Delaney Ch.6 Excersise #2

I can think of several times that I tried to make my body conform to the cultural norm or standard. It all started in middle school when bodies started to matter, when the word “fat” was a word worse than any other. It was ridiculous, I went to a very small middle school so as my body changed everyone noticed it whether they wanted to or not. This put pressure on all of the girls in my class to try and control our changing bodies, some of us gained weight while others lost it. I noticed this created a clique between the two groups, those of us that gained it were so jealous of the ones that lost it that we were willing to speak badly about them even though we probably didn’t mean everything we said.
So what did I do? I joined a gym. LA Fitness had just opened by my house and my friend and I joined, we thought we were so cool going to the gym. We went everyday for the whole summer, and we did lose some weight, but we quit going once we lost it. We thought our weight loss was complete, we weren’t going to the gym to become healthy or change our life style, and we were doing it for the momentary satisfaction. I am glad I went to the gym instead of developing an eating disorder. When I got into high school I began to see the many ways that people would conform their bodies to society standards. Girls would wear makeup everyday religiously and it seemed like everyone had something to complain about their body. I watched girls starve themselves, binge eat and purge, I actually had a girl on my basket ball team who only joined to lose weight and then passed out on the court from de hydration and she hadn’t eaten in a couple days.
Most of these girls did lose weight, and even though most of them looked sick, people would tell them “oh you look so good”. This disgusted me, and after thinking about the culture of our beauty, I realized that our culture doesn’t care if we are healthy, our culture cares if we are a certain size, where certain clothes, and look a certain way. Everybody is going for that momentary satisfaction and not thinking about making healthy life choices. Society has an impossible image of the perfect women, not a lot of women are a size 2. Our society should stop putting so much pressure on women. I love the comparison that this chapter makes of the expectations society has for us and the product they give us. There are fast food restaurants on every corner but we have to be a size two. Our culture has a horrible and unfair view of the body.