I don’t know how many times I’ve looked into my friends’ eyes and told them that they are beautiful and have them not believe me. But I also don’t know how many times the people I love have looked into my eyes and told me that I was beautiful, and I thought they were lying to make me feel better.
We all know about how the media and popular culture contributes to body image issues, and we’ve all met someone with low self-esteem, if we’re not personally dealing with it ourselves.
But I can’t just brush it off anymore; I’ve seen so many amazing women almost be destroyed by this obsession to be thin.
I have multiple friends who are struggling or have struggled with eating disorders. I was lucky enough to get two of them to tell me their stories; they were hard for me to hear, so I can only imagine how hard they were for them to share.
Zoe
I first wanted to speak to Camosun student Zoe Franke, whom I’ve gone to school with since Grade 2. I wasn’t oblivious to her struggles, but I never truly understood the depth and severity of them until now.
In elementary school, seven- and eight-year-olds romp around the playground wearing whatever they found in the closet that morning and play games with their imaginations. The last thing on their minds is what the other children are thinking of them.
That’s how it felt when I was in primary school, but Franke’s mind was somewhere other than hide-and-seek.
Franke says that while she was a little chubby in grade school, it wasn’t nearly unhealthy. She was just a kid, and it was the other kids that made her feel fat; children can be cruel.
Even from a young age, people somehow learn that looking a certain way is “wrong.” These early signs of rejection from Franke’s peers led to an unhealthy obsession over food. The preoccupation with her diet started in middle school.
“I started never eating breakfast and throwing away my lunches. I felt uncomfortable eating around people because I thought it would enforce that idea that ‘she’s fat because she eats,’” explains Franke. “It got to the point where I enjoyed hearing my stomach cry in protest.”
But the skipped meals didn’t change her classmates’ behaviour towards her. Because of a curvy figure and a larger bottom, Franke was immediately ostracized by the boys in school, she says. These boys made no effort to keep their opinions a secret, either.
“I recall being approached all the time by classmates as they asked me why I had ‘so much junk in the trunk,’ or overheard boys on the sidelines whisper, ‘Look at fatty run!’ in gym class. It left me feeling too self-conscious to look at anyone,” says Franke.
This was about the time that Franke and I became friends. I remember her telling me what happened and how it made her all feel, and even back then I was astounded at the apathy that our peers were showing her.
I didn’t understand, because when I looked at my friend all I saw was beauty, but most kids around us were succeeding in making her feel ugly.
Now, when asked what part of this problem is, Franke illustrates that we are drowned in touched-up images of what men and women “should” look like. When we are exposed to these beautiful people who look so happy, we begin to compare ourselves to them and the others around us. Franke contends that we are the generation of comparison.
“We have access to an endless amount of markers for what it looks like to be attractive. However, we soon find ourselves hopeless and depressed because what we’re trying to measure up to doesn’t exist,” she says. “Yet we still starve ourselves and make ourselves miserable until we believe we’re good enoughÉ skinny enough… beautiful enough…”
Franke has never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder or hospitalized because of her habits. She’s a small-town, intelligent, talented, and hard-working young woman who has been affected and hurt by this idea that success is a number on a scale.
Franke says something that people don’t understand is that everyone is beautiful as a unique individual, which is what many say and what many want to believe. But I don’t think Franke quite believes it herself.
“I believed, and still believe, that if I don’t weigh a certain amount then no one will find me attractive,” she says. “Whenever I starved, I liked to think that the empty feeling was getting me closer to who I wanted to be, because I felt lighter.”
Kaitlin
Last year, I became friends with a girl named Kaitlin (Kaitlin asked that her last name not be used for this story). She’s that person who walks into a room and makes it instantly brighter inside. I have heard multiple people describe her as ethereal and fairy-like because she always smiling and always so sweet. You would never know that she harbours so much hate for herself.
Kaitlin tells me that she has had negative thoughts and feelings about her body for as long as she can remember. She started running competitively in Grade 3 and recalls thinking that her legs were huge. She also remembers not eating dessert or dinners or drinking water for fear of getting fat. At this point in her life, she didn’t know that eating disorders existed.
In Grade 7, she began to weigh herself. When she would eat she would weigh 71 pounds, as opposed to 65 pounds when she wasn’t eating. It was at that moment that she became obsessed with the numbers.
High school only brought more issues for Kaitlin; she tells me that she’s so thankful she never has to go back. In grades 11 and 12 she was mentally bullied and manipulated, and felt trapped. One girl in school, with her own body image issues, led her further down a destructive path.
“This girl started showing me pictures of sick girls with titles such as ‘Skip dinner, get thinner.’ I became obsessed with these pictures and absurd diet programs,” says Kaitlin. “I was convinced that all my problems would disappear if I lost weight, and maybe people would stop treating me like shit if I was scary thin.”
