Oh Jessica Valenti, how you are my hero lately. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find her book, Full Frontal Feminism, not only extremely eye opening and charismatically fierce, but also very informative and filled with so many valid points I never even thought twice about these past 20 years of my life.
Two points Valenti made in the reading really put a bee in my bonnet, and quite frankly pissed me off. She states on pages 197-198 that her friend who suffered from bulimia for quite some time knew she was slowly killing herself, yet she still continued bingeing and purging. Her reasoning was she “would rather live a shorter life as a skinny girl than a full life being fat.” Wow. The sad part about this story is most of us women (and some men!) think and feel this way in one way or another. I know I am guilty of going all 4 years of high school with one thing on my mind- being skinny and pretty. Scholastics were, sadly, at the bottom of my priority list. I felt as though this is what I needed to do. Not learning to my fullest ability and living up to my full potential is perhaps one of my biggest, if not only regret in life. These images and subconscious feelings and norms of what women need to be can greatly distort women’s focus. Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth, our standards of feminine beauty have greatly devolved into, essentially, anorexia. Wolf continues to say “But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic but rather that something important is indeed at stake that had to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.”
This brings me to the second point Valenti made that perturbed me. Valenti shares a story of how she was invited to a luncheon with former president Bill Clinton. She wears a modest crew neck sweater and is accused by bloggers and in particular, law professor Ann Althouse, of basically shoving her tits in Clinton’s face. This struck a never because it reiterates the fact that as long as I have boobs, I will never be taken seriously. Or, rather, if I do not have boobs and dress unfeminine, I am a lesbian.
You know what? I can relate to how you felt in high school. All I wanted was to be skinny and pretty. I stopped eating for a while just to "fit in". My friends soon caught on and helped me work through it but the power of the media and the need to be thin really got to me.
ReplyDeleteYes, isn't it devistating to realize you are not up to par with white western 'norms'? I seriously want to punch all of the models in the face that starve themselves to "fit in." Not only are they huring themselves, they are contributing to this bogus image that 90% of women can never live up to.
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