the body project: part i

I’ve been reading The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s really fascinating to read about the different and changing attitudes about the adolescent girl’s body over the past century. Not just girls’ attitudes about their own bodies, but American society’s views of them as well. Joan also quotes a lot from different girls’ diaries throughout the 20th Century, and it’s making me want to dig up my old journals next time I go “back home” (many of my personal effects are currently in storage in my in-laws’ basement). However, I don’t think I’ll find much in the way of image and body observation in those old journals. I wrote much more extensively about my relationships with others, or my lack of relationships with some boys!

Usually around the summertimes of my teens I believe I thought briefly about getting “toned up” but apparently it was never important enough to me to have a good follow-through. A couple of times in my later high school years and college years, I would go through times of what I thought of as “vanity” where I set out to lose a few pounds, but I always ended up abandoning the project after a few days when it occurred to me that people should (and did!) like me just the way I was. Plus I just really liked sweet stuff. Mmm, cookies...

I held firmly to this belief for much of the time, especially once I began actively looking for my “knight in shining armor,” which started in my early twenties. Sometimes I’d think to myself: you would probably get more male attention if you lost a few pounds, but then I would just remind myself that I DID NOT want to marry a man who valued me because of a slim figure.

But I’ve gotten off-track! Back to The Body Project… I can definitely identify with some of society’s views on my adolescent body that I saw as standards to be held to. Case in point: modesty. When I was in junior high and high school, modesty was a big deal to me. Going against the grain and keeping my skin off-limits to the public was a priority. Keeping my shape a mystery was also important, except where absolutely necessary. Like at work. Where I worked AS A LIFEGUARD and SWIM INSTRUCTOR. I’m full of contradictions, I tell ya. But at least that modesty stuff explains why one will find very few photos of me, as a teen, where I’m not wearing big old baggy jeans and an oversize shirt. Okay, it was also the alt/grunge era… but seriously I never donned a strapless gown for a dance, mostly because I knew how uncomfortable I would be that everyone could see my whole décolletage. But it wasn’t really insecurity about my image; I just thought that it wasn’t modest to let guys see that much of me. I was to remain a shrouded mystery.

Let me tie up this post by saying that there will be more to come about this book, once I finish it, and then I have two more *gems* on my bookshelf to get into.