The Emotions of Starvation

Reading the Hunger chapter in The Beauty Myth,  I was intrigued to find a few details that confused me. In my previous post, I stated that exercise was the correct way to be thin, not by dieting and not eating. However, Wolf states that "One fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility" (192). I am confused as to what she is saying here. Is it that exercise is bad? I find it hard to believe that exercise at a good level could be bad for a human being, knowing that we were once built to run for hours based on the persistence hunting hypothesis (before the time of weapons, we used to run after animals until they could not run anymore because they do not have a cooling system that is as sophisticated as ours).

Another point that I found interesting is Wolf's explanation of the emotions hunger brings out. When we hear the phrase "like a hungry animal" many of us think of a wild beast going crazy. I never put this idea into context until I read this chapter. Wolf states "Hunger makes women feel poor and think poor" (197). At first I did not understand why she specified women in this statement. After some thought, however, I came to the idea that perhaps she specified women because when women get hungry, the body not only becomes starved, but the women also feel the need to think about what they are eating, how much they are eating, and if they should eat. Because of this, I feel like although a woman may have all the food in the world in front of her, she may still feel poor because she cannot bring herself to touch it. Wolf also states that "Hunger makes successful women feel like failures" (197). I took this in the same context and thought that women who are starved are using all their power to think about what to eat and what not to eat, and so are too tired to think positively of themselves and so dive into negativity. This, I think, also applies to men in many cases, simply because hunger makes us all feel like we can't do anything because we physically don't have the fuel to do so.

The Disease

Having just read the Hunger chapter in The Beauty Myth, I felt a bit horrified. I originally thought that the "not eating to get thin" idea existed but not too wide spread. The statement that "Many are hospitalized, many die" scared me to a certain degree (179). How is it that people know that not eating is harmful in many situations and that both women and men (but mostly women I think) do this often if they feel pressured from the outside world. The idea that we need to be thin has been there for a long time, but the ways in which we get thin have been chosen for us by the media. Advertising of things such as cigarettes, diet tablets, and other sources of "thinness" point us towards the wrong way of being thin.

I also think that being thin and being fit have been confused. They are not one in the same thing. Being fit often results in being thin, but simply being thin does not at all mean that you are strong and fit. The goal should be to be strong and fit, not thin. Exercising and physical activity is what we were built for, not staying motionless. Therefore that should be our primary cause. Wolf wrote that Vogue stated that a woman who had become thin unnaturally "'look as though she has not had enough milk as a baby and her face has that expression one feels Londoners wore in the blitz'" (185). The second part of that phrase, I think, brings out how women feel when they put themselves through the torture of not eating. It is an awful expression to have on one's face. The face loses all color and expression, looks deflated and sickening, and scared. I personally have never understood why everyone connects fatness to eating directly without first going to lack of exercise. I suppose it connects to the fast food industry as well. As people have been realizing that fast food makes us unhealthy and obese, I think they have decided to not eat fast food without replacing it with other food. They have assumed that it is the "eating" part that makes us "fat" and not the fact that fast food is wildly unhealthy.

Something that scares me is thinking of the future. If we keep going down this road to thinness in the wrong way, a lot more people will have many problems. We need to emphasize exercising a lot more than we do today and decrease the emphasis on beauty and fat. The negativity that comes with the word "fat" is astonishing, and it should have never been there. 

A View From That Place in South Asia

Over break, I interviewed my grandmother for our class. Before the interview, I had gone through the questions and had given a guess as to what my grandmother would say for each one, based on the types of instructions given to me by my parents in situations. I was quite relieved to find out that my guesses and my grandmother's answers were quite similar. At the time I interviewed my grandmother, I had just begun to read The Beauty Myth. When I came to one part of the definition of the beauty myth: "Strong men battle for beautiful women and beautiful women are more reproductively successful" I asked my grandmother what it was like at that time when she was growing up in terms of beauty and the perception of it (12). She responded by saying, "We didn't think about that at home. We were more focused on what we were doing. That is how my mother taught me to be and that is how I am." However, she also said that, "Our parents didn't let us cut our hair. This was not for religious purposes but because of the idea that girls looked beautiful with long hair." So the idea of beauty did exist back then at the superficial level even if it was not as prevalent. My grandmother also went to an all girls school and had very strict rules determining when she had to wake up, go to sleep, finish playing, do homework and so on. However, she mentioned, these rules were not just for women, but for everyone. It was a very disciplined culture back then.

