::From my earliest memories, my older sisters avoided cameras,

miniskirts and bathing suits like Rush Limbaugh avoids middle-of-the-road reality. At some point before my viable memories register, my sisters adopted the goal of unachievable beauty and began a perpetual cycle of dieting.  One sister recently opted for liposuction without even trying to exercise or eat right, and unfortunately after all the physical and financial costs no one could tell a lick of difference.  My 8-year-old niece has already learned the habit of self-criticism, refusing to wear a certain pair of pajama pants due to the supposed appearance of fat thighs.  My mother, at 58, just joined a women’s gym that boasts all sorts of weight-loss success on substandard hydraulic machines.  And even though my mother claims she joined to build bone density and prevent osteoporosis, I know that her motivation for health lags far behind her desire to feel as thin and youthful as she did when she was married at twenty-one. 

            In my experience, the earliest source for learning physical discomfort is through the familial model.  Parents are reluctant to let their daughters have a second or third portion at mealtime because the parents themselves feel that fat and female is the worst thing to be.  Daughters witness their mothers’ complaints about their breast size, thigh size, ass size, belly size, and learn to question themselves. 

            I was angry.  I am angry because I know that no matter my political beliefs or social vocabulary, I will fight beauty standards until I die.  And even if I have a moderately healthy body image, there will always be a “but”.  The “but” lies between the lines of beauty magazines with articles consecutively stating “How To Tone Your Problem Areas” and “The Road To Self-Acceptance”, accompanied by photo spreads of underfed models. The pervasive force of the media bombards children with images that mold future ideas of society, behavior, people, and self.  Oddly, we seem surprised that the media has had a profound effect on shaping personhood, even denying that the media has had a role at all.

I think I look pretty good, but my thighs are big for my taste. 

·        Keyword:  pretty good – translates to okay, but not good enough. 

·        Key phrase:  for my taste – whose taste? 

Do we really think that this beauty ideal is our own innate sense of aesthetic beauty, some instinctive quality that tells us that the most desirable female has thin thighs and flat bellies?  If not, whose taste do women attempt to satisfy?  To whose standards are we trying to conform to?  Male hyper-masculinity requires some luscious female to offset the difference in the gender binary: 

·        A pin-up girl in every locker room helps to balance the close contact between naked athletes whose intimacy and brotherhood cannot be duplicated outside the realm of sports.

·       The female superhero who holds “masculine traits” such as logic, intellect, physical strength, agility, confidence and power, must compensate for her manliness with an unnatural body type (enormous breasts, tiny waist, ala Lara Croft) to help re-feminize her persona.

The ultimate insult for a woman is to label her something between fat and manly, as though the terms are not relative to whomever is slinging them around. In our culture, femininity is masculinity reflected – polar opposites – and anything between is unacceptable.  Thus women begin the game of Constant Comparison, inevitably and successfully turning women into woman-haters for fear of falling within the shadows of Beauty’s light.

            To paraphrase Georgia O’Keefe, perfectionism is a form of self-abuse.  Requiring women who have no chance of reaching the collective societal goal of beauty to be perfectly beautiful is to degrade the worth of women, equating that worth to beauty alone.

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