Sarah says: Worship of beauty

I sprained my ankle on the last Saturday of J-term. As he wondered how he would survive the 200 steps home, the sudden jolt of pain that ricocheted through his body immediately told him this wasn’t going to be good.

When the nurse examined my ankle the next afternoon, I was satisfied with her words, “That’s amazing.” No one disputed my evidence of pain. Before leaving, I put on a compression bandage, crutches, and black boots that seemed disproportionate to the surface area of ​​my injury. The boots attracted just as much attention as my new halting gait. I tried to hide it under a long skirt to keep it looking nice. But over the next few days, I developed a sense of tenderness toward the wound, and a hostage-like affection toward the bruises and swelling.

Tracking ankles has become part medical responsibility (when will I be able to walk on them again?) and secret pleasure. Because my ankle was the only part of me that was not claimed to be beautiful, and the very ugliness of my injury was a testament to my injury. strength.

Membership in the cult of beauty is a prerequisite for girlhood. I can’t remember when beauty started to dominate me, or when she didn’t look at herself with the eyes of an appraiser. If there is an escape from the cult, I have yet to find it.

I was lucky to have a feminist upbringing. Never in my life did I get the impression that my male classmates were intellectually superior, and feminist ideas were encouraged at every turn. I studied Jane Eyre and Margaret Atwood early on, and majored in very little gender, sexuality, and feminist studies here. But underlying my feminist intellectual flow is a countercurrent that calls for allegiance to beauty.

One of the great contradictions of modern feminism is that women are now not only intelligent and passionate (though those passions are confined to the narrow confines of women’s comfortable ambitions), but also attractive. That means we have to continue.

For most of my life, body image has been framed as a self-esteem issue. The tragedy of her childhood was her lack of personal confidence. But as soon as I arrived at Middlebury, this framework started bothering me. By relegating body image to the whims of self-love, we imply that it is a women’s issue, that it is fundamentally unimportant.

During my freshman year, I was selected as a finalist for the Spencer Award. I spent six minutes making the case that body image is a pressing political and economic issue. Statistics have changed since my speech, but in 2022, the beauty industry (defined as skin care, fragrance, makeup, and hair care) will be worth approximately $430 billion, the plastic surgery industry will be worth $45.5 billion, and the diet industry will be worth $45.5 billion. was about $430 billion. Approximately $76 billion annually. The anti-obesity drug industry will reach $6 billion this year, and with the rapid growth in popularity of drugs like Ozempic, Goldman Sachs predicts it could become a $100 billion industry by 2030. . In “Body Image,” the joint engines of patriarchy and capitalism conspire to make self-loathing good business.

This does not even begin to tally up the time and income lost by countless women who suffer from eating disorders and eating disorders, sacrificing their full potential for school or employment in pursuit of the “perfect” body. there is no. These are unfathomable statistics.

In my speech, I brought to the fore my history with eating disorders. Throughout high school, I often struggled with insecurities about my weight that were disproportionate to reality. Especially in the fall of my senior year, I began to restrict myself, counting my wins on the calorie-tracking app My Fitness Pal and the hunger pangs that followed my sleep. To be clear, this was never an eating disorder. I met the criteria for an eating disorder, a clinically vague term. According to one study, 65% of American women between the ages of 25 and 45 report disordered eating behavior. My practice was disordered, but not statistically abnormal.

At the same time, for my Narrative Journalism elective, I was conducting long interviews with women on my high school crew team who had developed eating disorders and disordered eating patterns. We nodded empathetically to their stories and took detailed notes, but the irony that we were using many of the same calorie management methods was never lost on us.

She seems like a different person when she sees herself measuring her virtue in cups of low-fat yogurt. It was probably the saddest thing she’d ever experienced in her life. I contextualized my actions in high school as a means of social reward to assuage the deep sadness I was carrying. I liked being told I looked good. I sucked in the taste of my friend’s jealousy like it was candy.

The insidious truth behind the cult of beauty is that beauty is a zero-sum game. Beauty is always relative.Being beautiful is never enough, we must be even more beautiful than Become someone else or be the most beautiful person. The cave-like hole of beauty is an endless desire. There’s always the presence of other women’s thighs, breasts, and firm bellies that make me perceive my body as an alien and turn towards my own.

I ended my Spencer Prize speech on a momentary note of optimism. I was far more panicked by my freshman 15-year-old’s fear than I was by COVID-19, and I ended the first week of my freshman year with a story on the scale I asked her mom to tell me. I never opened the scale, but my best friend at the time had put a post-it note on the scale telling her to call me if she wanted to use it. This optimism was motivated by the demands of the genre (people like happy endings), but it also felt heartfelt. My issues with food and body image were very much 2020. I was beyond them.

This is the type of arrogance that you hope will fall.

I was in the basement of Jefferson Obstetrics and Gynecology, where a nurse was recording my vitals when I fell. Since my senior year of high school, I had begged the nurses not to worry about my weight, but that morning, out of morbid curiosity or simple laziness, I kept silent. When I saw the number on the back, I crumpled like I did when I got punched straight in the nose in second grade.

Gaining weight felt like a failure, the same as not being able to submit a Canvas assignment on time. There was no one but myself to blame for not doing my job. I feel like beauty, to me, is the worst job, a job with no economic benefits, and one that continues to carry a strange moral weight.

I have always been obsessed with the cult of beauty. The only time I felt that pain was when I was no longer a size zero 19-year-old.