October
2010
Body Image – Her Story1
Here’s something that was sad to read. First of all, the image at the top of the page is a very little girl measuring her waist with measuring tape – what’s wrong with this? What’s not wrong with this?!
The rest of the post is 100% anecdote – the retelling of a personal tale about a journey dealing with their body image that continues today. It’s not an extreme example, but perhaps the fact that this is such an average experience for American girls is the most frightening part of the story.
The concept of body image disturbance was foreign to me at that time, but it was apparent that I was becoming familiar with modifying my body starting in the sixth grade. I vividly remember hating my voice for someone had once mentioned that it sounded like a guy’s. Perhaps it was because I had grown up with boys and my tone of voice was just poignant, but I took it to mean that my vocal range seemed lower than most girls. So while most boys’ voices cracked at that time, I took to raising the range of my voice so that it would be higher and more “feminine.” Well, it just became more nasal, if anything, and did little attract boys to me.
Nothing body image wise, aside from the aforementioned, surfaced until the eighth grade. I had spent seventh grade learning about eating disorders and self-mutilation because of my friends undergoing their own personal issues. With the hate that I had for myself, My annual physical was the added cherry; I had gained twenty pounds that year because I was undergoing puberty. I was told that I was needing to watch my weight and what I ate, which were accompanied by my parents’ comments of what I should eat and not eat. I played sports with the boys, but I wasn’t considered to be one of them anymore (even though the then best friend was), and I wasn’t considered girly enough to hang out with the other girls. In effect, I belonged no where.
There was one boy who liked me since we were eleven, but even he was falling for the other girls. It felt as though I was my right to be a girl was being taken away from me; in some way, you could say that I was being castrated. I felt as though that I was invisible. And I believed at that time that I had to make myself visible, which was only possible by changing my physical appearance. I began to skip my lunches, and there was a sense of empowerment in doing so. But that empowerment had to be concealed, and I went to great lengths to hide what I was doing. I sought to change my bus routes at times so that I could get rid of my lunch, and there were times when I would nibble on my lunch to provide the illusion that nothing was wrong.
To read the entire post:
http://www.barbaraleung.com/2010/06/connecting-dots-tracing-body-image-woes/
Where do you think her insecurities came from – and how influenced by our cultural standards and roles for women do you think she was?
I saw the trackback link on my blog, so I thought I’d check out your edublog.
It probably would be appropriate for me to answer your questions. Cultural standards were just that for me – standards. In comparing myself to others, the media served as the role model in a sense to guide me in determining what was right and wrong. It seems shallow to say so, but with media ever more present in our lives, it serves to function as portraying the “norm,” with the thinking that if it were not, it wouldn’t be socially acceptable to show it to the public.
Insecurities can be rooted from a lot of things, but it stems more so in personal interactions. A failure in achieving the sense of belonging leads one to judge themselves against the “media norm” and to pick apart what is similar and dissimilar.
Anyway, I thought that it might help you to read an essay that I’ve written on examining body image issues with Hispanic Americans (since there is also a conflict of cultural norms when looking at different ethnicities):
http://www.phreshly-squeezed.net/2010/04/essay-impact-western-culture-eating-disorders-poor-body-image-hispanic-americans/
I also took a look at your reading list; consider reading Sarah Grogan’s “Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women, and Children” (great and important text) and Susie Orbach’s “Bodies” (which deals mostly with body dissatisfaction in general). For online reading, I suggest Margarita Tartovsky’s blog at Psych Central: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/weightless
Also note that the DSM V is set to change its defining qualities on eating disorders (more specifically anorexia nervosa).