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Sparkle (2)
“On the outside, I’m adamant about how much I love my body and confident I am in myself and would be mortified to admit otherwise to anyone I know but deep inside I just wish I could be thin and have a blemish-free symmetrical face … how do you have such great self-confidence in respect of the way you look when you’re so far from the beauty ideal?”
The above missive is from an email I received from Gemma, a reader who’s finding it hard to reconcile her feminist beliefs and her body image. I have to confess that I can only relate too well. I used to think that there were two groups of women who didn’t feel bad about their bodies: the beautiful and the feminist. Turns out I was wrong on both fronts.
Despite what I’ve written about how the beauty ideal harms people (especially young women), I find it a lot easier to not judge others by the way they look than to avoid judging myself. Since I don’t admit on my blog that I, too, get bothered by weight gain or that I feel guilty when I don’t exercise, it’s no wonder that other people get the impression I have “great self-confidence.” Don’t get me wrong -- I do think my body image is better than it’s ever been before in my life and I’ve never been less fixated on my appearance. Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t also have plenty of days when I wake up feeling … well, fat.
It took me a long time to realize that there’s no magic number that’s going to make you feel content with yourself as long as you have the mindset that you can reach “beauty” like some kind of goal. As long as your self-worth is in any way connected to your weight or the quality of your skin or the contents of your closet, you’re already setting yourself up for unhappiness. You should start by asking, “Why is this something that I deem valuable anyway?” For one, because we’re constantly told that beauty is valuable, that it’s fleeting, that it’ll make people love us, that it means we’re somehow better. And the ugly truth is that being beautiful does afford you a lot of privilege in our society. Even simply dressing the “right” way will mean that you’re assumed to be more legitimate than someone doesn’t. Which is terribly unfair, isn’t it? Absolutely! And it’s something we should be mad, not resigned, about. Why should we be feeling bad about ourselves for not being able to adhere to an inherently flawed standard?
At the same time, we have to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that appearance matters. That’s why it’s such a struggle to not care about how you look. Because even if you realize that you shouldn’t have to, not caring and not following the rules does put you at a disadvantage. This was the conundrum I was pondering a couple years ago.
At the time, I was incredibly tired of having people discuss whether I was hot enough to write a sex blog (SexAndTheIvy.com). It seemed like no one felt the need to read my writing, if I didn’t pass their initial “Would I Do Her?” test. (Of course, none of them asked themselves if I’d ever do them, but whatever.) Anonymous people on the Internet would call me “chubby” or “busted,” and even though I wasn’t invested in a stranger’s assessment of my looks, it was irritating that this was even an issue. It’s not like I knew any dude bloggers who ever had to deal with this much scrutiny. So, I’m embarrassed to confess, I came up with this Super Feminist Plot to lose enough weight that no one could comment on it anymore. And simultaneously, I could acknowledge -- in my head, at least -- that it was ridiculous that I had to do this. I could have my cake and eat it too! Well, metaphorically, that is.
Guess what? It didn’t work.
And I don’t know why I ever assumed it would. We even
