I’ve always had an issue with my body. As I’ve said before, I do not remember a time in my life when I didn’t think I was fat. As early as second grade, I thought I was fat. Here I am at that age (and here again in a worse dress); what do you think?
By the time I was in middle school (here), I really thought I was chubby. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I think that we as American women suffer from a universal body dysmorphic disorder; we all hate the way we look, and have no idea what we really look like.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a woman say she hated her body, I’d be swimming in dough. And I’d be willing to swap bodies with most of them in a heartbeat if given the chance; the women I know are gorgeous, and have strong, feminine bodies that are just beautiful. Not mine, of course. I may be strong, but… sigh. Yeah, I still hate my body too.
Grrl sent me a link to Lauren Greenfield's current exhibition of photographs called Girl Culture (it’s also apparently a coffee table book). Some of the images just make me sad (um, we won't even discuss the fetus bingo, okay?). The girls at fat camp, especially (they just aren't that fat!). Or the anorexic that can’t stand to see how much weight she’s gained during treatment so she gets on the scale backwards (meanwhile, she’s so weak she needs two people to steady her). The young girls all on anti-depressants. The little girl posing sexily at four years old.
Sarah’s daughter in only nine years old, but she’s already tried to french kiss her boyfriend and asks her mom if she “looks sexy” in various outfits. Sexual awareness seems to be happening earlier than ever; little girls playing dress up is one thing, but little girls jutting out hips and chests to look sexy is another. This is going beyond just the mimicing of adult behavior.
For a society that proclaims to want to stamp out sexual
molestation and child pornography, we permit the sexualizing of little girls
entirely too often (not to mention the current trend to make women look like little girls--brazilian wax, anyone?). I wouldn’t be surprised if Sarah’s daughter starts asking
for a bra soon, even though she’s years away from having anything to put in it.
Who’s to blame? Sarah doesn’t allow her daughter to watch uninterrupted hours of Britney Spears on MTV, so where does she get it? It must be coming from the other girls at school.Or perhaps is because of the new marketing catagory of "tweens"--girls between six and eleven. Bratz dolls are a perfect example of a product geared to this age group--way too sexy for a six year old to play with! Even Barbie is less overtly sexual.
I remember the pressure to look like everyone else, to dress like everyone else. It was impossible for me when I was a kid—designer jeans were in (Calvin Klein, anyone?) and I was shopping at K-Mart and thrift stores. By high school, I said the hell with it, tore my clothes to shreds and dyed my hair pink. But as much as I acted the rebel, I still craved the approval of the other kids. I remember quivering with joy when this kid Paul once introduced me to a new student as “the coolest girl in our class.”
Another thing in the Girl Culture piece that made me sad is the young women that are stripping or are dreaming of becoming strippers. Can you imagine?
Now, I personally know probably more than my fair share of
women that have danced for a living; lots of former strippers end up in my circles of friends (it's so common, in
fact, that once I met a ballerina and when she said she danced I said,
“Oh, what club?”). More than 90% of the women I know that made their living
that way were sexually abused as children. There is definitely some sort of
sexual boundary disconnect that happens, that allows these women to feel
comfortable displaying their bodies that way (the other 10% of the women I
know, most were addicts—but a few just did it briefly as a way to make money).
I’m not asserting these claims as my own—this is what the women who’ve danced
for a living have told me.
So, I wonder what the early sexualizing of our young girls is teaching them about their bodies? What kind of emotional issues will they have? What damage is being done?
Some of the Girl Culture exhibition made me laugh—like the girl frantically scrambling through her incredible mess of her room looking for the perfect outfit. So much less drastic a self-image issue than getting breast implants in high school (can you imagine? If I'd gotten them, I'd look like this now)
There are issues too big to go into here; we could talk about how all the hormones in our food (and the plastic it comes in) are making young girls develop at an earlier age. Or we could discuss the fact that as more women work outside the home, the more unrealistic the ideal female body image becomes (hard to be an effective executive if you have to starve yourself nearly to death to look good, right?). We could talk about the damage done by television and movies.
Or we can all just walk over to a mirror and tell ourselves we are beautiful. And tell the women in our lives that we think they are beautiful.
Cause you are beautiful, you know. You really, really are.
