Intrapersonal Violence: the effects of Women's Hatred of Their Bodies and thus, Selves
“The beauty industry may seem the most superficial of the cultural institutions participating in the backlash, but its impact on women was, in many respects, the most intimately destructive-to both female bodies and minds” (Faludi 203).
“The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically” (Wolf 19).
Women’s sense of self, and their relationship to themselves, is extremely intimate and private. When women commit violence on themselves it is usually caused by psychological problems. Women and girls internalize misogyny and standards of femininity that can be very harmful. When affected by a violence, psychological trauma can happen and depression can result. Depression can lead to suicidal thoughts and tendencies, and self-destructive behavior. For the remainder of this entry I’m going to refer to the phenomena surrounding the extreme value of women’s appearance, their relationship with themselves, and the problematic representations of them, as “body image.” It’s a complex issue and could use a better word because of all that it encompasses; however there isn’t one I have come across, except “this phenomena” which is just as abstract.
It breaks my heart when women question themselves because of their appearance. It’s such a depressing thought. I didn’t get the job, I was ignored, she said no, he broke up with me, they didn’t like me. Was it because I’m fat? And what’s even sadder is that it’s possible that the answer could be yes. And that shouldn’t be. “Negative attitudes are related to negative behavior, which can profoundly restrict the life chances of those who are overweight. In a review of the literature, Cash and Roy (1999) find substantial evidence that overweight people encounter frequent discrimination in education, the labor force, housing, and treatment by others” (Stinson 5).
I think one of the worst cases of the effects of body image that I’ve seen was a woman who had actually attempted suicide and had problems with being suicidal because she was so miserable because of how she was treated and felt about herself for being fat. How can anyone miss that there’s something fundamentally fucked up in society when women are suicidal because of fat?
This affects adolescent girls disproportionately, because of puberty. "Cross-culturally, from birth, girls have 10-15 percent more fat than boys. At puberty, male fat-to-muscle ration decreases as the femal ration increases" (Wolf 192). That fat is part of women's bodies makes fat hatred an aspect of misogyny. "Generally girls have strong bodies when they enter puberty. But these bodies soften and spread out in ways that our culture calls fat. Just at the point that their bodies are becoming rounder, girls are told that thin is beautiful, even imperative. Girls hate the required gym classes in which other girls talk about their fat thighs and stomachs. One girl told me of showering next to an eighty-five-pound danver who was on a radical diet. For the first time in her life she looked at her body and was displeased. One client talked about wishing she could cut off the roll of fat around her waist."" (Pipher 55)
Representation, invisibility, and messages, in our culture, from other people, industries and the media, help make up this phenomenon. Representation can cause vulnerability to harm, and is extremely important in this subject.
This problem has some of its roots in capitalism. Body image is overwhelmingly used to sell things to women. “The formula the industry has counted on for many years-aggravating women’s low self-esteem and high anxiety about a “feminine” appearance-has always served them well. American women, according to surveys by the Kinsey Institute, have more negative feelings about their bodies that women in any other culture studied” (Faludi 202).
TV not only sends messages that perpetuate the phenomena obliviously or subliminally-they do it straight & outright -and over and over again and condensed- in commercials- which are constantly repeated. LOSE WEIGHT NOW! LOSE INCHES! SO EASY! MELT FAT! GETTING THINNER IS THE POINT OF YOUR LIFE! YOUR VALUE IS BASED ON HOW THIN YOU ARE! HATE YOURSELF MORE! IT WILL MAKE YOU BUY! BUY BUY BUY! KEEP BUYING! DON’T STOP! YOU’RE STILL FAT! TAKE THIS PILL!
Research by Harvard Medical School found that teenage girls in Fiji had an increase of using vomiting to control their weight by FIVE TIMES after television was introduced to the island 1. There is no denying the fundamental impact that cultural and media images and standards has on young women. Very similar to this, in Bangladesh, sky rocketing rates of eating disorders manifested after 18 months of satellite TV from US went from miniscule to 80% of girls under 15. The state got rid of satellite and the eating disorders went away. (Lecture notes, Berger 2006)
Naomi Wolf explains that a danger of not adhering to the strict beauty standards is invisibility. “Few can bear being treated as if they are invisible” (Wolf 259).
Watch some of the following clip to understand more about representation and the effects it has on women and violence against them.
Much of the harm caused in this area is Epistemic.
In many of the books available on the problem of the strict standard of beauty and the implication of it to women, explain how popular discourse equates it with health. They all conclude with overwhelming evidence that health does not equal beauty or thinness, and most ascertain that "when poor health is correlated to fatness in women, it is due to chronic dietying and the emotional stress of self-hatred" (Wolf 187). It is just one more institution that perpetuates the oppression and hatred of women’s bodies. Body image has been perpetuated by many institutions, even religion. In at least one diet book that looked at it through a religious lens, fat was equated with sin. “It explained that “ ‘God really made us all thin, except for the glandular cases, and that if our bodies really are to be temples of the Holy Spirit, we had best get them down to the size God intended.’ Associations between godliness and control of appetite were hardly new: Gluttony had been regarded as one of the Seven Deadly Sins since Early Christianity. What was radically new was that the “sin” had shifted from appetite to body size itself. Fatness was a worse sin than gluttony. Indeed, the glutton who stayed thin did not seem gluttonous. The idea that God had intended everyone to be a certain size-thin-allowed weight-loss efforts to be viewed as a holy quest, a fulfillment of God’s design” (Pollack Seid 107).
