I'm going to start by saying that this post is all about weight, body image, body issues, and all that jazz. If those sorts of issues bother you or bore you, abandon ship.
I've never been happy with my body. Well, that's probably not entirely true - I bet at two years old I didn't look at my stomach, or my legs, and think, "Damn girl, you need to go on a diet!" Pre-elementary school aged me was a tomboy, and for the most part raised gender neutral. By that I mean my mom bought me dolls and Barbies, and my dad bought me footballs and Matchbox cars. I was undoubtedly bombarded with media messages about femininity, but in my own home I was permitted to be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. For a while.
My interests ran toward the rough and tumble, although I loved my play kitchen and was devastated when my brother destroyed it. As I got older, I played soccer and softball, and took ballet and tap dance lessons. I was an active little kid, with an athletically-built body. I was always one of the three shortest people in my class, so the lack of height, combined with the muscle I sported, meant that I was always going to be "thick". I don't know when I first decided I was fat, but I do remember one of the first times I remember feeling fat. I was still taking ballet lessons, so I was between the ages of four and ten. If I had to guess, I would say I was about eight, because that's when the first signs of puberty started. Anyway, that's when I decided that I would no longer go to dance class unless I had a ballet skirt on. I don't know how to describe it to you, it's a wrap skirt, almost like something you'd wear with a swimsuit nowadays, very thin and swishy. I declared that I had to have one or else I would no longer go to class. The reason, and I don't remember if I told my mom this or not, was that my butt and thighs were big, and I was ashamed of them. I don't remember if anyone made fun of me, or if this was something I decided on my own. I do remember that most of the girls in my class were tiny. The kind of stick thin that little girls often are, especially before puberty. There were perhaps one or two heavier girls in my class, and then me, who had entered into puberty already. That was the first time I decided I was fat, but it wasn't the last.
The rest of elementary school was rough. I was teased a lot, for a variety of reasons (most of which are not relevant to this post). Once I started middle school, things got worse. For one thing, middle schoolers and high schoolers rode the same bus. This started a year of what was, looking back, sexual harassment. My bus driver that year had the bright idea of assigned seating. Not a terrible idea, but she put sixth grade me in one of the back seats with a guy much older. He and some of his friends who sat nearby spent every single day sexually harassing me. They would alternate degrading my appearance (calling me a fat bitch, for instance) to threatening to rape me (which never happened, thank goodness). They had me in tears just about every day.
But the assholes on the bus weren't the only ones calling me fat and ugly, of course. Some of my classmates, mostly male, took great pleasure in calling me fat and ugly. I want to take time out to discuss what I actually weighed at that point, just for illustration. From middle school through high school, I was five feet tall, and weighed anywhere between 105 and 125, which put me in the normal range for my height. But we all know that the way any given weight looks can differ, from person to person and within a persons own life. I went through an extended awkward period and because the ideal is for a flat stomach, long thin legs, and a small shapely butt, I was called fat, even though I wasn't. I didn't have a flat stomach, my legs were never going to be long, my thighs were thick with muscles, and I had a big butt. I stopped eating breakfast and lunch, I tried to eat dinner as little as possible. I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, but I certainly tried eating as little as I could get away with. I honestly can't tell you what I looked like during that time, because when I would look in the mirror, I would see a manatee look back at me. I was of normal weight, with a fat person living in my head.
Unfortunately, the repercussions of my classmates abuse were long lasting.
Through most of middle school, all of high school, and some of college, I was depressed. My parents didn't believe in therapy, because they thought it was something shameful, so I received no support there. My high school's guidance counselor was of no help because she didn't think my feelings were very serious. In college, I used the campus's free counseling, but I didn't like it.
Eventually, I stopped thinking about my body. I met a great guy, we got married, and I was the happiest I've ever been. Life went on. Then a funny think happened. I looked in the mirror, really looked, and realized I had put on weight. I got on a scale, and realized with horror that I weighed 215 pounds, a full 100 pounds more than I did in high school! Apparently, I became an overweight person with a normal weight person living in my head, because I didn't see what the mirror and the scale were now telling me. So, I joined a weight-loss group, lost 40 pounds, and felt pretty good about myself.
