On Body Image
OK, in the interest of full disclosure (and I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again): I am skinny.
Ant Attack
I’m not saying this or showing you this for any reason other than just to set the stage for this post. There are quite a few people who know me personally who read this blog, and I guess I just want to jump the gun on a slew of comments that might say something like “Skinny people don’t know what it’s like to have a bad body image” or “What do you know about bad body image? I bet you have never had to think about your weight for your whole life.” Before you start leaving stuff like that in my comments section, go read this post (tweeted by @illusionists and written by @DaraChadwick) and then come back and see if you want to write anything like that.
The point here is this: Skinny people do experience bad body image. Everyone does! Well, maybe not everyone. That is a sweeping generalization and I do hate sweeping generalizations, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t at one point wish something was different about his/her body. For example, when I started the This is What a Beautiful Bride Looks Like website, I received several e-mails saying that the site was pointless because, even if these women didn’t like the way they looked on a daily basis, they obviously felt better about themselves on this one day because it was “their day.” I had someone tell me that no bride looked at her wedding pictures and saw anything other than beauty and happiness. The sad truth of it is that for every e-mail I received saying something like that, I also received an e-mail from a bride telling me that she didn’t even want to look at her wedding pictures because she hated herself that much.
To tell someone that he or she has no right to talk about body image is absurd and, really, just plain rude. To say that skinny people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to body image or to tell a bride that she’s crazy to think anything less than she is beautiful or anything along those lines is just perpetuating the myth that images in the media and entertainment industries don’t affect us all, and that skinny people are always happy with themselves.
I want to be honest without getting too personal here. Food and I have not always had the best relationship. I remember being a bigger kid, and to this day I hate looking at my dance pictures – you know, those group portraits the studio has taken to advertise with all the kids in their costumes before the big recital. But then, around seventh grade, I grew tall and thin seemingly overnight. I got contacts instead of my big glasses. I got braces to straighten my crooked teeth. I was a different person. Well, not really. I was the same person with a different look. But I felt the same. And things pretty much stayed that way until just before I went to college. I don’t know if it was real or just in my head, but I felt like I was gaining weight, and I was so afraid of the dreaded “Freshman 15” that I became a vegetarian, ate two meals a day (well, that is if you can call a bagel or pasta and a granola bar a meal…), and hit the gym every day (sometimes twice a day) during my freshman year of college. I believe I lost 15 pounds. Even my mom said to me once when I was home over break that I didn’t look good. My friends told me that I was pale and unhealthy-looking and that my usual energy was gone.
Fortunately for me, that was enough to make me rethink my eating patters and, while I still visit the gym at least every other day and am still a vegetarian (although that has since morphed in to more of a political thing than a “health” thing), I do feel better and healthier because I eat more.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve completely stopped looking at myself in the mirror on some days, pinching this and wishing to be rid of that. It just means that I am doing my best to be healthy and love myself for who I am. But it seems it might always be somewhat of a struggle, no matter what anyone says.
Us feminists are always trying to get people to accept human beings for who they are and not judge a book by its cover, so to speak. Well, I would urge you to really do this, and know that just because someone is skinny, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have no idea what it means to hate their body.
And, with that, I’m off to eat copious amounts of delicious Thanksgiving food. 🙂
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I used to be very skinny and always thought I was fat. Yes, I bet even Gisele has the days she looks in the mirror and does not see “glam supermodel” but “oh, no, I didn’t work enough at yoga yesterday.”
And honestly, thin isn’t a negative thing to me as long as you are healthy.
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The other day our department had a Thanksgiving pot-luck thing. I’m new, so don’t know many people outside my office, but the girl behind me and the lady in front of me knew each other. The girl asked for white turkey meat but no stuffing, and the lady in front of me whispered to her, “Weight Watchers?”
I turned to look at this girl, who was my same size. While I am not “skinny” (I have nice child-birthing hips), I am thin, and so was she. She proceeded to explain to the lady that she was trying to fit into a size 6 dress for graduation, because she refused to by a size 8. Her tone was slightly apologetic, as if she were embarrassed to be dieting.
