READING: “BODIES” BY SUZY ORBACH
Me and my friend got talking about children and how they’re entering puberty and how my friend is worried about her daughter comparing herself to others and bringing herself down by not having spag results as good as others or her body looking different from other girls bodies.
It really struck a cord with me and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I remember struggling with my body changing, hips amd thighs being larger than other girls, breasts smaller, there was this constant obsession and comparison to other girls. And then the eating less process started, decision to be “vegetarian” which only really meant esting grapes for most of the time. My periods stopped for 6 months. I remember my friends having bulimia and other eating disorders. I have friends now whose daughter is anorexic, because in gymnastics someone mentioned she was “too heavy” to be lifted. I am devastated by movies such as Wicked still pushing the image of the unhealthy thin Arianna Grande as the example to follow. The problem with today’s visual culture in general is that it has “cast our relations to our body as a place of hyper-criticism”(Bodies, Suzy Orbach)
According to Suzie Orbach:
“Teenage girls in particular are so caught up in worries about their body size that very few of them eat in relation to appetite and stop when they are physically satisfied. Such concepts as appetite and satiety elude them. They are a generation who have grown up with mothers who worry about the acceptability of their bodies and who they’ve seen be inconsistent, wary and often anxious about their own eating, size and body shape.
These daughters have learned from early on to be cautious around food, relying on rules and regulations, which they occasionally rebel against, rather than biological cues. What has become the eating norm for teenage girls is far from what would have been considered ‘normal’ eating twenty years ago.
Emotional and biological rebellions against a life of food restriction, deprivation and compulsive exercising can produce either anorectic-style responses or what appears to be its opposite – out-of-control eating.”
That feeling, of not belonging, while wanting to belong, it is so incredibly strong, even Louise Burgeois, the great artist, even she mentions in the Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008) movie that as a girl “I thought I was too fat, and I thought that was unnacceptable”
As a woman who went through similar problems during puberty but having nobody to talk to at that time I really want to do something to make the change, to help these girls love themselves and appreciate their bodies, to stop judging themselves and one another, to work as a team rather than against each other. But the trigger of that change has to come from us, adults, we need to not only lead by example, we need to love ourselves and teach them how to love themselves. I have decided to have a workshop at my kids school, for pubescent girls, teaching how to love their bodies and be supportive of one another in this time of change. I know what I want to talk about. I just don’t know what assignments/exercises to give them.
IDEAS:
Draw/paint themselves, then swap papers and discuss/tell one another what are the positive things about that person, what do they like about one another. That’s very important, to value one another, to notice, to be able to tell each other positive things about the way we look instead of being “helpful” by offering what could be changed and fixed and amended
Make them try a sport: running, but trying to do it as if they only had one leg, to get them to realise how amazing it is to have a whole healthy body
Meditation with music with positive affirmations they could continually repeat to themselves.(Kasia)
Dancing to music together, without judgement, in a circle, to feel they have one anothers support
Showing them how to dress imaginatively, not to show off your body’s every inch, but to express how you’re actually feeling today, to lift your mood, to chose a colour that matches your state of mind
My email to head teacher:
Dear Ms Gandhi,
I talk to mothers of pubescent girls, I myself used to be a pubescent girl and my Daughter will reach puberty in a couple of years. I remember how difficult and traumatic it was for me. I would like to conduct a lecture/workshop at Aldersbrook Primary for pubescent girls. I would like to help change negative image of body changing during puberty amongst girls, I propose a workshop for 10-11 year olds to prepare them for the changes and help them face those changes with love and respect for their own bodies, without constant comparison to their peers bodies, teaching them understanding that every body is different and beautiful in it’s own unique way, that the size of clothes they wer should not define them. That the strength in women is when we work together and support one another and not when we use our body differences as tools to judge one another. That pubescent girls should treat one another with care and respect and judge one another while their bodoes are changing.
Please see my workshop proposal below and Let me know what you think.
Kind regards
I’M ALSO WORKING ON LAMP NO5 to continue the process of loving myself, accepting the wrinkles, appreciating the grey hair strands and stitching together the hip and back pains. The quest for reclaiming love of myself through art continues. Figuring out how to add it to the rest of the lamps and testing wire hanging at the church to make sure it is stable and doesn’t bend but also protect the wire with foam so it doesn’t cut into the limestone columns
