hedy1

"In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf (1991) cites a survey indicating that a whopping 90% of American women are dissatisfied with their bodies. When this attitude is passed from mother to daughter, which is understandably almost inevitable, a vicious cycle begins. Mothers, according to Susie Orbach (2001), generally experience some level of difficulty in accommodating the needs of their daughters. They wish to feed and provide for them, but fear giving them too much lest they become greedy or demanding. From a very young age, girls are encouraged by their mothers to deny their own needs in favor of those around them. In an attempt to cope with the disappointment of their caretakers thwarting of their needs, young girls learn to accept them as inappropriate because they are still too dependent upon their mothers to condemn their actions. They see their own unmet needs as the problem and begin to force them underground.

Later, as their daughters mature, mothers are often the first to actively encourage them to diet by the age of 12 or 13 to lose their baby fat. Orbach writes,

This unconscious thwarting of the daughters hunger and satisfaction mechanism comes to play an important part in later life in a girls receptivity to looking outside herself for information about food, hunger and satisfaction as well as for a sense of well-being in her body. The misdirecting of these internal physical cues does not aid the development of a secure body image. Rather, it opens up the possibility that a girl will feel insecure in and with her body and become a target for the hugely profitable enterprises of the diet/fashion/cosmetics/body beautiful industry (62-3). *
A girls poor body image, when combined with her thwarted and denied needs, effectively prevents her from forming an authentic sense of self. She grows up always looking outside of herself for approval, lacking both confidence and any feeling of entitlement to her physical and emotional needs. When she realizes her body does not measure up to the standards she is bombarded with every day on television and in magazines, she is crushed. The medias commodification of womens bodies engulfs her, teaching her to commodify her own and view it from the outside as a separate entity. Orbach explains that young women learn to view their bodies as gardens- as objects in need of constant cultivation and attention. "

i would take the time to say in an erudite way how this makes me feel, how i feel about this and my body, and my life, and my mind, but that would involve not being detached-in-order-not-to-feel-pain.