Objectifying women

Anna Oudra writes at Salon about being a skinny woman.

I wasn’t bulimic, or anorexic, and I’m not now either. Being thin is not a choice I’ve made. I’m skinny because I have Marfan’s Syndrome. It’s a genetic condition that makes my body thin and lanky. Marfan’s affects the connective tissue, and brings with it a litany of health issues. It’s caused my lungs to collapse five times to date, most recently requiring a lung lobectomy (if you don’t know what that is, don’t ask). My joints don’t always fit together well. I have dislocated lenses in my eyes. My heart valve leaks and may have to be replaced. I’m at risk of having my aorta spontaneously dissect.

It’s been interesting to live with a body that can fail on a whim. Most of the time though, it’s all very manageable. My Marfan’s is relatively mild. To protect myself I don’t play contact sports, scuba dive, or lift heavy things. I wear protective eye gear when needed, and I get an ultrasound of my heart every year. I am grateful for the perspective my lung issues have gifted me; I learned not to take health for granted.

...The far less manageable, in some ways more painful, part of Marfan’s has been the public body critique. Constant scrutiny and feedback led to a tumultuous relationship with my own appearance. It bolstered a shame and isolation that spilled into all areas of my life.

To cope, I learned to mitigate judgment in ways I now know to be standard amongst the unintentionally thin. I stopped going to the bathroom during meals with colleagues and strangers. I avoided ordering salads. I wore loose clothes to events frequented by faux-feminists, who would label me instantly as the enemy. I layered-up, wearing thick tights under my jeans when it was far too warm to do so. I developed standard responses to questions and quips about my weight, and became self-deprecating to make sure people knew I didn’t feel better-than because of my size.

...Like everyone, I wanted to be accepted. Moreover, I wanted to just be. But the effect of being picked apart is insidious and eventually I came to feel deeply flawed. I began covering mirrors, avoiding reflections, and obsessing about looking normal. I went through phases of having panic attacks and avoiding going out. When I tried to talk about what I was going through, girls tended to think I was being vain. After all, what did I have to complain about when others had it so much worse?

When the body-positive movement started kicking up a few years ago, it looked promising for everyone. Unfortunately, this movement has, for a time at least, made things harder for women like me: women who resemble the body type fetishized by fashion and popular media but, more and more (and rightly so) skewered by public opinion. Margaret Cho started saying in her stage show that she likes “real women” and that “real women have curves” – a mantra that is still repeated years later. Lady Gaga, in the midst of her body image campaign, approached thin prepubescent girls and criticized their weight. Shows like Drop Dead Diva showed confident, curvy protagonists making cutting jokes about the dumb, skinny characters.

This cultural breakthrough has led to an increase in real-life critique. People feel more entitled than ever to tell skinny women what they think. To be clear, I’m not talking about confrontations of the I’m genuinely and sincerely concerned for your health kind. These are always understandable, if not appreciated. But when comments are not directed at me as a person, but at what I represent to someone else, I’m left wondering if the movement has really achieved its goal of promoting widespread acceptance of varied body types.

Maybe this is a temporary cost of a needed evolution, an overcompensation for generations of fat-shaming. More likely though, we are trapping ourselves in an endless pursuit. The media’s ideal female body stretches well beyond weight, after all, and is far from static. The nose we’re told to love today will be different ten years from now. The hips of today, whether rounded or narrow, will somehow fall short of the ideal future generations will set. What we will never love is having our worth boiled down to how we look.

When we, as individuals or as society, objectify “skinny bitches,” we sustain the same system we claim to oppose. We’re still reducing women to their shapes, judging women’s bodies in unhelpful, reductive, and oppressive ways. We’re still trying to empower ourselves by putting other women down, still dictating if women are sexy, strong, or “real” based on the size of their curves.

Read more here.