In the YMCA Locker Room
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Ours is a culture that idealizes thinness. From movie stars to magazine models to constant advice from morning television programs and women's magazines about how to loose weight, keep weight off, or not gain weight in the first place, it's all but impossible to escape the thin credo.
Consider these statistics:
- Most fashion models are thinner than 98% of American women. Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman; today’s models weigh 23 percent less.
- 69 percent of Playboy models and 69 percent of Miss America contestants weighed 15 percent or more below the expected weight for their age and height category. Fifteen percent below one's expected weight is part of the criteria for an anorexia diagnosis.
- A woman with Barbie-doll proportions would have a back too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body cavity would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel.
- 42 percent of elementary school girls between the 1st and 3rd grades want to be thinner. That number jumps to 76 percent by age 17, and and 86 percent for adult women.
- 45 percent of medically-underweight women think they're fat.
- It is estimated that the diet industry alone is worth $100 billion a year.
- Plastic surgery is the fastest-growing, and one of the largest, medical specialties.
- It's been estimated that young women today see more images of beautiful women in one day than their mothers saw through their entire adolescence, and that viewing pictures of television/movie stars and magazine models has a direct correlation with body dissatisfaction.
Sound overblown? Guys, just have a direct conversation with the women in your life -- mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives -- and ask them if they're happy with the way they look. Some of us will answer honestly -- that, yes, we want to be thinner. Skinny, even, if there are wishes being granted. Others will couch it as wanting to be in better shape, or that we'd just like to or need to eat better. But beneath that, the large majority of women in this country have an overall dissatisfaction with their bodies.
I am no stranger to this. I first tired dieting when I was 11. At 5'2" and less than 120 lbs., I spent my high school years dreading having to don a skin-tight GS suit for ski races or breeches for horse shows, and my college years in fear of gaining the dreaded "Freshman 15." These days, I wish that, in most pictures, my face was just a little less round, my thighs a little less full, my legs a little less short. And don't even get me started on pictures of me in a swimsuit.
I know that I am "fine" -- that I'm not overweight, that I'm at least average if not slightly below (depending on what criteria you're using), that my fears are largely unfounded.
But I also know that I am not alone.
Get any group of women together, hang around long enough, and you'll hear phrases like, "I just need to loose another 10 pounds," or, "I feel fat," or the go-to standard, "Do I look fat in this?" Listen to any woman describe another woman, and the first descriptor will almost always be related to the fact that she's either thin or not thin (guilty as charged). There are exceptions, sure. But even with groups of women who are exceptions -- there are often exceptions to those exceptions (follow?).
So, what to do about these body woes? Stop shopping for clothes? Stop watching TV or movies? Stop reading Shape, or Cosmo, or (gasp!) US Weekly? Perhaps that would be a start. Because all of the knowledge in the world that every one of those pics has been airbrushed does not make you feel better after viewing page upon page of 6-foot, 115 lb., six-pack-ab-having models. But I really, really, really enjoy my weekly dose of "Stars -- They're Just Like Us!" and brain candy.
Since starting a master's swim program, though, I think I've found the answer.
First of all, I've found that the better shape I'm in, the better I feel. And regardless if the scale has moved at all -- in either direction -- the less I care about how I look or how much I weigh. I don't work out because I want to loose weight. I work out to feel strong, because it takes the guilt out of eating, and because it lets me escape from constantly caring about an unattainable image and number on a scale.
And second, I've discovered that a trip to the YMCA women's locker room after the Master's swim team practice can clear up all sorts of misgivings that there's any such thing as a perfect body. The bodies range from stick thin to past obese. There are heavier women with tight, toned muscles and attractive breasts. There are skinny women with cellulite and boobs that hang under each arm. And there's an entire range that falls in between. But not one single one of them even comes close to the ideal purported by today's media. Nudity seems the great equalizer, and damn is it ever refreshing!
I never feel better -- for both the first and second reasons cited -- than I do after Master's swimming. So good, in fact, that it's an experience I wish for all women I know...and those I don't. If everyone had a similar opportunity -- a place they could go to see that without makeup and designer clothes and airbrushing, none of us look like the girls in the pictures or those walking the red carpet -- I have a feeling that body-image issues would quickly become a thing of the past.
And wouldn't that be a wonderful world.
Posted by Erin 12:01 PM
2 Comments:
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- Anonymous said...
4/11/2007 3:57 PMI think you're gorgeous!- patrick manion said...
4/12/2007 6:47 PMYou really should submit these for publication...