Body Image and Intersectionality

The main purpose of my final project was to focus on body image, and intersectionality. Your body is the first thing that people see, and is, to most people, one of the main focus’s of life. I really wanted to focus on sexuality, race, gender, and age and how it affects your body image, but I was met with a problem. I didn’t know a lot about body image myself. So I took to google and began researching statistics. What I learned was really suprising to me. But what was most surprising was how little I knew.

If I was going to be asked whether or not I have positive or negative body image, I don’t think that I would know the answer. For starters, I don’t even know what either of those fully mean, no one does. The basic definition for positive body image is that you are happy with the way that you look, and you see your body as it truly is. Negative body image is the same, only the opposite you are not happy with the way that you look and you do not see your body for what it truly is. Learning these deffinitions was interesting, but it didn’t tell me much. I began questioning a lot about my perception of my body, and others. Is it really possible for someone to have a constantly good perception of their body, and not have a negative thought? This seemed crazy to me.

I didn’t really think about my body until 5th grade. When you are younger, everyone pretty much looks the same, give or take a few exceptions. When my body began to change, I was suddenly the tallest at school. I shot up 5-6 inches above everyone else, even the boys. I was very skinny and awkward and people began to make fun of me for it. I became hyper aware of my body, constantly thinking about what it looked like and what it was doing. As I grew up, my body continued to be a main focus in my life. As I suffered through the awkwardness of adolescence, I struggled more and more with the way I thought my body looked. I gained a good amount of weight in 8th grade, and began to hate my body, even though I was completely healthy. Thus began an unhealthy obsession with eating (or not) that I struggled with for a few years after that.

With the use of social media, I have noticed the amount that my peers and I compare ourselves to others. I have used tumblr and instagram for years now. Posting photos of me and text posts has become almost an obsession, I have to document everything that I am doing at every second of the day. The amount of “likes” that I get on a photo can automatically make or break my day. Sitting and writing this essay, this seems absolutely ridiculous to me, but it is true.

As I began this project, I found a youtuber and instafamous “celebrity” named Essena O’neill. Essena is a 19 year old from Australia who has half a million followers on instagram, and an equally high number of subscribers on youtube. Essena has been famous since the age of 15, when she started her instagram account. Recently, she has come out and said that she is quitting all forms of social media, and has started a campaign called “Lets be game changers”. She is saying that the reason for quitting social media is because she allowed it to brainwash her into thinking that they way she looked meant everything. She also has stated that she began to hate herself, and that her instagram was not an accurate representation of her or her body. All of her photos were edited, she starved herself to keep the perfect figure, and was paid to wear certain clothes and say certain things. Her new campaign is keeping up all of her old instagram photos but changing all of the captions to write accurate descriptions of what was really going on. Instead of a photo saying “love this skirt, best day ever” the new captions say “I starved myself for four days to take this photo, cried when I thought I looked fat”. I think that this is a really interesting project, but I wonder were her obsession stemmed from. It also scared me how similar the way she felt was for me.

When I learned about Essena, I immediately assumed that media was the cause of all of our body image issues. Taking into account the amount that I am on social media comparing my body to others, I figured that if I was to stop social media I would have a much more positive body image, and everyone else would too.

I sent out a survey to the Putney community with questions ranging from “What is your sexuality”, “Do you think you look better naked or clothed”, “Has your body image gotten better or worse as you’ve aged” and “What is the biggest influence in your life about your body image”. I wanted to focus a bit on race, gender, and sexuality and how they affect your body image. I really wanted to notice trends in certain things as well, and, given the information about Essena O’Neill, I was hoping that the majority of the reason people might have a negative body image has to do with media. I got back 120 answers, and my data was completely inconclusive. There was not a single trend happening. This was very interesting to me, because I was almost certain that there would be specific things given all of these intersections that would come up multiple times. I think that largely however the reason for this is because our school has a very certain demographic of people. It is hard to give a survey about intersectionality when we have such a large population of white upper class people. It would have definitely been very interesting to give this survey to a larger demographic of people so that I could actually see the purpose of the project played out.

