores the issue of female body dissatisfaction. After that I thought that maybe The Significance Project actually was about body image, maybe even in its' entirety. And then, after some reflection, I settled somewhere around middle ground, recognizing that I've been preoccupied with body image for many years and that it has a huge impact on how I move through the world.
So I took a quick look around the internet and holy smokes, body image stuff is ubiquitous in the media! Problem is, none of it seems to get to the bottom of what I see and experience, so I proceeded to write and re-write this post roughly 36 times. I'm tired of re-writing but I'm still not exactly sure what I want to say. So, my apologies for what may seem like a long and muddled stream of consciousness here, but I figure I should put something out on the interwebs after all this effort.
I needed a place to start so I did a quick scan of what current research is saying. First, we know that stigma associated with body image is a gendered phenomenon. “[T]here is significant social pressure on women to maintain youthful-looking, wrinkle-free, toned bodies, and… this is not imposed on men to the same extent” (Grogan, 2012, p. 201). North American females are held to unreasonable beauty standards with respect to everything from breast size to lip fullness, but perhaps the most urgently to body size. This has been referred to as "the cult of thinness," or the ever-present preoccupation with being skinny.
Though the ideal female body type has not always been lean, the thin woman became status quo in the late 19th century (interestingly, right around the time that the women's rights movement fired up). The 1900's marked the era of corsets, which cinched waists and propped up breasts like little round melons (Swami, 2016). Though it wasn't explicitly stated at the time, this bodily aesthetic ran parallel to perceptions of the ideal woman--weak, frail, and submissive. Though feminists worldwide have made some headway in terms of advocating for the inclusion of many body shapes within a broader conception of female beauty, the thin ideal remains firmly rooted in North American culture, and body dissatisfaction among women is so pervasive that it is now normative (Murnen & Seabrook, 2012).
To contextualize this, let me tell you the (abridged) story of my own body image issues. Growing up, I was a round-ish child, most often referred to as "big boned." Looking back at photos I realize that I was much smaller than I thought I was, but it didn't change the fact that at around age 8 or 9 I became keenly aware that I was bigger than other girls my age. Shortly after that, the teasing started. I didn't know then that grade four kids can be extraordinarily cruel without a second thought; it likely wouldn't have helped me feel better in the face of what seemed like ceaseless ridicule. There was one incident I remember vividly. I had a t-shirt that I loved--a white over-sized tee with the word "WOW" written in bright blue capital letters on the front. Wearing it made me feel fabulous. But, one day after school when I was wearing the shirt, a boy laughed at me and shouted, "what does WOW stand for - weally over weight?" As he ran ahead of me I felt the color rise in my face and mortification take over. I never wore the shirt again.
A few years later, something happened. During the summer between grade seven and eight, I grew several inches but didn't gain any weight. All of a sudden, I was skinny. When I returned to school in the fall, all of the teasing magically stopped. No one said anything about how I looked any more except to compliment my weight loss. And, it was then that the neural pathway was forged in my brain, the one that equates body weight with self worth. It has only grown deeper and stronger since then.
Now, at middle age, I feel like much of my life has been shaped by my efforts to conform to pervasive female body weight standards despite the fact that I'm an academic and I know better. In addition to the physical and mental energy I have spent calorie counting and exercising feverishly, I also buy clothes to strategically hide "trouble spots," stick to an almost entirely black wardrobe so that I don't draw attention to myself, and avoid styling my hair in any way that might make my face look rounder. I maintain a mental tally of what I've eaten throughout the day and what kinds of activity I'll need to do to burn it off. The ways that I perceive my physicality on any given day influence how confident I feel (in life, in work), how I interact with people, and how I allow myself to experience joy (or not).
I feel a great deal of shame and resentment about the time I've wasted worrying about how I look. In all seriousness, it has influenced how I engage in every social situation, every workplace encounter, every romantic experience in my life. I maintain an almost unconscious self-consciousness, always wondering how I am seen by others. It has helped a little bit to read some research in this area; I am reassured knowing that women are conditioned to use body shape and weight as central aspects of our self-judgement, and that it can influence our sense of self-efficacy in other life roles too (Latner, 2012). I also acknowledge that, as one of the women being interviewed in the Embrace documentary stated, "when you hate your body it eats away at every aspect of your life."
I wish, as Ricki Lake expressed in Embrace, that I could be one of those women who just got over it. I wonder how much time it will take me to forge new neural pathways that allow me to acknowledge my body for its' strength and resilience, and to see beauty in that. I feel like there should be more resources for women like me, who really want to think and feel differently about our bodies. The problem is, when I look at everything online about body image, it's mostly fashion related blogs for "curvy girls" (ugh). Even the research seems to be primarily quantitative, and has not striven to truly understand the experiences of women with varying degrees of body dissatisfaction. The Embrace documentary is the closest I have come to finding something actually useful, but it still doesn't address the question of how to start.
I will begin with a commitment to being honest and forthright about body image issues. And, maybe there is a way that I can help other voices to be heard, to facilitate meaningful storytelling in order to gain a better understanding of what's really going on here. Anyone want to do some research with me???
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