Quick Hit: Women and Body Image… From A Man’s Perspective
This article might be the best article about women’s experiences of body image issues that I have ever read. And, best of all, a man wrote it! *gasp!*
I have had a few body image breakdowns lately, mostly wedding related (my hair isn’t long enough, I want long hair for the wedding but I hate how it looks now, my fingernails don’t look right, my eyebrows don’t look right, I shouldn’t be eating this, I should get to the gym more… You get the idea). Unfortunately, Tim gets the brunt of this, and he has trouble understanding how to help. (“But you’re beautiful! What’s the problem?”) The problem is, he and I are fighting against an entire lifetime and then some of media images and directives about how women should look and behave – not only on your wedding day, but all of the time! I’ve been part of this community long enough to know that this is what is happening, but that doesn’t stop the media from affecting me in the same way it affects everyone else, and it’s definitely tough sometimes not to fall prey to the internal monologue of criticism.
Anyway, this article is great. I shared it wih Tim and it was like a lightbulb went off for both of us. So go check it out!
Wow, if that pile of gender essentialism is really the best a man can do on the topic of women and body image, then we have a lot more work to do than I even realized. I don’t mean to troll, I normally love your posts, but I’m just gonna have to disagree on this one. I mean, there are PLENTY of men who relate to their bodies in a way that is anything but simple, and PLENTY of women who are perfectly content with their imperfect bodies–that is, women who have the intelligence, confidence, and plain old rational sense to ignore our culture’s messages on beauty, and men who lack it.
What almost bugs me most about the article is the fact that there are a few parts where the author peripherally alludes to some really great points…but instead of really going there, every time he backs away and starts spouting bullshit evolutionary biology crap. So the author clearly isn’t just 100% clueless about women and culture and beauty…he HAS some good ideas. He just lacks the courage to really follow through, preferring to resort back to popular gender essentialism (men like things they can fix! Like machines! Women are hysterical messes!) instead.
I wish I knew how to edit my previous comment…as I was scrolling down my Google Reader, I saw the post you did earlier this month about getting frustrated with criticism and the impracticality of trying to apply a lot of feminist theory to real life…I just hope my comment didn’t come off as too mean. So…sorry, if that’s the case.
But there’s one particular thing in the article that I forgot to mention before, and if practicality in a modern classroom is your concern, then this should be a biggie…in the article, he suggests that anorexia is caused by the pressure to be thin. And while the rest of the stuff in the article is merely annoying, perpetuating that particular unscientific belief is dangerous. Sure, he can talk about women dieting that way, but trying to put anorexia into that category just perpetuates a lot of really dangerous myths.