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Introduction:
The opening statement on the NOW Foundation’s national Love
Your Body Campaign web site indicts the media and consumer culture
for making women feel lousy about who they are and what they look
like: “Hollywood and the fashion, cosmetics and diet industries
work hard to make each of us believe that our bodies are unacceptable
and need constant improvement. Print ads and television commercials
reduce us to body parts— lips, legs, breast — airbrushed
and touched up to meet impossible standards. TV shows tell women
and teenage girls that cosmetic surgery is good for self-esteem.”
As Brené Brown, PhD discovered in her research on women and shame,
nearly all women feel ashamed of their bodies at one time or another.
In our society— which prizes personal responsibility and self-discipline
over all else— women and girls are pressured to believe that
with enough will power the right kind of diet and exercise, they can control everything about the size
and shape of their bodies (and for women with ample resources, those really stubborn areas
can be modified by a surgeon’s scalpel). For too many women, our
relationship with our own bodies becomes adversarial at an early
age -- and the lifetime of shame we carry around due to our inability
to measure up to culturally-defined standards of perfection undercuts
our sense of self-worth, saps our mental and emotional energy and
ultimately undermines our personal and collective power, which
is why some feminists identify body image as a potent political issue.
For better or worse,
our bodies are part of our social identity— and for many us
getting our “old” bodies back after pregnancy and childbirth
becomes a symbol of regaining control after the seismic upheavals
of new motherhood. Yet carrying and giving birth to a child can
change a woman’s body in countless ways, many of which do
not conform to idealized standards of beauty. Some of the changes
are transitory, but many are permanent. (Personally, I struggle
daily with the reality that no matter how many stomach crunches I do, the skin on my lower belly will never
be as sleek as it was before two mid-life pregnancies stretched it
past the point of no return.) This may leave mothers especially
prone to body shame and vulnerable to the negative self-concept
that flows from it. I invited Brené Brown, author of Women and
Shame: Reaching Out, Speaking Truths and Building Connection, to write an article on shame and body image as a follow up to last
month’s Love Your Body Day (October 21, 2004). For a more
thorough discussion of women’s shame as a psychological and
social issue, read the MMO’s
August 2004 interview with Brené Brown.
Judith Stadtman Tucker
Editor, The Mothers Movement Online
November 2004 |
| I’ve
spent the past six months traveling across the US, giving
lectures on women and shame to lay people, mental health professionals
and educators. One issue that always strikes people is the highly
paradoxical nature of shame. This is certainly true when we talk about
shame triggers. While shame is absolutely universal and part of the
human experience, the issues, events and experiences that leave us
feeling shame are highly individualized and contextualized.
After interviewing over 200 diverse women, it became very clear
that here are no universal shame triggers. There is no list of events
or situations that make all of us feel or experience shame. When
I write, “highly individualized” I mean, what’s
shaming for me may be mildly guilt-producing for someone else and
possibly not even come up on a third person’s emotional radar.
By “contextualized,” I mean that it’s not always
a specific event or experience, sometimes it’s the context
in which an event or experience occurs.
While there are no universal shame triggers, I did discover that
there are categories that are meaningful. Without exception, all
of the participants’ shame experiences fit in one of these
ten categories: identity, appearance, sexuality, family, motherhood,
parenting, health (mental and physical), aging, religion and a woman’s
ability to stand up and speak out for herself. These are the categories
in which women struggle the most with feelings of shame.
Body image happens
to be the one issue that is the closest to “universal”
with over 90 percent of the participants experiencing shame about
their bodies. Body image also serves as an invisible thread that
runs through almost all of the ten shame categories. In fact, body
shame is so powerful and often so deeply rooted in our psyche that
it actually transcends the appearance category and impacts why and
how we feel shame in many of the other categories including identity,
appearance, sexuality, motherhood, parenting, health, aging and
a women’s ability to speak out with confidence. What we think,
hate, loathe and wonder about the acceptability of our bodies reaches
much further and impacts far more than our appearance. The long
reach of body shame can impact who and how we love, work, parent,
communicate and build relationships.
Defining
Body Image
Our body image is how
we think and feel about our bodies. It is the mental picture we
have of our physical body. Unfortunately, our picture, thoughts
and feelings may have little to do with our actual appearance. It
is our image of what are bodies are, often held up to our image
of what they should be. While we normally talk about “body
image” as a general reflection of what we look like, we can’t
ignore the specifics— the body parts that come together to
create this image. If we work from the understanding that women
most often experience shame when we become trapped in a web of layered,
conflicting and competing expectations of who, what and how we should
be, we can’t ignore that there are social-community expectations
for every single, tiny part of us— literally from our heads
to our toes.*
I’m going to list
our body parts because I think they are important: head, hair, neck,
face, ears, skin, nose, eyes, lips, chin, teeth, shoulders, back,
breasts, waist, hips, stomach, abdomen, buttocks, vagina, anus,
arms, wrists, hands, fingers, fingernails, thighs, knees, calves,
ankles, feet, toes, body hair, body fluids, pimples, scars, freckles,
stretch marks and moles.
Again, I bet, if you
look at each of these areas, you have specific body part images
for each one— not to mention a mental list of what you’d
like yours to look like and what you want to avoid. I personally
have a media-driven, perfection-seeking wish list for each of these
parts except for my “head.”
There is a profound quote
in Women and Shame that comes from a woman who had just
turned 18 when I interviewed her. She does a powerful job of capturing
the complexity of the “body parts” issue:
I think all of the
body stuff is shaming. It’s like you never get to see normal
bodies or you never get to read about what normal bodies do. I
think you’re always thinking, “Do other peoples’
breasts look like this?” “Do other people get hair
here and no hair there?” “Do other people smell like
this?” “Does this look like this?” “Do
you get pimples there?” I think everything about your body
that you don’t see on the perfect people on TV or in the
magazines, you wonder if you’re the only person and you
gross yourself out and that’s what shame is. Shame is when
you’re grossed out by yourself— it’s when your
very own body makes you sick. I’d like to see a book that
has all the information, like this is twenty ways this can smell,
or this is a picture of fifty “normal women’s”
breasts and here’s what they can look like. Then you can
be like, “Oh, OK, I’m normal.” But you have
to ask, “Who would pose for that?” Probably not normal
people. Then you’d be comparing yourself to crazy people.
It’s just ridiculous that no one is ever going to talk about
the weird stuff out of the fear that they’re actually the
one person that has that. Then it’s like “Uh-oh.”
Then it’s double worse because then you’re ashamed
and you think you’re supposed to be ashamed.
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