I was disappointed when I couldn’t find a trend in different things that affect body image, because it meant that I am no where closer to finding an answer for myself. Obviously, this was incredibly disappointing, because although I no longer have an “unhealthy” obsession with my body, I am definitely still an uncomfortable 17 year old. Seeing the answers that adults in the Putney community gave to my survey didn’t exactly give me hope either. However, as I become more aware of the world around me, and campaigns come out to help teach people that their bodies are unique and beautiful, I think that there is definitely hope. My hope is that one day we won’t focus so deeply on body image. This project taught me a lot, but mostly it taught me that society doesn’t really know a lot about tackling the subject of body image. I think that it is important to start educating younger kids about their bodies, because when I was younger I didn’t know anything about my body.

Growing Up

Growing up I was never aware of my families financial situation, I twas kept hidden from me, and I only got brief glimpses of it when shopping or asking for things. Growing up with a single mother, I knew I wasn’t financially well off, but I never thought that we didn’t have money, either. I got the things that I needed, and usually got the things that I want.

I moved in with my step dad and his children, and I was a little bit more aware of our financial situation. At the time, my step dad wasn’t making much, and we lived in a “not so nice house” in a really nice town. Leaving the city was a weird experience on its own, but moving to westchester was like a whole other world. The kids there didn’t worry about anything, so I began to conform to that mindset. This was the first time that I was embarrassed of where I came from (as sad as it is for me to say that now). My house just wasn’t nice like the other kids, they lived in mansions. I hated westchester because I never fit in. In NYC everyone was so different, from all different backgrounds and I easily flew under the radar. In westchester, I was the weird girl with the weird clothes.

When I decided to apply to boarding school, financial aid played a huge part in where I could attend. It was never a question that I would go to the school that gave me the most money, I knew that that was what I was going to do. Not because I was poor, just because I was average. I didn’t have money to throw about.

When I came to Putney, my money (or lack there of) was thrown into my face. I suddenly had friends with more money than I could ever imagine. It wasn’t like Westchester, though. The kids here kept their wealth hidden, almost as if it was something to be embarrassed about. Kids who I knew were wealthy wore clothing that made them look homeless, and often joked about how poor they are. For me, this was very painful to adjust to. I didn’t understand why people were using my financial status as a cool trend. It wasn’t cool, and it was something that I had grown up hiding. Having people here denouncing their wealth publicly for no reason it just didn’t make sense for me.

I come from a working class family, my mother has worked hard for every opportunity that I have been given. She works three jobs to support me and the rest of my family, without complaining. Now that I am applying for college, she has told me that she refuses to let me take out any loans, and instead wants to take loans out in her name. I struggle at our school because of how entitiled I know feel. I don’t want to forget where I come from, and I feel guilty for my family working so hard to send me here and then to college. I know that they want me to do well in life, but I feel bad for making them struggle so hard.

Systemic Oppression and White Guilt

Our country was built on White Supremacy. Since the beginning, white people have come into land that doesn’t belong to them and taken it for their own. White cis men have instilled in us from the beginning of time the thought of being the supreme race. We have been taught that our beauty standards, or thoughts and our actions are higher than people of color. I am not a racist. I was raised in New York City, one of the most diverse cities on the planet, to a single working class mother. I understand struggle. I know that I am privileged, but not as privileged as my friends.

I  am not a racist, but i’m white. This fact may seem small, something that one could disregard completely, however due to systemic oppression the fact that I am white means everything. I am racist just because I am white. We don’t have separate bathrooms for colored people or internment camps anymore, no. Our racism is much more hidden, much easier to shove under the rug and not speak about again. Systemic Oppression, also known as Institutional Oppression is the mistreatment of a certain group of people due to their identity, that is then “backed up” by institutions (schools, governments, stores, etc). Any way you look at it, this is really just another form of Racism, but it’s a lot harder to get rid of.

How can you delete something from society that you can’t see? The problem with this type of oppression is that you can’t pin point where the problem started. Oppression against people of color was originally created to empower white people, and make them feel safe. This was at first very clear, we took land from native americans, had slaves. Flash forward to the civil rights movement, our laws that we could be “outwardly racist” could no longer really be used. But of course as white people we still wanted to feel like the supreme race, so we changed our habits to be much more subtle. Our police force is a great example of this. Although they can’t outwardly arrest people of color just due to their race, they do many other things which show that oppression has not changed at all, rather shifted. 85% of all stop and frisks are on people of color (black and latino). 80% of all people that are stopped are actually innocent. These stops are simply due to race; not due to any inkling of a crime.

