Just came across this piece in The New Internationalist and had to share it with you. It’s an outstanding unpacking of the normalisation of rigid norms of female beauty, which have been exported around the world. Written by Giedre Steikunaite, it’s a report on the Endangered Species Summit held recently in London to challenge the toxic culture that teaches women and girls to hate their own bodies. Wish I’d been there.
The Beauty Myth…and madness‘The human body is now a product,’ said photographer Wendy Hicks. So we buy and sell ourselves, constantly remake our bodies, blindly believing we are ‘improving’ them. This commercial exploitation of the body has become a norm; once normalized in a society, it’s taken for granted…
So why are we doing it? Because we’ve been sold a myth, a beauty myth. And because it makes somebody very, very rich. ‘People without problems are not commercially viable,’ said Rosi Prescott, CEO of YMCA. A happy person is a bad consumer. Thus, a business lesson: create a problem, convince me I have it, and then sell me the solution – voilà! …
The problem is not limited to the Global North. ‘Body hatred is becoming one of the West’s hidden exports,’ Orbach wrote in her book Bodies. It’s a new form of corporal colonization. ‘We’re sending body hatred all around the world’…
‘We are living in Marshall McLuhan’s global village, sharing many of the same images worldwide. They become identity markers, framing our streets, our magazines, our look, providing a sense of continuity in a befuddling and fast-changing environment’…
‘When interviewing young girls I found that they felt there was just no alternative, only the mainstream image,’ said Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It’s an issue of diversity: you’re in trouble if you can’t see your own reflection out there; it affects you negatively. We have to mainstream the ‘alternative’ (ie the real image).
Read the full article here
And here’s the opening speech to the summit by psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic Susie Orbach. It’s short, but so powerful.
3 Responses
I do not know any woman who loves and accepts their bodies, let alone enjoys them. I love this cause. I want to know more 🙂
I like to tell myself that because I haven’t gone so far as cosmetic surgery, and because I can recognise, and I despise, fake images of air-brushed models in magazines, and because I have worked with organisations trying to fight body hatred in girls, and because I seek out articles like this in order to educate myself… because of all these things, I try to convince myself that I am unaffected by body hatred and self-image issues. That I am enlightened. And so I am, in a way…. yet still, I find that how I feel about my body on any particular morning can radically influence my mood for the day. Feeling fat or unattractive can lead to an unhealthy spiral of self-hatred that lasts for days.
I am educated and aware of these issues… and yet I have been ‘watching my weight’ and trying to change my body for about 25 years now.
I know that the myth really IS a myth… and yet I struggle to find something about my body that I really love.
I am tired of the self-sabotage, by me and most women I know. It IS time for us to stop seeing our bodies as “complicated places of fear”. It is time for us to fight for change so that in 20 years from now the girls and young women we know today won’t have to look back on two decades of dieting, self-loathing and regret.
Australia also participated in the Endangered Species Global Summits at an event in Melbourne last week. It was small in comparison to the ones in London and the one in New York happening this weekend but it was still a wonderful day.
I hope it’s something that can grow in years to come.
For those interested Endangered Species Australia as a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=lf#!/pages/Endangered-Species-Australia-Preserving-the-Female-Body/180442568649467