The below article struck such a nerve with me so much that I had to get up and walk around so I wouldn't get upset...the author is so on point about how we never tell men they need to put down their hamburgers and worry about their figures.
So much of our self-worth as women is tied into how we look (or don't look) and I suppose it depends on our own individual life experiences whether this resonates with us or not...but there's a very good chance it will.
Whether we heard it from our mothers ("you don't want to get fat, do you?" said in the same way if you took out "fat" and replaced it with "evil" or some other four letter word), boys in school or even other girls, it's familiar and men just don't get the kind of treatment the author describes. I'm still shaking at what she experienced. Being judged for how you look or don't look and "should" is one of the things that's wrong with our society.
Here's the article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-lifshitz/a-memo-to-the-men-who-told-me-not-to-eat_b_6771956.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
...and then this morning I go online to read today's New York Times and I see this, also heart-breaking. I long for an era or a society where body image is not so critical to who we see ourselves:
At least, I wish that I felt about extra pounds the way I feel when my hair gets too long — no big deal, really, and maybe the excess even looks nice. I wish that I lived in a society devoid of clavicle-fetishizing, industrialized food, Calvin Klein billboards, that mysterious berry called acai. I wish that I was too smart for this. I wish that I’d aged out of this. I wish that my feminism protected me from this. But I’ll likely wind up dieting again, doing calorie math in my head, because few things make me feel as hopeful or invigorated.
It’s embarrassing to admit that.
As a child, I heard a story about a man sentenced to life in prison who refused all of his meals, but always saved the butter packets. When he was finally thin enough, he buttered the bars and slid out. When the guards came to his cell in the morning, they found his clothes discarded on his cot. Before I understood that this story wasn’t true, I always wondered how he pulled it off, how he crept naked past the guards, out of the building, out of town, how he shuffled himself into the world unnoticed. I often think of him — a man in despair, trapped in a cage, whose only way out was to shrink.
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