Women’s National Health Week, an annual awareness event dedicated to all issues related to women’s health, was May 13-19 this year.
In honor of this year’s message, “It’s your time,” I want to draw attention to the link between how we see ourselves and how we treat our bodies.
Currently, 80 percent of women in the U.S. are dissatisfied with their appearance. And more than 10 million are suffering from eating disorders.
So the question I have to ask, Why all the self-hatred?
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Any one experience weight gain or metabolic changes after being on SSRIs?
I have taken fluoxetine – Prozac – for a long time – as in 20 years, in lowish doses – (usually 20 mg.). It has not led to weight gain; early on, it may actually have subdued my appetite a bit.
Couple of thought here. First, a shaky use of statistics. “In 1975 most models weighed 8 percent less than the average woman; today they weigh 23 percent less.” In a nation where the “buffet” has become a staple in every McMart community, the weight gain is far out pacing the weight reduction of models. Which brings me to point number two. Obviously it isn’t having a profound affect on the overall average of society. There are more people today with greater social exposure via the media. So in hard numbers there are more cases of anorexia. But, that certainly is not the common social problem for men or women.
Since this is a psychology/ sociology blog, a thought about the minds role should be entertained. The body is not a separate entity, in fact it is nothing more then the sensory extension of the mind. A woman’s body has two roles it must fulfill for the mind. It must attract a mate and it must maintain a body capable of bearing offspring. The difference between men and women is women have to pick the most “perfect” male option. They can only bear 1 child per year. Men can scatter their DNA among any who will receive it. In a culture where where the desire to have children is being conditioned as a separate response to attracting a mate and having sex, the two concepts are at odds in the mind.
At the end of the day, Freud still rules. Men are attracted to the mothers (when it comes to picking a mother for their child) and women are attracted to their fathers. That works well if those people are in their childrens lives. If you leave it to the media and that “Lord Of The Flies” environment that we call public school to shape your kids ideals on beauty, relationships, and social roles, then you get this random result. You want to correct women’s self image? It starts by teaching men to be a good dad. Dad’s, ignore, avoid, or be absent from your daughter’s life and she will be “boy crazy” in life looking for that attention you didn’t give her. Be in her life, give her attention, confidence, and an emotional rock, and the boys will be “crazy” for her. Men, it takes a lot of time and attention to raise a daughter. If you don’t have the time, do the world a favor and keep that thing in your pants.
@Sbueno, if you are on an SSRI, the least of your worries is weight gain. You are on a drug that doesn’t allow your PFC to send those chemicals that make you feel guilty about (among other things) stuffing food in your gullet. In fact a lot of times you won’t even recall you did it. It makes the whole “repression” process that much smoother. So go, get wasted and drive, have an affair, steal something, stuff yourself at a buffet everyday. Then just pop a pill and all those nasty guilty feelings will just go away.
There’s nothing funny about your comment at all, “lol”.
Truly disgusting and ignorant.
Anger,I see here. Equal to my own! Thank you…..
My undoing was going to spend a year in France when I was 18 & went back at various times for quite a few years after. I will be 70 in August.
At 18,I was tall,very pretty,quite slim, with a very attractive figure.I’d had boyfriends that loved how I looked.
When I went to France. I loved it there.The French boys were attracted to me & I felt good.Everything was new & exotic .
French girls of my age were not very tall,had small breasts & skinny legs.
I began to think I was big & unattractive.This was all in my mind…..
So I started starving myself to get the small, skinny French girl look.
How hard & hungry it was, how I punished my young body.
How stupid not to have enjoyed being shaped like myself, enjoyed the fantastic French food!
How stupid to have thought I was inferior to these girls with small breasts & hips.
I had as much ,if not more, sense of fashion & style than them,& was most certainly just as good-looking.
I just had more flesh on me & was taller……
All this would lead to anorexia & bulimia,& sadly,to alcoholism.(All now in remission)
Wonderful to vent here! But I hope these comments will be taken seriously by other women.
