Body Image as a scapegoat for our worries

Charity Tooze

She sat frozen across from me, tears suspended on her cheeks, while I breathed in her words and saw through her pain. As she came to life her words, and obsessive thoughts, were those of women from around the world, mumbling under their breath the pain of an un-healthy bodyimage, pain with their man, with life. So much of this pain gets siffened through the image of ourselves. Relating negatively to our bodies has been, for many, the only expressive conduit for our feelings, disappointments, and desires. What do I mean? I mean that obsessing about our bodies is an overdeveloped language we use to process our life. Huh? So, my friend was really upset. She felt anxious about her future, her relationship, money and so on, and spontaneously she began falling back into this self-loathing body process. This is a contemporary (or is it ancient?) process women fall into when they're upset in life. It's like we don't have a language to articulate our frustration with our partners, or with the limitations of the oppressive hands of patriarchy, so we internalize the propelled objectification of our bodies, and spiral down into a self-loathing critique of our thighs, our breasts, our eyes--usually all the most commodified places.

We reach for the Ben and Jerry's, pull on old t-shirts, fall into the creases of the couch and cry our pain away. We eat our pain away, we look to food for emotional nourishment, and then we become guilty when we've eaten too much. We begin feeling heavy and "fat"--we are spontaneously failures. I write of this because I see it. I see it hauntingly learching for me in my life, and in the many lives of women around me. Do I make sense yet? What I am saying is self-obsession is a conduit we use to channel many emotions and needs that have nothing to do with our bodies. In the same way, sometimes relationships become the focal point for our vast palette of needs. Relationships will never fulfill our need to reach our potential academically, financially, or socially. The same is true with our bodies. To obsess about our bodies, when we're really feeling let down by a loved one, or lost and frustrated with career choices, is something we must stop. Our bodies have become lethal weapons used against us, to sell us things, to make us better, to make us different, to make us ideal and unreal. I think it is integral to remember that not only are we working with-in a system of patriarchy but we are working against an enormous multi-million dollar media machine; we need to deconstruct this obsession! To the media we are a wonderful crop, that has been grown, and our farmers reap the benefits of our insecurity and obsession everyday. Conscious forms of resisting body-obsession are radical forms of activism.

We need to learn to associate with our feelings, to build a new language for processing our emotions. We need to learn to validate the needs we have in relationships, and ask for what we want, rather than internalizing our pain and projecting it back at our selves with stabbing glares in the mirror, and drowning dreams in chocolate. Somehow we need to reclaim a healthy and balanced relationship with ourselves again. It's imperative we build a relationship with ourselves, where our external appearance is not our locus of control, but instead we have an internal locus of control, a center, and it is from this center that we can identify our needs, our dreams, our feelings. From there we can communicate, and take action in the world, rather than breaking down and beating ourselves up by stuffing all of our feelings into our body image.
Women become very stuck when all they think about is how they look. This is a brilliant way to undermine our essential power and incredible untapped genius. Don't you see? The more we subscribe to this the more we debilitate our ability to be functional and powerful assets to society, which is um…very threatening to patriarchy.

Come on sisters! Step back and invest in knowing yourself, be brave enough to own how you feel, invest in what you want and were you are going. Let go of thinking that if you just lost that five pounds, or if your eyes were just a little more...whatever…reclaim your body. Today is a day where we, especially in the U.S., have opportunities to be heard, and to make enormous waves in decision-making policy. We are 51% of the population. There is no time like now to begin to let go of some of these archaic structures that enslave us, and free ourselves to become who we are, for ourselves, as women of the future.