Susan Bordo
Unbearable Weight, 2
. . . the anorectic embodies, in an extreme and painfully deliberating way, a psychological struggle characteristic of the contemporary situation of women. That situation is one in which a constellation of social, economic, and psychological factors have combined to produce a generation of women who feel deeply flawed, ashamed of their needs, and not entitled to exist unless they transform themselves into worthy new selves (read: without need, without want, without body.)
Going out in Rome last night, my mind awhirl with smoke and drink, with Susan Bordo and her more poignant points as my eyes ran over female bodies trying to replace what I put to blame. I tried to seek dignity behind the make-up and dress; I looked for the woman displaced, just like me. I sought the thin line between an acceptance of construct, the acceptance of the self within the throbbing, looking mass and the unacceptable, the shame. How the girls in the bathroom pressed their lip-lined, eye-lined, masked faces so near to the mirror they left breath-streaks, they flipped their hair and batted their eyes; Who are you looking for in there?
Are they trying to match line-to-line, their figure and their faces, their paint and and their adornments to the photo held in their mind’s eye of “perfection”? Can they see under their cover? Do they know that they are part of a game? A game whose rules only seem to be growing harsher.
I see women in their perfection of picking and pruning, trimming and adjusting as scrambling en masse up a very slippery cavernous wall. At night when their faces are all washed off and their bodies stripped, some may gasp at the futility of who they have presented, some may feel victorious for catching a comment or a glance, rare are those who fall to sleep dreaming. Last night I saw a very large all-seeing eyeball sweep over the crowd and look up-down every woman to check if they were far enough inside the limits of “appropriate.” I saw that that eyeball was themselves and friends and unknowns and was born out of this culture so bent on the visual.
Culture not only has taught women to be insecure bodies, constantly monitoring themselves for signs of imperfection, constantly engaged in physical “improvement”; it also is constantly teaching women (and, not let us forget, men as well) how to see bodies.
I do not want to get hopeless about this, but every time I look deeper, our bodies bearing the weight of laws agreed on by no one, I only see us falling further. If anorexia is one extreme then the other is a self cheapened by adopting the all-seeing eye’s visual values as one’s own. My own experience with anorexia was a denial, a refusal; it was the desire for “masculine” ideals, like “will, autonomy and rigor” against what I saw as woman’s softness, weakness. I wanted to be judged on the “man’s” side of the all-seeing eye; I wanted to be judged without regard for the feminine: appearance and body. I did not want a body because the body was always presenting the wrong message.
The “message” of the visual-entrenched woman is suspect to the willy-nilly fashion of society’s morphing norms. But it is always sexual. The “message” sent by every woman’s body is placed on a continuum of one translation. Until what we see changes, this will always be our dilemma. An arrow will one day quiver, a straight shot into that all-seeing eyeball; we will then be given our true eyes; we will then see. Until then we must seek consciousness; the more naked our interpretations about how and what it is that our eyes really see, the less the blind-grip holds.
The equation of slenderness and success in this culture continually undermines the preservation of alternative ideals of beauty.
Beauty spread beyond bounds; What is physical beauty anyway? We have accepted the assumption that physical beauty exists. Challenge what you see; challenge how you see it.
Bracciano Italy
September 2008
The blog, Shapely Prose has excellent commentary. Also, 007 Breasts: for men or for breastfeeding! Check out the normal breast pictures.
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