foxinsnow's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- boycott the media! So, I don't know if I've written about this, but due to a meds change I've gained about 25 lbs. since July. It was a good thing, too, because I was pretty gaunt. Now I don't have hollows in my cheeks (which are especially noticeable on me because I have high, prominent cheekbones) and I have a little, you know, T and A. I pretty much consider my belly to be the price I pay for having tits and ass, because I do not have the time or energy to do sit-ups every day. But I am taking a modern dance class which is heavy on the Martha Graham technique, which means I work my abs a lot in that class. On my driver's license it says I weigh 120 lbs, but I weigh more like 126 lbs-- but I always forget to weigh myself in the morning when you're supposed to and I never take off my clothes to weigh myself... too lazy. I'm basically too lazy to have bad body image, or it just may be that I like my body fine the way it is so that's why I don't have it. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf was my bible when I was nineteen (back then it was a crisis in my life that I didn't have big boobs), but now, although I do acknowledge that for some girls and women body image can even be fatal when it turns into an eating disorder, I don't think of body image as a pressing concern anymore. I think problems like acquaintance rape, abortion and, globally, female genital mutilation are much more important to focus on. The media is just not going to stop handing us an airbrushed, implanted, anorexic, fake-tanned image of female beauty, so my personal solution is to just tune it out, although I respect that some females are not able to do that. It really helps being a photographer, too, because I know all the tricks that are used both in the shoot and in Photoshop to make women like Britney Spears and J-Lo look that way. They don't look that way in real life, let me assure you of that. But like I've been saying, where body image becomes a serious problem is when people do things like develop eating disorders and get dangerous surgery (breast implants) to look a certain way. However-- I know this is going to be controversial-- these women have free will. We are not haplessly forced by the media to get breast implants. A woman (or man) can choose to ignore the media's message of what is the perfect body. I think if more people started doing that, the media would lose its foothold in the business of hawking unattainable so-called perfection, and then, by ignoring the media, it would change, just like the schoolyard bully stops taunting you when s/he sees you ignoring him/her. 6:10 a.m. - 2004-10-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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