About Face
18/3/09 15:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsMy friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
janni has some smart and thoughtful things to say about body image. As another woman who has fought that tiresome battle with body image and food, what she said made me resonate like a plucked string. But there's more to the matter of self-image than weight, and much of it starts at home (which, as a parent of girls, concerns me deeply).
Before I start trying to explain what I'm talking about, let me be clear. This is not a veiled plea for egoboo or reassurance, some sort of Interweb "do these pants make me look fat" rant. I'm trying to figure out how much of the harsh light I shine on myself comes from my eccentric upbringing, and how much from the world around us. I'm not at all sure, at this point, how to change my judgment about my own looks. I certainly don't feel this way about the people around me: all my friends are beautiful because they look like themselves. That's just not a rule I can apply to myself. Yet.
I come, on both sides, from families that judged by appearance. My father's family seemingly valued the appearance of accomplishment more than anything else: you are what you do. But my father also married three times, each time to very beautiful women. Dad was an artist, and perhaps that gave him a particularly rigorous standard of beauty. I overheard him once, when I was in my early 20s, respond to a woman who said "Oh, Madeleine is just beautiful!" by saying, with genuine bewilderment, "Madeleine? Madeleine's not beautiful." It's as if he had a particular standard and could not fit me into that standard, and couldn't imagine enlarging the standard itself. I know Dad loves me, but this rigidity was something even love couldn't penetrate.
My mother, who was beautiful, had been a plump, cross-eyed kid, the child of divorced parents, and a girl who was, at least occasionally, teased about her weight by her mother and grandmother. Mom could spend an evening spent telling me bitterly about being called "the Cow" or "Horsie" by her mother, then send me off to bed saying "Goodnight, Fatso!" without any sense of irony. Um. And as her animus toward my father increased in her later years, the fact that I took after his side of the family didn't do me any favors. My brother had inherited the best of my parents: my mother's killer bone structure, my father's coloring and hair. It was clear, at least to me as a kid, that he was the good looking one. I got my grandfather Abraham's nose, my father's non-aggressive chin (which he covers with a beard--I don't have that option), and from somewhere on my mother's side, long arms and a short waist.
Of course, none of this would have been crucial if I hadn't been a girl. My father will probably insist, with his dying breath, that no mite of sexism beats in his breast, but he clearly loves having a son, particularly a son who shares many of his talents. Family labels have an awful way of sticking to the sole of your soul for years, unexamined: my brother was the Smart One and the Talented One as well as the Goodlooking One. The Boy Child was supposed to be the one who carried the name and the fame of the family. So what did that leave for me? I was, clearly, supposed to be the Pretty One, and through no failure of my own (I didn't choose these genes) I flunked Girl in this regard.
Once I hit adolescence I went from a skinny little girl to a heavy teen. With big breasts (the semiotics of breasts is a whole 'nother discussion). It is, perhaps, not surprising that I emerged as an adult with some looks-issues. I had internalized the "fact" that I wasn't Pretty (which I certainly took as Holy Writ from a fairly early age) and believed it was not only a disappointment but a moral failing. If I were a good person I would fulfill my role in my family's scheme and be Pretty, dammit. (Okay, I'm insane. Anything I do wrong is a moral failing, including wearing mismatched socks.) That's the Family part.
The Society part: in a world where women are supposed to measure themselves against the airbrushed images of professional Beautiful Women in magazines and on TV, and where actors playing "normal" women are size two, groomed and plucked and polished before the cameras start clicking, why wouldn't I feel like I can't compete? I found, years ago, that when I turned off the TV during the day (I used to have it on while I was doing layout work, as less distracting than music) I immediately felt better about myself; daytime ads are all about weight, food, and grooming products, and making you feel like you don't measure up. (The ads are also about Enhanced Male Performance, but that's for someone else's post.) My reed-slender younger daughter periodically asks if she is too fat; I try very hard not to thump her, and instead shift the discussion to the question of whether she's eating heathily (which, insofar as it is possible for a 13 year old to do, she is). Feminism hasn't been able to combat the ubiquity of objectified female images--if anything, the focus on the purely physical is spreading across the aisle: men and boys with eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
There's an awful lot of stuff out there signalling, without words, that looks are everything. Not just weight, but the shape of your nose, the smoothness of your skin, your flawless smile, and on and on and on. If you look at the ads for a well intentioned campaign like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty you see plump young women with pretty faces. Smooth skin, dimples--regardless of ethnicity, they're all cute as buttons. Okay, maybe it's asking too much for Dove to include as "real beauties" women with real bodies and real faces. Baby steps.