As western culture has spread, so have our beliefs. We have taught people that they only way to be beautiful is to have straight hair, a pale complexion, and a thin body. This shows people of color that no matter what they do, they will never be beautiful and should never feel comfortable with themselves. When I speak, or any white person speaks, they take precedence over a person of color. My voice will always be louder than a woman of color’s voice. People will always respect me and listen to me when I speak, and when a woman of color speaks no one will. These are just three examples of this, there are too many examples of systemic oppression to count.

I have a sense of guilt revolving around race that i’m not sure how to attack. I know that i’m not racist, but because i’m white I benefit from systemic oppression. This is an advantage for me throughout life. I don’t ever have to worry about being denied a job due to my ethnicity. I don’t have to worry about race specific hate crimes, or brutality from the police. I am safe from all of these things. Which makes me feel guilty. I don’t want to benefit from something that a huge demographic of people don’t. I don’t like that the history of my people is so ugly, because I don’t share the beliefs that they did. Yet, due to the fact that I do benefit from being white, I am responsible. I am involved heavily with social justice work, so for a long time the guilt I felt really held me back. I had to learn though that it is okay to feel guilty, but it is also okay to forgive yourself and realise that you are not responsible for your race as a whole. Just like it is not okay to have a person of color speak for their race, I don’t have to speak for mine. But I do have a responsibility. I can not sweep in with white saviorism and try to fix racism. But I can’t stand by and let it happen. I think that the most I can do is notice my privilege, and notice when I am benefiting from my race in a situation that I shouldn’t be.

Although we don’t have open racism anymore except for a few cases, systemic oppression runs deep. It will take a lot of work to break it down, and in turn would probably result in the change of almost all of our major systems. Bottom line is that white people need to stop being the only race that benefits from basic human rights. If society sat down and realized that racism is still very much prevalent but in a different form, we could finally then begin to tackle the form of oppression that rocks us to our core.

Rape Culture

As a woman, I have been told countless times that it isn’t safe to walk alone at night. It isn’t safe to go to a bar alone or walk through a parking garage. If you really think about it, these things seem insane; however, it is a part of a woman’s every day truth. And, in fact, we have become completely desensitized to that truth. I don’t think twice about the fact that I need to constantly have another companion with me. The reason for this is because of the obsession in our culture with domination and anger. Humans are inherently aggressive creatures, who naturally believe in survival of the fittest. We have been this way since the beginning of time, when cavemen had to survive off of being the most fit and the most healthy in order to survive in the wild, and it has stemmed further from there.  This has simply been amplified by the use of media, which shows men the way that they “need” to be, so that they can be “real men”. By use of video games, movies, tv, and just ads in general, the social norm is to rape and take what is yours. Unfortunately, not only is this a United States problem, but also seems to be a world problem. All of these things support the idea of rape culture; or the set of beliefs that encourages males to rape, and tells women that this is a normal thing to accept.

Rape has always been around, however, Rape Culture itself did not come to light until the 1970s, when feminists decided to take a stand against this growing problem. Rape culture is one of the most prevalent themes everywhere in the world. Rape culture, in  my opinion, stems from this domination. This idea that for men (although, yes, men can be raped too), the ultimate form of showing your masculinity and full reign over someone is to take full control, regardless of whether or not they want you to. This is only propelled by media; where in games & tv shows constantly are made to make rape the normal. If you are to flip through your television, you will find countless examples of women who are sexualized and abused. In video games, take grand theft auto for example, it is very common for women to be seen as objects that you can beat up and sexualize.