En passant, my lovely daughter who is tall & slim like her Dad (& myself now),used to come home from High School & weep,saying a teacher & fellow students would say she was anorexic.
And she would say,”Mum, am I too thin?That’s what people say.”
And I would say that I knew how she ate well & enjoyed all the good food that was offered ….and that she was exactly as Dad had been like at her age.
And that was true.
The absence of any consideration of the relevance of active spiritual values and living them is telling. It’s not that women do a good or bad job of living them out with fidelity and conviction. They are relevant, at least potentially, as a formative attitudinal factor and as an affirmation factor, and being absent as a factor in daily life to consider regarding attitudes and values render the piece flawed.
It is like looking at one side of a three dimensional object and believing that legitimizes opining about the object in its entirety.
What? Spiritual values aren’t relevant at all to the original post.
So true! Over the past year, I lost around 50 lbs. I am 5’4” and 125lbs, and I’ve never felt better. After a few comments from my friend about being “too thin”, a little fear crept in & I really started questioning if my weight loss was healthy. After some reflection, I thought about how ALL of us females are practically propagated to never be “ok” with our bodies, from a cultural to a personal level. And I decided then & there that I’m not participating anymore! I am just gonna be ok with my body, despite the messages received. And I remind myself of this each time I get a comment.
The most surprising thing about all this was how the comments from others of being “too thin” stung just as bad as the comments I made to myself when I was overweight. I didn’t expect for it to swing both ways.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know where I can find the Jamie Lee Curtis magazine photo spread mentioned?
Nevermind. I found it.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/08/27/ED242187.DTL
for anyone else who was curious
The only degree I have is an LPN certification, and I can easily answer this question.
Every day of our lives from the time we are very young, American females are bombarded with the message that if we don’t have the bodies of a Barbie doll or comic book superheroine, we are ugly and no-one will love us.
Even women with average weight bodies are decried as “fat,” and truly fat women loathe themselves, no matter their positive qualities.
Fat is seen as the most shameful, loathsome quality of all, rather than simply being a body type. People are given the message that it’s okay to hate and mock fat people. Women end up thinking that it would be better to have cancer than be fat. This is not okay.
Some people use the “for your health” excuse to browbeat larger people into dieting. There is really no evidence whatsoever that being thin equates to being healthy. This is a message perpetuated by the multi BILLION dollar diet industry, whose continued existense hinges on people failing at diets and blaming themselves.
If any weight reduction diet truly worked, there wouldn’t be so many of them.
Why do women hate our bodies? I think the answer is obvious.
Thank you for that. Everything you just touched on is absolutely true.
To reiterate really: Women hate their bodies because society keeps insisting that they should.
You’re never good enough. Some part of your body, face, complexion, age, whatever is ALWAYS in need of improvement if it is not outright wholly unacceptable. Those most basic of human drives is the inherent need to belong, to be accepted, as humans are a social animal and inextricably subject to the drives of social animals. In my experience, it has only been upon decidedly deprioritizing the “need” to be accepted by others that women (and men, everybody) reach peace and accept their bodies instead of resenting them.
It’s a weird mix, where the general population is getting heavier, and the images we see are getting thinner. I’m exposed to limited tv, live in an area where healthy life styles are highly valued, and I’d say accurately, I’m a bit overweight (~ 10 pounds). I’d never say I hate my body though, and I plan to increase my activity and address my winter bulge because I feel better when I’m in shape and am better able to do things I enjoy. For me it’s about what my body can do.
I think it’s also worth noting, that while there is a shift in quite a few places from valuing a very full figure,to a more US-tv based thin figure, this is often a shift from one unhealthy norm to another, where healthy is somewhere in between. Being obese, for example, in many cultures, including European cultures further back in time was associated with wealth. That doesn’t mean it was healthy.
