"How much of our obsession with food and fitness, our daily evaluation of our bodies, even our textbook eating disorders is an unconscious expression of our loyalty to or rejection of our mothers? We speak to our bodies as well.
"To reject the pressure to be thin is to reject our mothers' lifelong efforts. On the one hand, to extricate yourself from the culture of dieting and overexercise is to miss out on a huge part of female bonding -- the dieting promises exchanged between mother and daughter, sisters, friends; the self-disparaging watercooler talk about that holiday weight; the chats at the gym. On the other hand, some girls starve themselves expressly to avoid growing into adult female bodies and inheriting their mothers' lives. Some girls overeat and get fat to wound their weight-conscious mothers. Some girls become sports-obsessed, in part, to drive home the point that they will not be dainty and domestic like their powerless moms.
"We see that our mothers cannot love their own bodies, and this translates, albeit unintentionally, to a lesson about femaleness, about form, about our own futures. Marion Woodman writes: 'Because our mothers could not love themselves as complete feminine beings, they could not love us as feminine beings. So our fear is archetypal, monstrous. We have a tremendous sense of something within behing shut off, abandoned.'
"All daughters say to all mothers -- sometimes in words, more often with our own bodies as substitutes for words -- I came from you, your body was my first home, and you didn't suspect I sensed how you felt about it? Your genes imprinted themselves indelibly on the moment of my birth, creating an equation for what I would look like when I emerged. It was you. Even if I have Dad's knock-kness or Grandpa's curly hair, it is you that I become."
-- From "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women," by Courtney E. Martin
No comments:
Post a Comment