The idea of the "housewife" still did exist though in some ways. I am unsure as to how it was seen in those days, whether it was simply a division of labour or whether it had more weight on the gender side. My grandmother said that her mother (my great grandmother) used to cook lunch for the children and my grandma's father and send them off to school and work respectively. The way that I saw this in my head, the way that my grandma described it, however, seemed to make her mother more like an old sage, to which all other members of the family went to seek food, shelter, and advice.

School was very different for my grandmother. She went to an all girls school, and there was a very strict dress code. She mentioned that everyone was meant to dress neatly in the same uniform and the uniform had to be worn in the same manner by all students no matter what age they were. There were also no school dances (because it was an all girls school). It was very focused on studies (essentially the bare basic nature of a school).

I found it very interesting to learn that what I had imagined of my grandmother's life, knowing the world my parents grew up in by their stories, was so close. I suppose that my guesses were quite general though, hence their accuracy. It is, in essence, the life of someone who lives in a reasonably poor area of the world but can afford to go to school and eat daily.

Racism In Disguise

Racism has been a problem in our world since whoever it was first decided to state that color or race is equivalent to status. In the United States of America, racism went so far as slavery until the 1860's. Then it was used as a tool to keep White status above all others. Since that time, racism has become less blatantly obvious and more masked beneath other words or phrases. The aspect of racism that is to do with beauty and color has not at all been masked but promoted. Today, women who model are constantly changed to achieve the look designers are searching for. By the end of the process, the pictures no longer look like the models at all. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf states that "airbrushing age off women's faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened" (83). The fashion industry is changing the color of women, and by doing this they are stating that there was something wrong in the first place which is a show of racism. As mentioned in the film, Killing Us Softly 4, by Jean Kilbourne, we are constantly and consistently told through advertising that lighter skin is more desirable.

On a trip in India, I was taken aback when a friend of mine said she was working on getting her skin lighter. When I asked her why, she pointed at a picture of this woman in a magazine. I did not like hearing this. I felt like my friend had lost the sense of herself a bit because she was looking in a magazine and comparing herself to the "model" on nothing but a surface level. Perhaps this thought of mine was a bit harsh. I was reminded of this story when Wolf stated that "To airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history" (83). I thought my friend didn't know who she was any more, that she was anything but a face.

I know that the media are to blame for this imbalance in women. Wolf made the statement: "Editors must follow the formula that works. They can't risk providing what many readers claim they want: imagery that includes them, features that don't talk down to them, reliable consumer reporting. It is impossible, many editors assert, because the readers do not yet want those things enough" (83).  I feel this statement gives the idea that editors have no choice but to create this effect of using women as nothing but pictures on pages. I also felt that it was trying to show how magazine companies use excuses such as this to argue themselves out of having  to try and find better, less hurtful advertising methods. At the end of this statement, it even seems like editors are trying to turn the blame onto the readers. I feel that there is a lack of responsibility taken by the editors, given that this statement is true. 

Circling Beauty

The idea of beauty is ever changing. Just yesterday I saw a tree outside my window that I thought was the most disgusting tree I had ever seen. Today, it seems like any ordinary tree. Tomorrow, it might seem like a beautiful tree. If a person were ever to buy a tree in a shop, he or she would pick the one that looked best, or that appealed to them most. If everyone kept buying the "good looking" trees, and the other trees died out, would there eventually be only good looking trees? I think this is an interesting thought in that it would be interesting to see what would happen if all the trees were "beautiful." How could we perceive beauty without variation? I do not know whether we would be able to tell if a tree is beautiful or not if all the trees were beautiful. It is like when parents tell us that "everyone is special in some way" and many of us think to ourselves, "well that is just another way of saying that no body is!" Reading through The Beauty Myth, I found another phrase that made me think about this idea even more. This idea, that "Women must want to embody [beauty] and men must want to possess women who embody it" made me think (12). Lets take this scenario for example. If men were only attracted to beautiful women, and if the same was true for women towards men, then all their children would be "beautiful" and eventually everyone would be so since both men and women are consistently choosing partners who are "beautiful." In this scenario, everyone becomes like the trees I described earlier. If everyone is beautiful, how would we be able to say that somebody is beautiful? Also, I mentioned that the idea of beauty is always changing. Perhaps, in that world where everyone is beautiful, our senses will start to work in the opposite way, that is, to see "imperfection" rather than to ignore it. Maybe our perception of beauty will change, and what we see as beautiful today, will be ugly tomorrow. I find it somewhat difficult to see that happening anywhere but in theory, but then again, I am still fairly new to this world just as many others are. I have no doubt that my perception of beauty, whether to do with people, or nature in general, has changed since I was younger, and will continue to change as I grow and change. Beauty, in this way, is circling like life, like the earth around the sun, and the sun around bigger stars, and bigger stars around the super-massive black hole and the centre of our galaxy. 