But, of course, that wasn’t the case, and it turned out to be the exact opposite. Kaitlin had long, beautiful hair down to her waist, and it all fell out and became frail. Her lips cracked and lost colour, her face became pale, and dark circles formed under her eyes.
“I was very thin and slowly killing myself,” she says.
On top of that, she became isolated and lost all of her friends. But she craved the feeling she got when she starved: a feeling of thinness, and elegance, and grace.
“When I eat, I can feel my body expanding instantly and it feels like I am trapped in my skin, as if I can’t breathe,” says Kaitlin, “like food is draining all of the oxygen out of me and expanding my waist at the same time.”
Kaitlin says she can’t wear tight tank tops, jeans, or strapless dresses because she believes that she looks huge. She worries about everything, especially about people judging her and talking behind her back.
A lot of this stress contributed to her decision to leave school. She too was a Camosun student, but she only attended for a couple of weeks before everything started to weigh her down.
“I only attended for two weeks, but I was already feeling the pressure of payment deadlines and heavy school load,” she says. “It’s impossible to focus in school and complete assignments if you’re malnourished and starving.”
I asked Kaitlin what she thought was wrong with society in regards to body image, and she had no shortage of opinion. She says that we need to put less emphasis on superficial things and believes that we need to care more about the environment and compassion towards people and animals, instead of being skinny. She’s also a firm believer that love can cure all and brings that with her every day to fight against this form of mental illness.
“You see beautiful thin models, actresses, or singers, and it makes you think, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I look like that?’ Society makes you think that’s what you need and that’s what’s important, but it’s all just an illusion, and it won’t provide you with happiness,” she says. “Now I know that love is the key to happiness. Whether you love someone, or something, or yourself. But as long as you love, happiness will follow.”
A sociologist’s view
The last person I talked to was Camosun sociology teacher Peter Ove. I approached him with a lot of “why” questions about our obsession with weight and looks, hoping to gain a deeper understanding of body-image issues within people, especially women.
I have had several friends with extreme body-image issues and eating disorders. I, along with countless other girls and women, struggle with being happy the way I am. Ove says that from the moment we are born, we’re given expectations to live up to with the simple words, “It’s a girl.” We are encouraged to think about ourselves as being women and being feminine.
“From that early age, women are constantly encouraged to think about themselves in relation to their appearance, which brings us back to eating disorders, how they look at themselves, and the disproportionate emphasis that society places on women’s appearances, as opposed to men’s appearances,” he says.
Ove suggests that a possible reason for this thin-female obsession has to do with a patriarchal society where men still hold the vast majority of the dominant positions. Because of this, women seem more favourable when they take up less space. This theory is used as an argument to prove why weight and body shape affect women and girls so much.
Ove also points out that media is a main contributing factor. It has a significant influence, one that people can’t hope to escape. So often we see movies, TV shows, music videos, and advertisements that feature women being praised for their beauty, which is validated by their relationships with men.
Ove says that by experiencing these stories that the media puts out for us to see, we’re not immediately affected in an obvious way. Each individual absorbs different information at different rates, and eventually we cannot avoid its influence because it’s so deeply ingrained.
Ove says to think about television sitcoms and what we see on them. We witness young and attractive women together with middle-aged, sometimes out-of-shape men.
“We see this dynamic all of the time where it’s okay for the men to not look as good, according to our societal standards, as the women,” says Ove.
Companies and corporations are starting campaigns that support women of all shapes and sizes, stating that we’re all beautiful. But Ove realizes that they are missing the whole point.
“These kinds of messages, like, ‘You’re beautiful too, even though you’re not super thin,’ still put too much emphasis on the value of women related to their appearance and not related to their skill set or to them as a person,” he says.
As we try to support and comfort women of all body sizes, it’s still about looks and all about weight. We should be celebrating women for the talents, ambitions, personalities, and traits that make them unique as people and as contributors to society, not for their numbers on a scale.
A sad truth: this is unlikely to happen. Not only does it benefit corporations who are selling us products for us to feel bad about ourselves, but this flaw of only accepting and placing value on women for their appearance was the same 100 years ago and long before that. The only thing that has changed is what our society considers beautiful.
Ove says that there’s “not a simple solution to making women feel better about themselves; it’s just not going to be adequate.”
The unlikeliness of any solution is heartbreaking. I don’t want to see people struggle with their bodies anymore. How do we raise our children to respect everyone, despite their looks, and to put more importance on what that person has to offer?
Somewhere out there, Zoe Franke, Kaitlin, and other women like them imagine a better, thinner, more attractive version of themselves.
They want to be that better version, so they will diet, exercise, apply makeup, and curl their hair. Other women want it so bad they turn to starvation, laxatives, binging and purging, and repeating, just to feel acceptable in society.
And I sometimes feel hopeless that women will ever feel acceptable.