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My mother was an on-again off-again member of Weight Watchers. Throughout my childhood she was a constant dieter: she did aerobics every morning (from the t.v.) and several nights each week (t.v. or at a centre), took diet pills, laxatives, measured her food, recorded every bite – or skipped meals completely. I don’t remember her ever sitting down with the kids at mealtime (my dad worked afternoon shift). I do not remember her being overweight (how could she be with all of this obsessive behaviour?) but she must have been unhappy with her body or else why would she have tortured herself this way?

I picked up her habits early and by the time I was twelve I also hated my body. I would choose an arbitrary number on the scale and decide that this would be my ideal weight of the week. I would skip meals until I had reached my ‘goal’. I remember making the concious realization that there was so little in my ife that I could control that reaching this “goal”, this arbitrary number on the display, would mean I was good at something. It never occurred to me and no one pointed out that I was a growing child or that what I was doing and what my mother was teaching me was unhealthy.

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All of these women are beautiful. But it’s not because of how they look, it’s because they have substance. Beauty has come to mean different things to different people. What once referred to aesthetics or physical appearance can now refer to content.

The Beauty Log

I don’t spend much time on my appearance. Take a look. Here’s what I did over the past week. I didn’t count things like applying sunscreen or bug repellant because I’d say those things are more for health than beauty. There’s a fuzzy line between those two things. Here’s the list:

• Monday

15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Tuesday

1 min: Hair brushing
45 In-class nail picking (gross, I know)
15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Wednesday

5 Hair brush
15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Thursday

15 mins: Morning shower and shave
2mins: Blow dry

• Friday

15 mins: Morning shower and shave
5mins: Blowdry

• Saturday

10mins: Shower

• Sunday

15mins: Shower and shave

Total time spent: 158 minutes (2 hours 38 minutes).

It’s actually more time than I thought. I cannot imagine if I had some elaborate routine of plucking, preening, and painting. How do people find the time for it?

For me, at this time and place in my life, spending time on my appearance means basic hygiene ( showering). I quit shaving my legs when I was fifteen years old because I refused to conform to society’s beauty standards. I was already a misfit and this just added to my character. Eventually I learned to ignore the heckling. For fifteen years I let my body grow whatever hair it wanted, wherever it wanted.

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These women and many others were posing for photos with geeks galore at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles. The “booth babes” (as they are called) are as much of a draw for the Electronic Entertainment Expo as the new releases.

August 2005’s Cosmopolitan features an ad for Tampax Fresh: “the only cardboard tampon that doesn’t smell like a cardboard tampon.” The image used in this advertisement perpetuates dualistic paradigms and characteristics about women’s bodies.

Beguile your senses.
Succumb to the freshness.

The colour white is associated with purity. This advertisement uses the colour white to symbolize that this menstruating woman is clean. Even though blood is leaving her body this woman has no odour — in fact her menses is fresh-scented. Women’s bodies are associated with nature/the wild and in need of taming/conquering. This leads to viewing their natural body functions as needing to be managed.

The use of water in this image furthers the idea of purity because water is used (symbolically and literally) to cleanse and purify. With water this woman cleanses herself of blood so that she can maintain her purity.

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Isn’t she the cutest thing?

I cannot remember much from when I was little. My earliest memories begin with school. When I was a little girl I was teased a lot. Children love to taunt when they receive a reaction and because I got upset easily (still do) I became a daily target. Mostly I was told that I was ugly. This was probably the worst name a young girl growing up in the late 70s could be called. Everyone around me, myself included, knew that it was important for women to be beautiful or else no one would marry them. Marriage was paramount and it was talked about constantly on the playground even if we all did have cooties.

Because I so desperately did not want to be ugly I tried to combat this by becoming hyperfeminine in the only ways I could understand. I tried to be a very good girl. I never got in trouble, I did all my schoolwork quickly, I helped the teacher, I helped other students, and I tried to be friendly and ‘nice’. A perfect young lady. Not only did this not help me in the schoolyard, it stuck me with the label Teacher’s Pet.

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Baby Abby

There are four main/popular schools of thought in regards to feminist theory:

egalitarian,
radical/essentialist,
social constructionist, and
post-structuralist

The two that have the most relevance to me are social constructionist and post-structuralist theory although I know I am influenced by all four in understanding the female bodies around me.

I have been told that there are things I am not allowed to do because I am female. In childhood I was discouraged from some things while being encouraged in others because there were social mores in place about what boys and girls ‘should’ do. Thus I was encouraged to bake and dance and my brother was encouraged to help in the garage and to build things. I was anxious around power tools and behind the wheel of a car because I had been taught that these are things girls were not good at. It was never explained to me what part of my corporeality created this inferiority, it was simply presented to me as fact. As I have gotten older and read and observed more I realize there is nothing innate in me as a woman that predisposes me to baking and dancing just like there was nothing innate in my brother than led him to mechanics. But now I am a dance teacher and he is a mechanic. Even though I have power tools of my own (and have developed skill in using them) we both followed the teachings we received in our childhoods.

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Put ’em all together and what does it spell?
G-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-L-L-L!!!!!!!