Last night a female classmate knocked at my door and told me she was moving away for other educational opportunities in Canada. I told her to take care; the Chinese pronunciation of “take care” sounds much like “adding on more pounds”, so she chuckled, “I am not going to do that. I am trying to lose weight!”. Even during this short melancholic farewell, she didn’t forget to mention one of the top issues for women–weight.
It appears hypocritical for a thin girl to say, “I don’t care about weight”; she might be despised since she was already thin enough. It is even troublesome for bigger-sized girls to say so, as it appears she is just making justification for her “bad shape” and excuses for not working out and keeping a figure. Either way, girls just so habitually take issues with comments concerning body.
Two friends of mine, one is a bit overweight, another one at most chubby, hate themselves everyday in front of the mirror. They wish they become smaller, lighter on the scale, and have long, thin and charming legs. In a word, they wish to be those they see on the fashion magazine. I tried to persuade them to give up the idea by saying the glamorous images of stars on the magazine is artificial; it is deliberately designed in a sexy even erotic manner and stars don’t look like that in their daily life. They know all these. But they choose not to side with this opinion. They think I am thin and looking good enough to make comments like that. But this is simply not the solution for them.
Weight issue has become the main topics among girls whenever they go–when they go shopping, go to school canteen to dine, do sports, work out in the gym, afternoon hangout in the coffeehouse, you name it. It becomes tedious whenever I meet a female friend she will bring up this topic–a topic appears more important than career and relationships. I tried to downplay the importance of body and weight to make them feel better, only to find out later that they hate me talk that way and they have been ready to rebut even before I started. So I instead try to engage in this conversation. I provide the counter opinion that people ought to have more diversified and more tolerant attitudes towards different body size. They will nod, and then make another comment starting with the word “BUT”, indicating a helpless resignation towards the “reality” in their eyes. And normally the conversation will end up with a sigh, followed by continued attempts to lose weight.
What troubling me most is not that girls are trying to lose weight, rather, they are doing it not because they think it is good for them, but it fits the social perception of being beautiful and sexy. You may question, why their motive matters? And aren’t we all struggling to satisfy the expectation of the society all the time as we strive to be admitted into top-tier institutions, to be recognized at work, to earn as much money as we could and to gain higher social status so as to be perceived as successful in life?
The motive matters because otherwise we are enslaving ourselves and no one could ever be able to set us free.
Girls have to be made to aware that this is a problem to begin with. Sadly, they fail to realize sometimes they must take a step back to see the bigger picture. They have to ask themselves why they are doing this? Why they have to starve themselves for a thinner body when they biologically have a bigger stomach to feed? The problem is they do not feel uncomfortable with the mainstream ideas of body images, instead, they feel this is the RULE to follow–whether they agree with it or not is entirely irrelevant. They take the “rule” as given. The whole idea of “die or be thin” is an institution imposed on all young girls who desire certain kinds of recognition from their male counterparts and the whole society. This institution is exploiting their health and corrupting their minds softly with them knowing. Its propaganda branch has been doing a great job making the girls believe this is in fact their own idea and their struggling in conformity with the rule is self-initiated. The mechanism works to infiltrate those notions into girls’ minds and soul almost like hypnotization. This institution just becomes self-perpetuating and the enslavement eternal. When they believe this is their own choice and even advocate for such choices, they are trapped, and throw the keys to unlock the vault imprisoning them.
The idea that the enslavement is a choice is detrimental. It is troubling in another sense that it distorts the advocacy for choices, and has a potential of confusing the contemporary feminist movement. It is a paradox to advocate for choices that is not genuine. But at the same time it begs the question under what situations can a choice be genuine. We are susceptible to opinions of mass media, pundits, research results and people around us. To what extent can the opinions or choices be purely self-initiated? But it is entirely a different thing to advocate something that generates harms so tangible for the welfare of certain group of people. But the advocates may argue even if they concede on the harms to health, this is entirely a lifestyle choice subject to individual preferences in the same way people choose to smoke and drink. I cannot agree. The latter scenario can be perceived as lifestyle choice only because its negative effects to health is so well known that it is almost impossible that people will not be put on notice. On contrast, many girls are ill-informed about how severe rigid diet plans can influence not only their body and health, but also their state of mind and psyche. They probably don’t know when they strictly control their calorie take-in they will become depressed and grumpy, they probably will not be able to manage good social relationships, their focus will be shifted from career developing to food most of the time, the struggling of “to-eat-or-not-to-eat” is distracting and torturing. What’s worse, it is very easy for them to develop an eating disorder which may accompany a girl for the entire lifetime. Girls may not even know about the above when they enthusiastically and ambitiously start their journey to the “thin land”.
The feminism and feminist movement itself is complicated enough. It is largely diversified, incoherent and full of conflicting notions. If we say girls who struggle for better body shapes are trying to make themselves look good in front of man or satisfied the worldly perception of beauty, we are being intolerant towards the choices those group of girls made, when the very basis of feminism is to embrace all, even conflicting, ideas regarding women issues, so as to establish an environment of equality and freedom desirable for the development of sisterhood among all girls in furtherance of feminism and feminist movement. Feminists who are not fans of body image perfecting cannot castigate such advocates, since they are one part of the entities that we want to bring into the scope of our advocacy, and they are the very group whose interests we want to better protect. We do not want to alienate them by contradicting the basis of feminism. Alienation and too much rivalry inside the women groups has been proved counterproductive. But how far can tolerance take us along the way of feminist movement?
Another troubling idea is that being thin is the panacea for every misfortune in life. Girls too often blames their failure and under-achievement in relationships, job interviews, etc. to not being thin enough. A popular pep talk usually is similar to, “If I were thin, I would have definitely…” or “I will be more beautiful/ confident when I become thinner”, or “they don’t like me because I am fat. So I must be thin”, etc. Striving to be thin is the easiest way out: one doesn’t have to evaluate her performance ex poste, or do some serious reflections to learn lessons. She thinks being thin can resolve every problems she is facing now. In fact, she will mostly be disillusioned had she achieved the level of thinness she desires (and yet being thinner has no actual ending point).
The idea of a thinner body image entrenched itself in female minds to the extent that it makes them confuse enslavement with freedom. It is sarcastic that the enslaved girls become advocates for female freedom. Appearing thin and putting oneself in skinny clothes is far from self-emancipation. To become an advocate, please set yourselves free before everything.