To me the most important things are things like – can you walk home with your groceries without being out of breath, can you carry your toddler, can you run for a half hour, can you sprint for the bus, can you move furniture, hike or ski all day? (Or for me – can do I do 5 push ups in good form, can I hold a head stand,etc., can I run 10km without a break). These are the things that show me I’m healthy.
” can you walk home with your groceries without being out of breath, can you carry your toddler, can you run for a half hour, can you sprint for the bus, can you move furniture, hike or ski all day?”
Yes, I can do all of those except run full out for half an hour… but that has more to do with weak ligaments and poorly healed fractures in my foot and ankle due to a running accident when I was 14 that left me with a permanent limp and several other abnormalities in the skeletal structure of that ankle and foot as well as abnormally weak tendons/ligaments.
And I am clinically obese, coming in at right around 255lbs and just under 6′ tall. Which apparently makes people think they have every right to not only assume that I would be physically incapable of all those activities (and more) but that I am every negative personality trait you can think of, and a few more besides. People, people much like you from the sound of it, like to diagnose me with dozens of physical ailments… and if I bother denying the accusation I’m accused of lying or, at best, told “it’s only a matter of time”.
All because you can’t look at someone and see that they can move furniture, walk/hike all day, carry groceries or children etc. All you can see is my size, so rather than assume that I am perfectly able to live my life and do all the everyday tasks that anyone else can do, you’d rather assume that I am defective, broken, and every other negative stereotype you have about me based entirely on your media fed bias against people who look the way I look.
I cannot go anywhere, not even my couch without being slammed by woman being used to see everythign from cars to potato chips. Every movie trailer you see promoting a new movie, only show the woman in the movie by a clip of her undressing or already undressed. Thats it. That was her role. With people like Danica Patrick selling out with commercials aimed at men indicating she is a lesbian, is so disappointing. Why did she sell out? It angers me and also younger girls who thought it was so cool with her career, UNTIL they saw the route she took. With the woman we have feeding into the crap, woman will always be viewed as a toy. Men dont take woman serious, and by watching tv for 2 mins, its makes that clear.
point is, with all the images shoved in our faces, its not wonder there is a more than enough woman walking around feeling awful about themselves.
“Israel’s government recently passed a law that requires a healthy body mass index for models.”
I do not view measuring health by a BMI score as a “glimmer of hope.” Some models have very small frames and are healthy at an abnormally low BMI. On the other end of the scale, some superbly fit athletes have a high BMI that is due to muscle mass, not fat. The BMI index does not adequately take into account personal variation of body types.
The idea that any woman should have to meet a body “ideal” set by society is archaic and patriarchal. It keeps women focused on surface aspects of their lives/bodies. By doing this, women aren’t allowed to have the full range of life experiences that men have – fewer of us go to college; when we do go to college, our jobs don’t pay as much; we’re still expected to work, bear and raise children, keep house, AND be the trophy wife; even when we are intelligent and well-educated, our opinions and expertise are ignored in favor of the less intelligent or less-educated man’s opinions/expertise. Is it any wonder that women resort to diets in order attain that societal “ideal”? It’s the only way we’re considered worthy of taking up space, and only the amount of space that society allows us. The sad thing is that women can never meet that “ideal” because it’s continually changing – what’s “ideal” this year won’t be “ideal” next year – the goalposts are ever-moving in order to keep women focused on their looks instead of improving their lives.
Just submitted comment, but forgot to add that”Mireille Guiliano’s book”French Women Don’t Get Fat”brought all this France experience back to me.
I believe it’s the “special” males in our lives, who give us the silent but very obvious hint that we women aren’t “good enough,” by spending their WHOLE LIVES ogling pretty women, while at the same time living with us, creating a family with us, being seen in public with us, making love to us, and telling us that they love us!!!! But they still ogle all other pretty/buxom women.
Hence, as their partner, our belief is that we’re good enough for our special male in every other area, except for our body – which just happens to be our complete shell. It’s physically the WHOLE of us.
No wonder we want to hide our bodies!!!
Ha, very true comment.