The Mental Side?

I was reading through The Beauty Myth today and a phrase popped up that made me think about the idea of beauty in general. The phrase I found was, "The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exists." (12). I agree with this phrase in that the idea of beauty exists everywhere no matter what religion, what culture, what ethnicity we are. The idea of beauty is, as I see it, parallel to the idea of perfection. There are many areas in which these two ideas overlap. Universal perfection is unattainable because no one can be perfect in everyone's eyes. Some of us associate celestial and heavenly beings as "perfect" such that a human being, or mortal being could never achieve the same thing. Universal beauty, too, is unattainable because no one is beautiful in everyone's eyes. Only the "perfect" beings can be universally beautiful because they aren't bound by one human form but can morph into whatever form is considered beautiful by the individual who it may concern. We cannot change appearance and shape. But we can all be perfect or beautiful in someone's eyes. The interesting thing about beauty is that its perception changes with time. For example, when I see a person on the street, my first reaction towards them is fear. I think they look scary. However, if I see them more often, pass by them every day, I will eventually become accustomed to their appearance in my world and therefore start to see them in a different light other than scary. Another example of this phenomenon is in music. Far too often have I listened to a piece of music my sister showed me, disliked it, listened to it for a week playing off of her computer, and then started liking it all of a sudden. Our ears are the instruments we use to detect sound. Hearing is one of the five senses. Beauty is seen by our eyes which control our sight. Sight is one of the five senses. Our senses all develop over time and adapt to whatever world we are living in. At first, they may be reluctant to appreciate a new feeling, a new sight, a new sound or taste. But they will become accustomed to the new sense and eventually welcome it. Therefore, it is very possible that someone could seem ordinary one day, and seem like a god the next. So beauty is like a being that is growing alongside all of us, with us, in our minds. 

Will-power?

Throughout history, women have not been given very many freedoms. Because of this, they have not had much choice in life, or been able to choose what they want to do for themselves. Now in the present, however, women are more free than before. They can choose their path through life for themselves, and they can decide to stay or leave. Jasmine, in Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherji, states that "I changed because I wanted to." (185). Here she is finally expressing her own will. Before, she had been pretty much controlled either by her family in her youth, or by her husbands. A comment was made in class about how all her nick names were given to her by a man except the name Jasmine itself. I think that this name too is a statement of individual power for women. Because it is Jasmine's own choice, the name represents that power of choice for women. It is a change from the old world to the new. I think today, that women have much more choice than they did before. Perhaps they still do not have the same opportunities as men just yet, but I believe we are moving in that direction. I think as our world tries to make things more equal, more and more opportunities will open up for women, and therefore more choices, and so women will have more free will than ever before. However, as this happens, I also cannot help but see that men's choices are decreasing with the constant effort to promote the choice of women. This might be just to the slightest extent, but in some situations such as certain fields of jobs, people are pushing so much for numerical gender equity that it is sometimes easier for women to get these certain jobs than men in the same field simply because of this fact. These fields, I think, are fields such as engineering, and science related businesses. It would be very interesting to see if the opposite were true as well in jobs that were, at one time, considered more feminine such as jobs at fashion magazines or clothing design businesses. I wonder whether it is easier for men to get a job in such industries now days. In the end, we are moving in a positive direction when concerning the choices available for women today. I am curious to see at what stage we will be 30 or 40 years from now.