What can I do about all this? It's tempting to feel that I'm a lost cause and to look at my kids and shriek "Save yourselves! Don't worry about me!" As a feminist, as a female, as a mother, I want my girls to understand that they're beautiful, because they are. And not just their souls, although their souls are pretty damned gorgeous, but their physical selves, too (you get told often enough that you have a beautiful soul and you start thinking the rest of you must look like the ass-end of an elephant). So I tell them they're smart and beautiful and funny and great-hearted, because they are, and I want to nurture each of those parts of them. And since they were small we've had discussions about what beauty is, and what you'd do or not do for certain kinds of approval; I read them the goriest version of Cinderella I could find, the one where the stepsisters keep cutting off body parts so they can fit into the damned slipper. Which led, not only to my kids saying they would never amputate a toe to marry a prince, but to their each observing that the prince must have been really stupid to even think about falling for it. I <3 my children.
It's harder to say "you're beautiful and smart and funny and so on" to yourself without sounding like an old Al Franken routine. My current solution, one I've been trying to practice for years, is not to trash talk myself. Anyone who's met me knows this is a work in progress, effort-wise--but imagine how much worse it would be if I weren't working on it. I'm going to keep trying at it, because as I get older I'm not getting any, well, younger, and despite all the ads on Facebook for products that will make me look like Julia Roberts, my real goal is to be happy looking like Madeleine Robins.
janni has some smart and thoughtful things to say about body image. As another woman who has fought that tiresome battle with body image and food, what she said made me resonate like a plucked string. But there's more to the matter of self-image than weight, and much of it starts at home (which, as a parent of girls, concerns me deeply).Before I start trying to explain what I'm talking about, let me be clear. This is not a veiled plea for egoboo or reassurance, some sort of Interweb "do these pants make me look fat" rant. I'm trying to figure out how much of the harsh light I shine on myself comes from my eccentric upbringing, and how much from the world around us. I'm not at all sure, at this point, how to change my judgment about my own looks. I certainly don't feel this way about the people around me: all my friends are beautiful because they look like themselves. That's just not a rule I can apply to myself. Yet.
I come, on both sides, from families that judged by appearance. My father's family seemingly valued the appearance of accomplishment more than anything else: you are what you do. But my father also married three times, each time to very beautiful women. Dad was an artist, and perhaps that gave him a particularly rigorous standard of beauty. I overheard him once, when I was in my early 20s, respond to a woman who said "Oh, Madeleine is just beautiful!" by saying, with genuine bewilderment, "Madeleine? Madeleine's not beautiful." It's as if he had a particular standard and could not fit me into that standard, and couldn't imagine enlarging the standard itself. I know Dad loves me, but this rigidity was something even love couldn't penetrate.
My mother, who was beautiful, had been a plump, cross-eyed kid, the child of divorced parents, and a girl who was, at least occasionally, teased about her weight by her mother and grandmother. Mom could spend an evening spent telling me bitterly about being called "the Cow" or "Horsie" by her mother, then send me off to bed saying "Goodnight, Fatso!" without any sense of irony. Um. And as her animus toward my father increased in her later years, the fact that I took after his side of the family didn't do me any favors. My brother had inherited the best of my parents: my mother's killer bone structure, my father's coloring and hair. It was clear, at least to me as a kid, that he was the good looking one. I got my grandfather Abraham's nose, my father's non-aggressive chin (which he covers with a beard--I don't have that option), and from somewhere on my mother's side, long arms and a short waist.