I bet you think you know where there is going, right? I get back down to my high school weight and live happily ever after. Nope. I regain half of the 40 pounds I lost, because I started graduate school while still working full time, and I barely have time to sleep, let alone run on the treadmill an hour a day like I did before. Plus, I was diagnosed with a disorder, one that makes it more difficult to lose weight (that's for a different post). I had a brief period of body acceptance, and now I hate myself again. I can't find clothes that I like in my size and I hate everything about my body. I hate that celebrities, the ideals that we are supposed to aspire to, are Photoshopped to hell and back on magazine covers and in ads, so that the ideal we are supposed to achieve, they aren't even achieving.
But do you know what I hate the most? The following:
A poll conducted by a popular women's magazine found that 75% of women thought they were "too fat" (Glamour,1984). A large scale survey conducted by Garner (1997) found body dissatisfaction to be "increasing at a faster rate than ever before" among both men and women (p. 34). He found that 89% of the 3,452 female respondents wanted to lose weight.
Many women suffer from body dissatisfaction, and assiduous dieting and the relentless pursuit of thinness has become a normative behavior among women in Western society (Rodin, Silberstein & Striegel-Moore,1984). Thinness has not only come to represent attractiveness, but also has come to symbolize success, self-control and higher socioeconomic status. Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. estimated the size of the weight loss industry for 1994 at $32,680 billion.
Body image dissatisfaction and dieting behavior isn't restricted to adolescents or adults. In a study of almost five hundred schoolgirls, 81% of the ten-year-olds reported that they had dieted at least once (Mellin, Scully & Irwin, 1986). A study of 36,000 students in Minnesota found that girls with negative body image were three times more likely than boys of the same age, to say that they feel badly about themselves and were more likely to believe that others see them in a negative light. The study also found that negative body image is associated with suicide risk for girls, not for boys (American Association of University Women, 1990).
Bar-Tal and Sax (1961) found that our culture places a higher value on physical beauty in the evaluation of females than males. Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz & Thompson (1980), have found that the average size of idealized woman (as portrayed by models), has become progressively thinner and has stabilized at 13-19% below physically expected weight. Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegelmoore (1984), suggest that this thin ideal is unachievable for most women and is likely to lead to feelings of self-devaluation, feelings of dysphoria (depression) and helplessness.
Shame seems to be another component of women's attitudes toward their bodies. In a Kinsey survey it was found that women felt more embarrassed when asked about their weight, than when they were asked about their masturbation practices, or occurrences of homosexual affairs (Kinsey et al., 1953).
Women and girls are also consistently taught from an early age that their self-worth is largely dependent on how they look. The fact that women earn more money than men in only two job categories, those of modeling and prostitution serves to illustrate this point (Wolf, 1992).
In a sample of male and female high school students, two-thirds of boys and girls believed that being thinner would have an impact on their lives. The majority of girls believed that this impact would be positive, while the majority of the boys believed that the impact would be negative. The gender groups did not differ significantly in their weight distribution around the expected norm for their group. Girls had higher body dissatisfaction scores than boys on all measures. Girls reported magazines as their primary source of information regarding diet and health, whereas boys reported their primary source to be parents, followed by two other categories before mentioning magazines (Paxton, Wertheim, Gibbons, Szmukler, Hillier, & Petrovich, 1991).
Dieting is more common than not dieting, with 95% of the female population having dieted at some time (Polivy & Herman, 1987). Dieting has been as a powerful contributor to dysphoria because of the failure often associated with this type of weight loss method, 95-98% of all dieter regain their weight (Heatherton & Polivy, 1992; Cooke, 1996, p.35). Caloric deprivation experiments have shown to produce depression, anxiety and irritability (Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen & Taylor, 1950). A sobering finding is that most bulimics report that the onset of their eating disorder occurred during a period of dieting (Hall & Hay, 1991).
A study that explored social and economic consequences of overweight found that women who were overweight were 20% less likely to be married at a later point, and had a household income that was $6,710 less than non-overweight women. Overweight men were 11% less likely to get married, yet their income was not significantly different from their non-overweight counterparts (cited in Exacting Beauty, by Thompson, Heiberg, Altabe, and Tantleff-Dunn, p. 50).
These facts provided by About Face.
Women shouldn't feel ashamed of their bodies from the time they are young. They shouldn't hate themselves, to the point of developing eating disorders or becoming suicidal. There is something wrong with a society that does this to their women. I don't have an answer, I'm just another voice crying for change.
Recommended listening: Radiohead's Creep, for one, since that's where the title of this post comes from. True Colors, by Cyndi Lauper.
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