The pressure to be thin has become intense. Pipher attributes this to three things:
moving away from communities of primary relationships in which people know each other to cities full of secondary relationships. In a community of primary relationships, appearance is only one of many dimensions that define people… In a city of strangers, appearance is the only dimension available for the rapid assessment of others. Thus it becomes incredibly important in defining value. Secondly, the omnipresent media consistently portrays desirable women as thin, thirdly, even as real women grow heavier, models and beautiful women are portrayed as thinner… Girls compare their own bodies to our cultural ideals and find them wanting. Dieting and dissatisfaction with bodies have become normal reactions to puberty. Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin…. Not only do girls dislike their bodies, they often loathe their fat. They have been culturally conditioned to hate their bodies, which are after all themselves… the social desirability research in psychology documents our prejudices against he unattractive, particularly the obese, who are the social lepers of our culture… By age five, children select pictures of thin people when asked to identify good-looking others… Studies report than on any given day in America, half our teenage girls are dieting and that one in five young women has an eating disorder… Eight million women have eating disorders in America (Pipher 183-185).
“This phenomena propels women to diet and to spend their lives in the futile quest for power through physical transformation. It causes women to focus on their bodies at the expense of their lives. And it makes women resist the incontrovertible evidence that dieting is futile and dangerous.” (Hirschmann x).
In 2005, a woman named Terri Schiavo received much public attention over the controversy over her situation. She had suffered from bulimia, which caused healthy problems that caused her to fall into a vegetative state for 14 years, in which she was kept alive with a feeding tube. Her husband fought to let her die, and her parents fought to keep her alive. “We see the role that patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and the heterosexual imaginary played in Teri Schiavo’s life and fate. We see a woman’s body to which both her husband and her parents claimed ownership. And we discover that her life was fatefully shaped by her desire to conform to the patriarchally inspired heterosexual imaginary of the beautiful-read “thin”-woman who marries and lives happily ever after. The pursuit of this goal left to her fatal eating disorder. She had understood that what she as a woman had to offer was a thin body-even if it killed her” (Ritzer 212).
The side effects of body image is harm to women in multiple areas, largely psychic, but also physical. Below are Mary Pipher’s explanation of the eating disorders bulimia and anorexia.
“Bulimia is the most common eating disorder in young women. It starts as a strategy to control weight, but soon it develops a life of its own. Life for bulimic young women becomes a relentless preoccupation with eating, purging and weight. Pleasure is replaced by despair, frenzy and guilt. Like all addictions, bulimia is a compulsive, self-destructive and progressive disorder. Bingeing and purging are the addictive behaviors; food is the narcotic.
Over time young women with bulimia are at risk for serious health problems: Often they have dental problems, esophageal tears, gastrointestinal problems and sometimes dangerous electrolytic imbalances that can trigger heart attacks…” (Pipher 169)
“Anorexia is a problem of Western civilization, a problem for the prosperous. It is, to quote Peter Rowen, a question of “being thirsty in the ran.” Anorexia is both the result of and a protest against the cultural rule that young women must be beautiful. In the beginning, a young woman strives to be thin and beautiful, but after a time, anorexia takes on a life of its own. By her behavior an anorexic girl tells the world: “Look, see how thin I am, even thinner than you wanted me to be. You can’t make me eat more. I am in control of my fate, even if my fate is starving.” Once entrenched, anorexia is among the most difficult disorders to treat. Of all the psychiatric illnesses, it has the highest fatality rate. .. The word “anorexia” implies an absence of hunger, but in fact anorexic girls are constantly hungry. They are as obsessed with food as any starving people. They have many of the physical symptoms of starvation-their bellies are distended, their hair dull and brittle, their periods stop and they are weak and vulnerable to infections. They also have the psychological characteristics of the starving. They are depressed, irritable, pessimistic, apathetic and preoccupied with food.” (Pipher 174)
Naomi Wolf writes about the extreme dangers of the implications of Surgical Age to women in this environment of extreme valuing of appearance. “A woman in a shelter for battered women once described her legs to me as “all one bruise, like they were covered with purplish tights.” … a woman who had had liposuction used a similar image. What needs to be explored are not the mutilations, but the atmosphere we now inhabit that makes them make no difference” (Wolf 251-252).
“Following the orders of the 80’s beauty doctors made many women literally ill. Antiwrinkle treatments exposed them to carcinogens. Acid face peels burned their skin. Silicone injections left painful deformities. “Cosmetic” liposuction caused severe complications, infections, and even death. Internalized, the decade’s beauty dictates played a role in exacerbating and epidemic of eating disorders. And the beauty industry helped to deepen the psychic isolation that so many women felt in the ‘80s, by reinforcing the representation of women’s problems as purely personal ills, unrelated to social pressures and curable only to the degree that the individual woman succeeded in fitting the universal standard-by physically changing herself” (Faludi 203).
“As long as young women are spending time worrying about externally defined standards of beauty, their mental energy, and time, are being taken away from creating political change, and electoral action, to break the external, mainly unattainable, standards that confine” (Rowe-Finkbeiner 71).
“ ‘Beauty’s’ pain is trivial since it is assumed that women freely choose it. That conviction is what keeps people from seeing that what the Surgical Age is doing to women is human rights abuse. The hunger, the nausea, and surgical invasions of the beauty backlash are political weapons. Through them, a widespread political torture is taking place among us. When a class of people is denied food, or forced to vomit regularly, or repeatedly cut open and stitched together to no medical purpose, we call it toruture. Are women less hungry, less bloody, if we act as our own torturers? (Wolf 257)
1. “Sharp Rise in Eating Disorders in Fiji Follows Arrival of TV,” Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs News Release, May 17, 1999; http://www.hms.harvard.edu/news/releases/599bodyimage.html