Helen has a light-bulb moment with body dysmorphia. Great stuff:

I feel best about myself if I am skipping meals, I buy clothes so large that I am drowning in them. The comments from my boss and additional comments made by a neighbor haunt me.

But fuck them.

I'm not perfect. I'm not gorgeous or a size 4. I'd like to lose some weight and I hope to make that happen. But I need to stop beating myself up that I am less than I should be simply because I am not 100% proud of my body.

This is a subject I understand intellectually, but not at all intuitively; body dysmorphia is something I just haven't got. Some of the reasons I think I escaped it have to do with my psychological makeup; I don't know if you've noticed, but I've got a thin steel wire of "fuck them" laced through my bones, and that's always been how I've reacted to other people putting expectations of any sort on me--often to my detriment ("They say booze is bad for you? Fuck them"), though in the case of body image I think that attitude is mostly a good thing.

Other factors were external. I first read about anorexia nervosa and bulimia in 1981, in this book. I was horrified and mystified; that anyone would choose what seemed to me to be a particularly slow and gruesome method of suicide was not something I could get my head around. Besides, I couldn't then (and cannot now) conceive of food being gross, disgusting, or repulsive. Food wasn't that at all. Food was Sunday dinner pot roasts and hot buttered rolls. Food was Ziplocked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bags of chips and pretzels, and coolers of sodas ferried by my grandparents to La Guardia or JFK to pick up my brother and I, so we'd have something to eat on the 2-hour drive back. Food was . . . food was awesome! Food was fabulous! How could anyone hate food? What did food ever do to them?

But this was 1981. There were no "pro-ana" sites on the web (what web?). There were no girls in my junior high classes frantically dieting off their baby fat. Actresses in the 1970s hadn't been suffering from the gymorexia they all sport now. Some of them were damn skinny, don't get me wrong. But it was a natural, I-just-happen-to-be-a-beanpole-genetically sort of skinny, for the most part; or it was the result of cocaine abuse, and viewed with disgust. So "disgust" was about my reaction to anorexia nervosa. Dieting away your menstrual period?--All together now: Ewwww.

The early 80s were also the heyday of Paulina Porizkova. I first read an interview with her in a People magazine. The interview was conducted in a restaurant; Paulina asked the waiter to bring her the most fattening thing on the menu. She then scarfed down a slice of cheesecake as she explained that modeling was a stupid, boring, but lucrative career, and that she did nothing--no yoga, no aerobics, certainly no dieting--to look the way she did. She was just a happy genetic accident. Or, she speculated, maybe she burned calories through all her "nervous energy."

Modeling needs more Porizkovas. I'd been an avid ooher-and-aaher over fashion models until that interview. I knew the names of the leading fashion models of each decade going back to the 1940s--but that interview was the end of it for me. Deep down, I knew Paulina was telling the truth: Models were freaks of nature. They did nothing to earn their fame except be born lucky, and grow up without suffering disfiguring accidents. It was like looking up to lottery winners, except even more stupid than that, because while I could buy a winning ticket tomorrow, theoretically, and be elevated to lottery-winner status, there was nothing I could do to make myself 5'11", 115 pounds, and unbelievably gorgeous.

I am writing this on the slim (ha!) chance that some young woman wondering whether the pressure to be thin is getting worse or better finds it, because as far as I'm concerned it is getting worse. Young women have it much worse than my generation did, and that is partly the fault of the women before them.

Yes, I said women. You know how much I love to blame the patriarchy for things, and I do blame the patriarchy here, I do. But I've also got to give us all thumps on the head for not pushing back more against the destructive cultural tide at work in body dysmorphia.

In the mid-80s, anorexia was seen, rightly, as a horror--now it's celebrated, and women are among the most fervent celebrants. Who reads web pages like this? Who makes up most of this woman's audience? Who buys magazines with this woman on the cover? That ain't men, ladies. That's US. We need to take some ownership here.

And I'll go out on a real bitchy limb here for a minute and say something that's been on my mind for some time now: I'm a little disappointed in the younger generation of feminists. You're like feminism-lite. You're . . . wimpy. You've brought so much extraneous crap into the mix--you're so worried about classism and ageism and racism and making sure every little i is dotted and every little t is crossed--and you are SO thoroughly wedded to one political party that you alienate women who might otherwise be sympathetic to feminism; thus the basic things, the very fundamental things like, "Maybe it's sick and wrong that our society encourages women to starve themselves," get buried, lost, deferred.

You have way too little "fuck them" in your bones. You worry too much about what antifeminists think of you. You worry too much about what you look like and whether you're popular. You worry too much about trying to educate. You're so busy trying to educate that you have no fight. You write articles about beauty products that are bullshit AND THEN YOU BUY THOSE VERY PRODUCTS. I am not blaming men for that. I am not blaming patriarchy for that. That was you reaching into your purse and paying perfectly good money for perfectly worthless crap. No one, no system, made you do that.

At the risk of being labeled anti-intellectual, let me propose something. Let me propose that body dysmorphia is not rocket science. Let me propose that there is one very simple solution, not to each individual case of body dysmorphia, no, but to society's tacit encouragement of the phenomenon as a whole--and that is to say without reservation or exception, "Fuck them," and mean it from the bottom of your hearts and your wallets.

There is no end of difficult, complex problems in the world--famine, pestilence, disease, war, crime, corruption, and oppression being just a few of them. But by cracky, teaching our daughters and sisters and friends how to flip the finger to skeletal celebrities and the people who encourage us to emulate them is not one of those problems.

All you've got to do is be willing to do it.

Posted by Ilyka at January 18, 2006 12:51 PM in hell is other people