Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
>
. But girls in societies that practise
> infibulation are often forced, not just encouraged. You've said that you
> see that as a matter of degree. I see it differently, and I'm content
> with that difference. Seems to me we both agree on the *meaning* of both
> acts.
>
Nalo, I agree that infibulation is uniquely severe. But I think most
people don't understand the extent to which young girls in our society
are damaged.
The problem of the hatred of the female body in white middle-class
US culture is far more serious than Laura's notice of liposuction
& breast implants would suggest. What makes me nearly despair
about it is that it's not solely the media's doing. Like footbinding
& infibulation, US white middle-class versions of it are manfistations
of those disciplinary phenomena that its targets (I deliberately
& pointedly don't say "victims"), themselves enforce. At question
in this discussion, of course, is whether psychological damage
(beginning at or before the age of six, when damage is most thorough
& formative) is comparable to physical damage at an older age
(say 10). (Though sometimes physical damage results from the
psychological damage-- as with the rising incidence of anorexia
nervosa & bulimia, & the falling age at which it occurs-- with
many, many cases now occurring well before puberty.)
As a fairly ordinary concrete example, let me describe what I
have witnessed in my own (extended) family. Almost ten years
ago now, I met my mother at the house of my brother who was a
rising corporate executive at the time, in Connecticut, for a
sort of mini-family reunion. My brother & I hadn't spoken for
several years, so I was anxious to avoid conflict with him. (This
was difficult, because he was constantly citing Pat Buchanan &
David Duke as the wisest men in the land, & constantly baiting
me as a bleeding-heart liberal.) Despite my brother's playing
the role of authoritarian paterfamilias, I was at first impressed
with his emotional closeness with his two daughters, one just
turned six, the other an infant. He was absolutely devoted to
them, & A., the six-year-old, was a classic "daddy's girl." The
flip-side of this mutual devotion, though, was A's inordinate
desire to please her father, whether with her reading skills,
or her dress (& she tended to flaunt & vamp explicitly for him),
or her plying him with flattery. These latter two disturbed me
a little, because they showed such calculated use of manipulative
techniques (aka "feminine wiles"), but I didn't understand their
full import until, on the Sunday morning at brunch, he verbally
abused & humiliated her for asking for a second helping of pancakes.
Suddenly she was a pig, a fat pig, & a bad girl, & he was raving
that good girls don't eat second helpings of pancakes that good
girls are careful of their figures, that daddies couldn't love
fat little pigs, & blah blah blah, blah blah blah. There were
references to her diet (& how she hadn't been following it), &
what a little creep she was & on & on, a stream of excessive beratement
to the effect that she was a worthless little pig, that was obviously
not unusual. (I not only couldn't eat any pancakes after that,
I had to leave the room before I exploded.) My mother considered
these reproaches appropriate, of course (though she would have
been gentler in her comments-- more "persuasive" than "negative,"
with "pancakes will spoil your figure, honey," or "don't you want
to look pretty?" etc etc).
My mother has a hatred of the female body & believes that every
"self-respecting" woman (& girl) will keep it from being "overweight"
(a judgment that has nothing to do with health & everything to
do with normative values: hence, for the female body, what is
"overweight" is in constant fluctuation, & is generally a social
value judgment). A., of course, was presented with split values.
On the one hand, her father & paternal grandmother have had her
dieting from her earliest memories. On the other hand, her mother's
Italian-American family values food & the pleasures of the body
& thinks dieting is perverse & believes that children should be
unconditionally loved. (A's mother was always dieting, but with
tongue in cheek, quite ruefully, without the serious reverence
my brother & mother give to standards of acceptibility in female
appearance. She didn't hate her body (which in my eyes was quite
lusciously desirable, & she didn't hate her mother's body-- which
was perhaps 180 pounds. A proper hedonist, I'd call her.) I
was raised with a similar split. On the one hand, my mother was
a monument to an indifference to food & hatred of the female body
(& openly avowed hatred for her mother, who perhaps not coincidentally
was huge-- at 4'8" over 300 pounds) & could only look at food
in terms of whether or not it was "fattening"; on the other hand,
my German-American father & paternal grandparents taught me to
love food & honor the body, themselves a monument of indifference
to standard US middle class notions of female attractiveness.
(My paternal grandmother was a great strong working woman who
in her healthier days had no trouble tossing around 100-lb sacks
of potatoes.) I see this split as culturally- rather than gender-
based. Mothers are often the main enforcers of the discipline
(as in my case), though fathers can be, too (as in A's). & one's
peers-- whether one is in the seventh grade, or an adult-- are
far more important enforcers than the media.
Over the years, as I've looked back at that scene involving my
neice, I've come to characterize it as psychological torture.
A six year old child is defenseless against the judgments of
the most important person in her life. What, I've asked myself,
can such harrangues do to a child's self-esteem? Though my brother
& I haven't spoken since that "family reunion," I'm certain that
scene was repeated frequently, since whenever my mother talks
about my neice, it's always with reference to how her dieting
is coming along, what kind of "figure" she has, & so on. It's
been widely reported that it's commonplace for girls in the second
grade, without any health problems, to start dieting because they're
worried about their "figures." It's also the "thing" now in L.A.
for middle class white women in their early-to-mid-twenties to
undergo cosmetic surgery repeatedly, even when they're conventionally
pretty (or even "classically" beautiful)-- shaving a hundreth
of an inch off the nose here, heightening their cheekbones there--
& of course resorting to either breast implants or breast reduction
(depending upon their perceptions of their breast size, WHICH
IS NEVER RIGHT). (A young woman I know says she is the only woman
in her circle who hasn't had cosmetic surgery: & her friends consider
abnormal for it.) Cosmetic surgery is THE growth sector of the
medical industry. Computer visualization serves that industry
well, conning women into taking risks with their healthy, usually
pretty faces that can end in tragic mutilation (since how tissue
heals cannot be accurately predicted, & varies from person to
person).
So tell me. What does it mean that bright young women, just out
of college, spend all their disposable resources on marginally
improving their looks (while risking disfigurement)? Is this
what young women should be devoting themselves to at that stage
in their lives? The way I read it, such women can only think
of themselves as objects being presented for others' approval.
(How else get so obsessed with shaving a hundredth of an inch
off their noses? Or enlarging a C-cup to a DD-cup, or reducing
a DD-cup to a D cup?) When they look at themselves in the mirror,
they see what they think the most censorious person they can think
of would see. Ditto, now, for many girls at puberty & younger.
Hatred of the female body takes many forms. Some are more violent
than others, but surely they're all damaging.
Timmi
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:18 PDT