Let her who is satisfied with her physical attributes raise her hand!
Most people, and especially most women, are dissatisfied with their appearance, their weight and/or the shape of certain parts of their body.
Women engage intensively in grooming and shaping up, and spend no small amount of time inspecting, examining and actually even falling into a depression on account of their breasts being too small, too large or too pendulous.
Fat legs, broad hips and other defects are a source of endless suffering. The unrelenting and, from her point of view, disadvantageous comparison with the ideal model can be highly frustrating to a woman unable to free herself from this dictate and make friends with her body.
Too many women feel not without cause - as if they were under constant judgmental scrutiny. While men win the role of observers and evaluators, so to speak, women are the objects of such observations and evaluations. The balance of forces between them is such that men select and women are being selected. The woman being depicted as a sexual object, and the use that is made of her and her body, particularly in advertising, generate a process of women's dehumanization; woman is not a person, but rather something else - a symbol, an object, an exhibit, an ideal and so forth.
Women unconsciously internalize this message and invest a great deal of effort in meeting expectations and finding favor. Needless to say how this must negatively effect their degree of self esteem. The American women's magazine Marie Claire recently published the findings of a survey. Of hundreds of men who were asked whether they felt embarrassed or bothered by what their spouses thought of their appearance, sixty-seven percent replied in the negative. But eighty percent of women answering the same question replied that they were embarrassed or ashamed of their bodies, or certain body parts, and that they were afraid their bodies were "not beautiful enough.
Beauty, that was supposed to be an abstract notion like freedom, love or the soul, has long since become a product to the marketed, and a means of control and subjugation, directed mainly at women. Under the influence of social forces possessing vested interests, the ones that control magazines, the advertising trade, television and cinema, the components of womanly beauty are assigned their standard specifications, a recipe, as it were, based on clearly defined and absolute components.
The beautiful woman, so the contemporary social message informs us, is very slender, very young, rather tall, and fair complexioned. Such ideals of feminine pulchritude, held up to view for emulation and as standards for comparison, gaze upon us from every advertisement, practically shrieking, with every inch of their emaciated flesh I am attractive. We are all influenced by these messages. Women use them as a yardstick for measuring their own attractiveness, thus arriving at a warped perception of their own physical attributes as being hopelessly deficient or defective.
The female child imbibes, with her mother's milk, the great significance that society - with its predominantly male-oriented perceptions - ascribes to her outward appearance. Little girls soon learn that they must try to find favor in the eye of their beholders, that their appearance is a matter of social value, and that beauty is a basic dimension in woman's sexual roles. The child reaches puberty in full awareness of the significance of her looks, and usually suffers emotional problems related to that aspect of herself. Looks being linked to self-esteem, a body that fails to conform to the reigning ideal may well bring its owner to low self-esteem and a sense of shame and insecurity. Here, society makes no allowances. Constant anxious attention to her appearance becomes a major part of woman's life, a source of frustration, unflagging investment and invidious comparison. She internalizes the message that her appearance will be her passport to success in life, and that her efforts to achieve physical perfection will be rewarded, in both her personal and her professional life. A body conforming to socially dictated criteria becomes women's status symbol. None of which, of course, makes women any happier or healthier. On the contrary, such constraints foster self-hatred and a stinging sense of failure.
Nili Raam is a renown expert in her field in Israel, as a Comunication Consultant for business, professional and executive improvement. She is authour of a few published books and many articles. niliraam@netvision.net.il
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