Homogenizing self modification

It is a power struggle. Man vs. Woman. But not at the surface. On the surface most see skinny, voluptuous, blonde women who look like they are confident in themselves. The true fact behind that façade of confidence is that she is anorexic or bulimic and hopes that she doesn’t look too fat in her stylish new dress or that she doesn’t have a muffin top, etc, you get the picture. This discipline of women having to be skinny to be good looking or even considered to be “ripe pickings” for reproductive uses is absurd.

How did this persona come to be? This social construction, as it were, is from the movies, the magazines, the billboards, the signs that portray women as objects of sexuality and perfection. The average teenager sees these signs and links them to getting a boyfriend or just being happy. Susan Bordo in her article Unbearable Weight Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body explains that this “ideal” woman stems from disorders that degrade the body in wrongful processes. But also that women partook in these disorders was due to the lack of confidence, ironically the same confidence that women overly try to emanate. The power struggle ignites the insecurity that fuels women. I agree with Bordo that “we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group and leveled against another; we must instead think of the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain”. If the gender role was eliminated entirely women’s confidence would have room to bloom. Also, I find it interesting that this lack of confidence is almost always produced from within. The woman takes a situation and mutates it, and from there makes the assumption that she is fat, [of course this is not always the case]. These anxieties are like poison.

Bordo says it best, that “memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough”, this self modification through social constructions, will ultimately lead to “utter demoralization, debilitation, and death”. Women need to stop with this foolishness of “oh I’m never going to be good enough for you unless I’m as skinny as a rail” pretense and be confident in who they are, and what that they are, otherwise it will kill them.