Of course, none of this would have been crucial if I hadn't been a girl. My father will probably insist, with his dying breath, that no mite of sexism beats in his breast, but he clearly loves having a son, particularly a son who shares many of his talents. Family labels have an awful way of sticking to the sole of your soul for years, unexamined: my brother was the Smart One and the Talented One as well as the Goodlooking One. The Boy Child was supposed to be the one who carried the name and the fame of the family. So what did that leave for me? I was, clearly, supposed to be the Pretty One, and through no failure of my own (I didn't choose these genes) I flunked Girl in this regard.
Once I hit adolescence I went from a skinny little girl to a heavy teen. With big breasts (the semiotics of breasts is a whole 'nother discussion). It is, perhaps, not surprising that I emerged as an adult with some looks-issues. I had internalized the "fact" that I wasn't Pretty (which I certainly took as Holy Writ from a fairly early age) and believed it was not only a disappointment but a moral failing. If I were a good person I would fulfill my role in my family's scheme and be Pretty, dammit. (Okay, I'm insane. Anything I do wrong is a moral failing, including wearing mismatched socks.) That's the Family part.
The Society part: in a world where women are supposed to measure themselves against the airbrushed images of professional Beautiful Women in magazines and on TV, and where actors playing "normal" women are size two, groomed and plucked and polished before the cameras start clicking, why wouldn't I feel like I can't compete? I found, years ago, that when I turned off the TV during the day (I used to have it on while I was doing layout work, as less distracting than music) I immediately felt better about myself; daytime ads are all about weight, food, and grooming products, and making you feel like you don't measure up. (The ads are also about Enhanced Male Performance, but that's for someone else's post.) My reed-slender younger daughter periodically asks if she is too fat; I try very hard not to thump her, and instead shift the discussion to the question of whether she's eating heathily (which, insofar as it is possible for a 13 year old to do, she is). Feminism hasn't been able to combat the ubiquity of objectified female images--if anything, the focus on the purely physical is spreading across the aisle: men and boys with eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
There's an awful lot of stuff out there signalling, without words, that looks are everything. Not just weight, but the shape of your nose, the smoothness of your skin, your flawless smile, and on and on and on. If you look at the ads for a well intentioned campaign like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty you see plump young women with pretty faces. Smooth skin, dimples--regardless of ethnicity, they're all cute as buttons. Okay, maybe it's asking too much for Dove to include as "real beauties" women with real bodies and real faces. Baby steps.
What can I do about all this? It's tempting to feel that I'm a lost cause and to look at my kids and shriek "Save yourselves! Don't worry about me!" As a feminist, as a female, as a mother, I want my girls to understand that they're beautiful, because they are. And not just their souls, although their souls are pretty damned gorgeous, but their physical selves, too (you get told often enough that you have a beautiful soul and you start thinking the rest of you must look like the ass-end of an elephant). So I tell them they're smart and beautiful and funny and great-hearted, because they are, and I want to nurture each of those parts of them. And since they were small we've had discussions about what beauty is, and what you'd do or not do for certain kinds of approval; I read them the goriest version of Cinderella I could find, the one where the stepsisters keep cutting off body parts so they can fit into the damned slipper. Which led, not only to my kids saying they would never amputate a toe to marry a prince, but to their each observing that the prince must have been really stupid to even think about falling for it. I <3 my children.
It's harder to say "you're beautiful and smart and funny and so on" to yourself without sounding like an old Al Franken routine. My current solution, one I've been trying to practice for years, is not to trash talk myself. Anyone who's met me knows this is a work in progress, effort-wise--but imagine how much worse it would be if I weren't working on it. I'm going to keep trying at it, because as I get older I'm not getting any, well, younger, and despite all the ads on Facebook for products that will make me look like Julia Roberts, my real goal is to be happy looking like Madeleine Robins.
