"Ideal Beauty" and Female Complicity in Keeping the Nightmare Alive

Who is it that decides what ideal beauty is? Well, much of the blame goes to evil hegemonic forces and their indefatigable crusade in dictating what’s appropriate for us to think and feel. Dr. Hegemonic Frankenstein’s terrifying baby, Popular Culture, which has arguably usurped it’s master as a weapon in the war against independent thought and choice, is also guilty of shaping perverse ideals and standards. But what we seldom acknowledge is our own self-destructive folly in encouraging adherence to these impossible ideals. Allow me to explain, and hold on to your hats, for I am about to take you on a trip down memory lane.

These are stories that, for me, epitomize female collaboration in ensuring that women remain the second sex. For the majority of my life, I’ve suffered on and off again with eating disorders. I was nine years old the first time I forced myself to throw up. It was in May, just a few days short of my tenth birthday, and a sudden disgust with myself couldn’t digest emotionally that night’s delicious spaghetti dinner, so I purged it of myself physically. Earlier that day, my best friend at the time, Karissa, had put on her favorite pair of bitch pants, and scrunched up her face in the way that meant she had something to say that would make me feel bad about myself. She was a bitch, but she was black, and I’m Muslim, so as two of the few minorities in that white trash little town, it seemed natural that we would be friends.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Well... I probably shouldn’t say.” Uttered the she-devil, with fake hesitation.
“Well now you have to tell me, you can’t just say that and then not say anything.” I said.
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re looking kind of chubby today. You don’t usually, but you do today. Maybe it’s what you’re wearing?”

Imagine the shock and hurt that my young self felt. I was developing earlier than any of the other girls in my grade, and I was already ashamed enough of that. The outlines of my training bra, visible through a white tee-shirt, and my too tall for grade school height were a source of many inane jokes for my white trash classmates. “Ewwww Zeyneb has boobs!” and “Don’t walk home with Zeyneb in the rain, you might get struck by lightning because it’s attracted to tall objects.” Thanks a lot, grade four science.

Throw in my crazy ethnic name, the lack of Christmas decorations on our house in a neighbourhood that was otherwise brilliant with December strings of light and plastic Santas masquerading as Christian piety, the fact that our poor family had a reputation as being violent and unsuitable for attendance at community functions, and I was about as much an outsider as outside gets.

And now I was fat, too. Using my powerful skills of deduction, I realized that even though I couldn’t control any of the other factors that made me different from my peers, I could control my weight, and what I chose to put into and expel from my body.

So it goes, my entrance into a new kind of shame that has effected my self-perception and world view ever since. That year I begged God that I would never grow taller, and that my breasts would never get any bigger. And guess what? I’ve been 5’7 and an A cup since I was eleven years old.

I learned early on that people will find your difference, attack it, and exploit it in order to assert themselves as superior creatures against the backdrop of an “other’s” failure to mirror a dominant normalcy. Kids are stupid and mean, but they learn it from somewhere. Far from being innocent victims in a patriarchal system, women and girls are champions when it comes to competing for social rank, and are only too happy to hurt each other and leave lesser peers behind as they make their way to Ideal Womanhood.

Now for story two. By the time I was in high school, my eating disorder had come to define who I was almost completely. I was a textbook perfectionist anorexic, and self-denial and self-discipline gave me the only self-esteem I knew at that point. When I was sixteen, I was so skinny that even size zero clothing hung loose on my emaciated frame. Kid’s clothing fit me better, but I
wasn’t one of those girls trying to maintain my cuteness with Winnie the Pooh everything, as was the craze at the time, although I did enjoy the life lessons that the Pooh books had to offer. Kids shirts weren’t long enough for me anyway, and they would just lift up to expose the jutting hipbones that bruised on contact with anything, for their lack of protective flesh.

Everyone was always telling me, “Oh my God, you’re sooooo skinny, how do you stay so skinny?” I told them that I was doing the Zone diet, which was partially true, but I was only consuming half of the recommended calories, exercising two hours a day, and throwing up any ‘bad food’ that my personal weakness had allowed into my body.

That year, the skinniest I’ve ever been, was the closest that I ever came to popularity. Everyone wanted the body that I had, so I got a lot of attention and feedback about how it great it was.

There was this girl Melec, who like me, was Turkish, and a straight A student. Her name means Angel, and she was very wholesome and obedient. Whenever we got a test back, I would demand to know what she had gotten on it, as she was my biggest competitor in academic glory.

One morning, seeing me in the halls, she said: “Oh my God, you’re so skinny, you look like you’re dying. EAT SOMETHING!” I got that a lot back then.

I took it with an ounce of pride. Even though I had my suspicions that people were lying to me about my weight, so that I would get fat and then they would be thinner than me, I still felt happy over such “compliments”. One part of having an eating disorder is working really hard to hide the fact that you have an eating disorder, so no one tries to take it away from you and make you ‘get better’ (which any anorexic knows, is just because they’re jealous, they don’t actually care about your health). The other part of having an eating disorder is a sick need that it be acknowledged. As much as I feared being exposed, I fed like a greedy pig on the comments people made about my body. Everyone knew, but so many people found the image favourable, that no one really cared to put a stop to it.

Anorexia has got to be, like, the worst kept secret ever.

Later on that day, after I had gotten up in class for some reason and come back to my seat, Melec looked at me in a sort of dumb-struck awe.
“Oh my God, you’re so skinny, I wish I had your body!”
This surprised me, as only hours before, she had said that I looked like I was dying.
“Really?”
“Well yeah! You have like, the perfect body. Everybody wants a body like that.”

This confirmed my long held suspicion that women are really fucked up. Melec, like Karissa and myself, was a straight A student, so her comments of the day couldn’t be attributed to stupidity, although I’m well aware that good grades do not necessarily indicate intelligence.

These two stories from the past are good examples of our failure to help each other, and ourselves, to get away from stereotypes of bitchy girls in endless competition with one another- for grades, for beauty, for jobs, and for men. It’s only quite recently that I’ve met a lot of great women who use their awesome minds and hearts to fight such stereotypes of girlish stupidity. But I’m sadly aware that the majority of women out there kind of suck.

I know that female sucktitude is much a product of socialization, and what we’ve been told to think and feel. But underneath the Aritzia and Juicy Couture, there are a lot of women who really are just bitches, and they’re okay with that, because it works for them. And that really sucks.

Sometimes I get so discouraged by the things women say and do, that I feel like there’s just no hope for us. It’s kind of like in 1984, where the proles are the only hope for the future, but the proles will never learn to think for themselves, so really we’re all doomed. I hate that vision of the future, and I really don’t want to give up just yet.

It appears that once again my attempt at explaining female complicity in our downfall and the pitfalls of grrl power degenerated into a deranged rant about how Karissa was mean to me and made me feel bad. As someone who lives inside of her head 90% of the time, most of my life has been devoted to understanding why we do the things that we do, and how my experiences have influenced who I am and my perceptions of the world. That kind of thing can't be properly summarized in a blog post, especially since I haven't reached my own final conclusion on life and humanity. But, we do all have experiences and, hopefully, sufficient intellect to at least attempt to understand how we come to the decisions we make and why we pursue the lives we do.

If you have yet to start the messy work of analyzing everything you and everyone else does under the direct or indirect influence of hegemonic norms and expectations, don't worry, there's still time. With determination and the willingness to acknowledge some ugly realities, you too, can be as cool as I am. Once you've started to understand what's behind your own beliefs and choices, you can work towards discovering the meaning of life in order to develop a clearer vision towards your role in saving the world. Just pay attention in Women and Gender studies and apply everything you learn in school to the outside world.