Nov
16
November 16, 2006
When I was reading through your interesting, insightful, and moving comments from yesterday’s post, I watched this Dove-sponsored video that Sabine linked. Wow. I recommend viewing it, if you haven’t already; it’s a powerful reminder of exactly how manufactured the beauty industry is. I actually got snort of sniffly and eye-blinky towards the end, when the model’s face is being digitally manipulated, because it’s just so sad that even after all the hair and makeup and lighting there’s still so much trickery that goes into those images. Necks are lengthened, eyes are widened, every possible imperfection is erased. Is it any wonder we’re so batshit crazy when these are the false idols we are comparing ourselves to? They aren’t even fucking human.
Bah.
Not that raising a boy doesn’t have its own set of issues, and not that the question of whether or not we’ll have another baby someday who may in fact be female isn’t still on the table, but for now I’m glad that one of the many nebulous subjects to get paranoid about in the nonstop worryfest that is parenthood isn’t How To Raise a Girl With Healthy Self-Esteem, because holy shit, what a complicated mess.
It gives my heart paper-cuts to think about all the crappy social issues Riley will start being exposed all too soon, probably at an age that will blow my relatively jaded little mind, in fact.
Sometimes we talk about moving out to the country to an area with less affluence and related keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and no middle school kids going to raves and maybe less Xboxes per household because then Riley will grow up a simple kind of man, just like that Lynyrd Skynyrd song, and he’ll be happy and strong and he’ll know how to build a fire. And then I think, who am I kidding. We can’t shield him from everything, and are there really any non-Amish communities anymore who aren’t living in the exact same world as the rest of us? (Country kids probably hurry through their cow-milking chores to pulverize each other on Halo in their wireless-networked barns.)
We’re still going to teach him how to build a fire, though. You never know, he might go on Survivor XIX: New York Sewers someday.
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In completely unrelated news, how in the hell is Thanksgiving next week? I feel like there’s been some kind of government conspiracy because really, there’s just no way it can possibly be almost Thanksgiving ALREADY. Somebody moved this holiday back, by god. Oh, you can’t fool me.
(Pardon me while I maniacally shake my fist at the invisible helicopters.)
We will be driving to Oregon for the holiday, and even though I have begged and I have pleaded, JB will not let me leave Riley behind (it’s not like he would have been alone, I totally would have left Dog in the house too. They would have developed a symbiotic relationship, like anemones and clownfish, I’m sure of it!). So we will have 6+ hours in a car with a “spirited” toddler, which will be great, as long as “great” means “eye-clawingly horrible”.
I should have a lot to be thankful for once we get there, like the fact that the double jeopardy law exists, so if I murder my husband for wanting to spend the whole time elk hunting (“But babe, it’s the only time I get to go!”) (“You mean except for last weekend when you left me with a teething Hitler while you spent three days manfully pooping in the woods, RIGHT?”) and I am found innocent, then just like O.J. I can tell you all about it with impunity.
There better be a shitload of pumpkin pie available to me at all hours next week, is what I’m saying.
For a variation on my usual “what are you doing this weekend” theme, tell me, won’t you, what your Thanksgiving plans entail, if you are celebrating.
Nov
15
November 15, 2006
Did anyone else watch the documentary Thin on HBO last night? Man, I haven’t quite been able to get it out of my mind since.
The movie focuses on several woman in the Renfrew Center, an eating disorder clinic in Florida, and follows them through their recovery process. Some girls restrict food, some purge, one has a tube connected to her body that is supposed to force-feed her, which she uses to suck food directly from her stomach.
They all seem, at times, to be normal young women who sneak cigarettes and have screaming giggling fits while they throw themselves onto a bed; at other times they look like prisoners of war, their faces reflect an internal battle they are losing every day.
One girl, Brittany, was only 15 at the time this was filmed. Her eyes are ringed with dark makeup and her hair hangs in lank strings in front of her face. She looks incredibly young and lost, and we learn that her mother has an eating disorder too (when Mom shows up to pick at the cafeteria food in front of her daughter, we see exactly how pathological this is). Brittany says she and her mom used to “chew and spit” bags of candy together, and how it was such a good time.
Later, she sobs uncontrollably, “Why can’t everyone just let me die?”
I don’t know why these types of stories resonate with me so much – I’ve never had an eating disorder, nor have I ever been at an unhealthy weight. I guess because it’s such a pointless tragedy, this self-inflicted harm, and even though I’ve never gone down that particular path it’s all too easy to imagine the slippery fall from our society’s “normal” amount of body obsession to becoming one of those pitiful little girls with bird-bone shoulder blades and fragile, protruding spines who look into the mirror and see monsters, who want to physically peel the imaginary fat from their bodies until they disappear completely.
If the point of this movie is to reveal the chilling reality of people suffering with eating disorders, I think it does an amazing job. There certainly is no happy ending to the film, and I wonder about the filmmaker’s choice with that. It’s true that recovery is an elusive goal, but it is heartbreaking to leave those girls with so little hope for them.
I wish I knew how Brittany was doing now.
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