 Minding
the Body - Women Writers on Body and Soul by Patricia Foster
I first read Sarah Tisdale in Whole Earth Quarterly. She writes with poetic
precision, and her essay in this collection, A Weight That Women Carry, hit
me between the eyes. My copy of this piece has more highlighted lines than
not.
"Reduction, the diminution of women," Tisdale
writes, "is the opposite of feminism, as Kim Chernin points
out in The Obsession. Smallness is what feminism strives against,
the smallness that women confront everywhere... How would it
feel, I began to wonder, to cultivate my own real womanliness
rather than despise it? Because it was my fleshy curves I wanted
to be rid of, after all."
After I read that, and started thinking about it alone in the
woods, I got really angry and sad. What the hell is wrong with
the women in our culture??? How did we ever BUY INTO this bullshit?
"A lot of my misery over my
weight wasn't about how I looked at all. I was miserable
because I believed I was bad, not my body. I felt truly reduced
then, reduced to being just a body and nothing more."
I agree. My weight issues aren't about how I look. They're about
my feeling that at my core, I'm bad, low, flawed. The following
quote reflects my feelings perfectly:
"Each of us in this culture,
this twisted, inchoate culture, has to choose between battles:
one battle is against the cultural ideal, and the other is
against ourselves. I've chosen to stop fighting myself."
|
