| On bullying, self-image, and the Beauty Myth |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|06:25 pm] |
I'm reading a book called, <i>The Beauty Myth</i> right now. I'm barely two chapters in, but I'm starting to get the basic gist: the desire for women to fulfill some kind of beauty ideal is a false, corporately-imposed desire meant to keep women subservient and inferior to men. In other words, the self-hate that many women feel when looking at an airbrushed billboard model is not because there is something wrong with all these women, but because women have been subtly told by advertisements over our lives that we SHOULD aspire to look like that model.
I don't know if I 100% but the corporate conspiracy theory. But, the underlying theme (it's not you, it's the stupid thin-obsessed society) still makes my head spin.
This is about to get really personal.
When I was little, I was fat. Not just a little bit chubby with baby fat. We're talking face of Childhood Obesity fat. I knew I was. I went on my first diet in 1st grade, although it probably lasted an afternoon. From that time until less than a year ago, I've always been on some form of diet. I punished myself emotionally for being so absurdly fat. I was convinced my lack of friends, my lack of boyfriend, my non-athleticism, my unpopularity were all due to my fat. Even throughout my teenage years, when I did have close friends and occasionally chanced upon a boyfriend, I would spend such a large percent of my time with them obsessing over whether I was too fat, too ugly, too stupid (and it's always the three together) to be seen with them. My confidence plunged, and my poor social standing likewise took a hit. It became a circle of blaming my lack of confidence on my fat, and my fat on my lack of confidence.
And if I ever got a glimmer of hope, a suggestion that I was a decent human being, my classmates would quickly put me back in my place. I was constantly bullied for my weight. The boys in my classes were particularly bad. They would call me "pig" and "cow." They refused to stand near me in lines or sit near me in class. They would throw kickballs at my face in gym class when the teacher wasn't looking (and sometimes when he was... the man was notoriously apathetic to bullying). They would taunt me when it was my turn at a sport. They threw paper at me on the schoolbus. Sometimes, as pre-teens, they would ask me out as a joke and then laugh with their friends when I said yes.
At the end of elementary school, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and an anxiety disorder. I became more withdrawn, more neurotic, and "weirder." My anxiety was (and still is) triggered by feelings of nausea. I nearly stopped eating, so afraid that I would throw up if I did eat. As a result, I because incredibly thin. Looking back at pictures from that time, I look like someone in the early stages of anorexia.
Nonetheless, the teasing continued. I was still convinced that I was grotesquely fat, even though I was about the same weight as my classmates. All the girls' bodies were flat from their chest down, and I had a big gut. Therefore, the self-hatred continued.
At this point, the girls took over the teasing. Their abuse was more subtle. They would pretend to be my friends, and ask me to do a dance move or share a factoid for them. I thought they were laughing with me, but they were laughing at me. My psychological state continued to waver. There were times I went home from school and slept straight through until the next morning. I stopped praying for my own safety and health at that point, just wanting to move on from the life I was living. I obsessed over all the things I did wrong: I ate too much, I never exercised, I was weird, I had no people skills, I was too ugly, my hair was too frizzy, I was too bitchy.
Eventually, the bullying stopped. No one person or thing served as a catalyst. People grew up and realized that they had better ways to spend their adolescence than teasing me. The scars ran deep, though. I was still obsessed with my appearance, caking on makeup, wearing contacts, dieting, asking friends again and again, "do I look okay? Am I fat? Am I ugly? Am I too fat for This Boy?"
The thing is... I wasn't fat.
Sure, I thought I was. But I recently asked my mother whether I wore "husky" sizes as a kid. She said no. In fact, according to her, I never ventured too far from the "average" size for my age. All those years of anguish were over a strawman, a Sarah that never really existed.
The question, of course, is why. Why would someone spend all the time and energy teasing a classmate over a non-issue? Surely the ten-year-old boy didn't care about my health as a response to my lack of athletic talent when he hit me in the head with a dodgeball, knocking my glasses off. And surely all the giggles and rumors from the girls weren't meant to be character-builders.
I go back to the Beauty Myth. According to the commercials and TV shows my classmates and I absorbed, there was a mold I was breaking. A younger girl isn't supposed to be round in the tummy, but flat. She shouldn't have the beginnings of breasts like I did, but a smooth chest. She should have a long, straight hairstyle, not a short curly one. Something was "wrong," and they called it out. This is the problem with our culture: instead of celebrating non-ethnic diversity, we condemn it. Advertisements show what we should aspire to; the "after" image, thanks to Product X. But when you or your classmate is never represented as that "after," or, even worse, is represented as the "before," the assumption is that that person is wrong and doesn't belong.
Now I'm not saying that my bullies' actions are correct or anything short of reprehensible. If there was a legal precedent to sue the everloving crap out of them and the teachers who ignored my cries for help, I absolutely would. The point is, until we can move away from this idea that skinny, blond, and clear-skinned = good; fat, brunette, and acne-ridden = bad, our society is doomed to have another generation of people like me. And some of them won't just give in like I did and wait for it to get better. |
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