My first instinct was to say something (probably something snippy) about her already being thin enough, or something about me wishing I could fit into a size 8 (I’m taller than she), but I kept my mouth shut.
When I told my husband this story, he pointed out that if I was going to be a feminist and say that people could be “as fat as they want to be” (not the best wording, but you get the point), then I had to be equally accepting of people who wanted to be thin. If this girl wanted to wear that size 6 dress, I had to support her, the same way I’d support someone who wanted to ignore Hollywood’s and society’s idea that we all have to be a size 2.
Even if you have a great body, you can still have body image issues, based on skin color, height, facial features, etc. Watch TV for half an hour and you’ll see a bazillion ads telling you what you need to fix about your face and body. And even if we didn’t have that, women are raised to be “humble;” we can’t talk about the good things about our bodies, because that would be boastful and conceited, so we have to find things about ourselves to find ugly (like that scene in Mean Girls when all the girls are saying the thing they hate about themselves, then they turn to Lindsey Lohan, who hasn’t said anything yet; she doesn’t have anything derogatory to say about her body and the girls hate her for it — she’s broken the rules).
Great post. Good food for thought (ugh — no pun intended, but too lazy to delete and reword).
Thanks so much for this. I have this argument with myself constantly – the one where part of me says, “you’re fat! you look terrible! No one will love you or find you desirable!” and the other part says, “You’re crazy! You’re a medium shirt and a size 27 jean – by all accounts, you’re skinny, so clam down.” It amazes me the degree to which I’ve internalized the dominant cultural trope about thinness, as much as I know about feminist theory and as much as I try to practice it in my life and my actions. I am by far my own worst critic – and often, the hardest person to be nice to is yourself. Thanks for your courage in writing this blog.
It doesn’t just show up with perceived size.
A lot of skinny women (and not just trans women either, cis women too) have things completely unrelated to what size they think they are that they hate about themselves. Facial shape, height (I know one really tall girl who hated her height, felt like it ruined her chances of making friends or finding a boyfriend), body hair (I seriously flip at my body hair on a regular basis even tho my levels are pretty dead average after estrogen), nose size, eye color, hair type, hand shape, teeth, voice, etc etc.
Body image problems come in all shapes and sizes (much like us womenfolk do XD) so anyone who pretends a skinny person doesn’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to body image is utterly full of shit. We just don’t know what its like to be big. We have thin privilege. But that does not mean our body image is good.
Ashley,
I wrote a post on my site in response:
http://www.steeleonentertainment.com/2009/11/body-image-response-to-small-strokes.html
I absolutely take your point about not dismissing anyone’s feelings about body image out of hand–no matter how fabulous they look or seem! At the same time, I think it’s not a bad thing to remember that body image is basically self-image and those wounds run deep for everyone.
However kind and inclusive we hope to be, I think it’ll only set us all up for failure if we try to pretend that all body image issues are equal, if only for the all-too-human fact that we feel our own pain most deeply. That said, I’m all for compassion mixed with a lot of patience and a little levity. And by that I mean, no, my sister in law does not know what it was like to worry about being too heavy on the see saw at age ten, but I like to think that one of the many wonderful reasons she was put in my life was to help me (work towards) overcoming my admittedly creepy anti-tall blonde and skinny bias. And when my size two new mommy friend says with not the slightest bit of irony, “You just don’t know what pregnancy DOES to a body,” I can smile and nod and offer sympathy. And thank her lucky stars that her daughter has a non-size two Aunt Jodi. I would love if she never felt a pang of jealousy or insecurity and never realized she got a different body type than her mommy, but just in case, I’ve got an ear and a shoulder ready. As does, I should definitely add, her mommy.
Wow. Thank you for all of the wonderful feedback on this post. I’m truly touched.
That said, I plan on introducing a new series here about body image. I hope you’ll all keep coming back to read and to comment, and I hope some of you might consider offering a guest post. Amy S. in particular, I’d love to use your post or some version of it on here.
Everything you say is true. Some of the saddest, most self-hating people I’ve ever known have been extremely thin — because they were anorexic. It’s impossible to know what’s happening inside someone else’s head or decide how bad that person is capable of feeling.
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