Rape culture has also become very highlighted recently in the media due to the increasing number of sexual assaults on college campuses. I recently watched the movie “It Happened Here”, which is about the stories of female college students who were raped and then treated very poorly by the school’s administration after the fact. In this documentary, the female students said that they believe that the main reason rape culture was so prevalent at their schools was because of the huge sports culture also co-existing. For example, at UConn, many instances of severe violence on female students by the football players frequently goes unpunished by the school board because of the need for success in the sports season. These female students claimed that the schools cared more about the statistics for sports then they did about the downside of this severe masculine energy. And it just makes sense. When you constantly are telling men they can get away with incredibly aggressive acts, as long as they “dominate” and “destroy” the other teams, they are going to be much more inclined to rape and hurt women because it’s all part of this dominating that is so ingrained in them. Greek life has played a major part in rape on college campus’s as well. At university of Canada, a fraternity created this student chant; “Y is for your sister. O is for oh-so-tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass.” This chant was used during student orientation at a fraternity. Seemingly a gross injustice, and a superbly distasteful lyric, it is jsut a thing that had been accepted at that school until female students became uncomfortable and it circulated around the media.

Women are raped every day, yet struggle to tell people because they know that they will probably not be taken seriously. That the most detrimental thing to ever happen to them will not be seen as real or true by the people that they tell. Unfortunately, this is often the harsh reality of being a woman in a society that mainly focuses on male aggression.

Teenage Girls

Age Exploration Draft

Ever since I was little, I looked at the media to show me the ways of the world. The women in the media, to me, at least, represented the way in which I thought I would become. As a young girl, the only women that I saw in movies, magazines, and tv shows were tall, skinny, plastic, and old. I was always confused growing up as to what the “cool” thing for my age group to do was. I never really understood why the media was saying that teenage girls should be mean to their parents, out doing drugs and having sex, because I did not want to do those things at such a young age. However, because the media was in fact portraying this, my friend group, and age group in general, began trying to act older and older to mimic what we were seeing in the media.

When I was young, I thought that movies such as the Clique, Mean Girls, and tv shows like Pretty Little Liars were accurate representations of what it was like to be a teenage girl. These “16” year olds were having sex with multiple partners, staying out all night, having pregnancy scandals, and overall just truly acting so much older than they were supposed to be. To me, that meant that as a teenager that is what I was supposed to be doing, and that was what my friend group was supposed to be doing. Needless to say, middle school was a time of great confusion for all of us. We saw in the media that this was the age for class systems, so we had class systems. My friend group, the stereotypical dumb blonde “popular” girls, thought that we needed to have boyfriends, so we got boyfriends. Stemming from that, as we watched more and more shows, read more and more books and met more and more people, we began doing things meant for people much older than us because we truly thought that that was what kids our age were supposed to be doing. Looking back, I obviously realise how foolish that was, but I completely understand why we would be doing it. If when you get home and you turn on TV you see young girls played by 20 year old actresses doing bad things that in turn get them lots of attention from people, you are going to want to do that too to get the same attention.  Now, as a senior in high school, I look at movies that I used to watch when I was young and think to myself that those are so clearly 25 year old actresses; that are underweight, have plastic surgery, and bodies incredibly different from the average viewer.But, needless to say,  I genuinely thought growing up that that is what I would look like, and was deeply upset that that was not who I turned in to. Society has created a social norm for young girls to be sex objects, and to try to look much older and do much older things from a younger age.

Another major example of this is the sexualization of young girls in the media. Everywhere you turn, you see teenage celebrities down to their underwear posing on the cover of magazines, giving sex tips and talking about fabulous parties. This really gets into your mind and you begin to think that at 14 years old you should be having sex, you should be drinking, and etc. There is no one there to tell you that that isn’t really what girls do, so you make dumb choices. And honestly, media just propels that. The average for losing one’s virginity has dropped down to 15 or 16, which is incredibly low. But with media selling sex all day to young impressionable minds, it’s also really not a shock.

The unhealthy image of 25 year old women playing 16 year olds in shows sparks an obsession that often leads to eating disorders and depression when girls realize that they don’t fit into society’s “image of beauty”.  This is an issue that is really hard for girls to deal with, because they see beautiful women and expect to look like them and don’t. Since media also only represents a very small demographic of people, so people feel even more displaced if they are not white and skinny. In reality, the media is not a representation of how we should act our age at all. There is no place but in the media for 14 year olds to behaving sex and drinking and just being generally stupid and unsafe.