It was pointed out to me by Hank Green that Dove, the company that pushes the “real women” campaign, is owned by the same parent company that owns like, Old Spice, which is notorious for spreading traditional destructive messages of masculinity, and the idea that men can use their products basically for sex. So. Just a thing I thought was worth pointing out.
It is imperative to demand a cultural shift in how much importance and value we place on women’s appearance and their bodies in our society. If anyone is being oppressed based on their body size, then to a certain extent we all are. People are either trying desperately to lose weight to fit in to the cultural ideal, or live in fear of gaining too much weight and no longer garner the approval from others. When we criticize our young daughters about their bodies and then their bodies change as they get older, and perhaps transform into “socially acceptable” bodies, they still carry the body shame and scars from the judgements that were placed upon them. Focusing on health, WEIGHT NEUTRAL health, and valuing people for who they are and not what they look like is a worthy cultural shift to aspire to. Thank you Dr. Coker Ross for this article.
Warmly
Dr. Deah Schwartz
So many wise comments here.
Have to agree with “lol” that the comparison early in the article fails where it says “In 1975 most models weighed 8 percent less than the average woman; today they weigh 23 percent less.” Obesity has been increasing from that time to now, so obviously, there will be a larger discrepancy today between the weight of models and average people than there was 35 or more years ago. I am 50, and when I look at teenaged girls today, so many of them are fatter and rounder than we were when I was young. We also spent more time outdoors than girls do now. Technology, for all the improvements it has brought, has also had a negative impact on the health of the average American. A certain kind of passivity has become the norm, and with it, expanding waist-lines.
Do people really try to be magazine girls, etc.? I have never found myself doing this and thought it was just an outworn trope. I’ve always compared myself more to my classmates and friends and women I see on the street — you know, real people whom everyone else I encounter on a daily basis is judging me in comparison to — and not felt like models/actresses were the same sort of people as me at all.
@”not funny”
“Disgusting” is a relative term and different from person to person. I wish I didn’t disgust you, but that is your right and desire to be so. Nothing I can do about that. “Ignorant” however is not a relative term. It means to “lack knowledge or awareness.” That is something that I am not. I would like to know just which statement in my comment you “feel” comes from a lack of knowledge. Maybe you know something that I don’t and I have yet to be enlightened. My statement is generated from many sources including some material you could read yourself. I would suggest starting with Freud’s “Ego and the Id”. If you want to go way back read Locke and “Essay concerning Human Understanding”. Also check out your favorite source on Skinner, Pavlov, and Stephenson. There are a lot of books on the first two. Then apply what these respected people believe to the concept of today and body image. For more contemporary explanations though I recommend “I hate you, don’t leave me.” and “The Female Brain”. Ignorant, no I can’t accept that. These are the things I have read to reduce my “ignorance” factor. I will say it is not productive at all to throw that word out simply because I said something that (even though accurate) you find it disagreeable. I gained my knowledge about SSRI’s through a more personal source.
Many of these comments stem from “feelings” about why they think they view themselves, or why society shapes the view. But all of these conscious feeling reject the notion that 80% of our behaviors stem from our subconscious. This is still profession wide held belief. I will make this prediction. My daughter is 5 yrs old. If you ask her “who is the most beautiful, smartest, and bravest girl in the world is?” she will tell you she is. She will still believe that at 16, 26, and 56. Because if that answer changes during one of my regular inquisitions, we will immediately seek to find out why. She will also have healthy and fit eating and exercise levels. Because she has me as an example, and I have never once lied to her, been overly critical, hypocritical, or lost her respect. There is the answer to this question, “why do women hate their bodies?” Because their fathers were either selfish or ignorant as to what it takes to raise a happy daughter. Too many parents loose the respect of their children at a young age, let the media and school peers dictate their self esteems, and set poor examples.
I think that it is ironic that while the article talks about how media is convincing girls that they need to be skinny while all the adds around the article say “how to be skinny in 3 easy step.”