ellenhEllen Haroutunian is a writer, counselor, theologian and deep thinker, living and working in the Denver area. You can read more of Ellen’s thoughts at her blog.

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new feminists 1Seeking the New Feminists: Thoughts on Body Image

As a young girl my daughter was often amazed to hear of how relatively recent the idea is that a woman is free to pursue her life’s work and dreams. She grew up in an era in which it was readily assumed that a smart girl would go to college and that she is just as capable of becoming a doctor or pilot as her husband, if she chooses to marry. Maybe it is evidence of the success of the feminist movement of the turbulent 60’s and 70’s that she and so many other young women find any other way of thinking hard to imagine.

I grew up when that wave of feminism was beginning to find its footing. It was shaped in the wake of Betty Friedan’s controversial best seller, The Feminine Mystique, which explored the “problem that had no name”. Specifically, it was the unspoken lack of fulfillment and quiet desperation that so many women found in their lives. Women were taught and fully believed that they were meant to find all of their fulfillment and meaning in being wives and mothers. Life meant seeking to be the ideal 50’s housewife. “Biology is destiny,” they were told. They felt horribly guilty in admitting that this promised fulfillment was not happening.

The quest of this new feminism was truly a quest for personhood. Freidan encouraged women in their education, and to develop their intelligence and abilities. Who are we, she asked, apart from the roles that we may assume? What do we think? How does a female perspective impact society, politics, the world? From this challenge came the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, which began to give women a collective voice on many social and political issues.

It was powerful for me as a young girl, to hear NOW quoted on the evening news on what seemed then to be every night. The news anchors would report a political story and then add, “And representatives from NOW say…” because their view on matters was to be respected. In my social studies classes (and often, in very unrelated classes) we’d be discussing why shouldn’t a girl grow up to be a doctor? Or a pilot? Or a Senator? I felt a quiet thrill. I really hadn’t thought that I was incapable of such things, but I believed the assumption that women just didn’t. My mom would look at me at times and say with more than a little envy, “Wow, you can be anything you want to be.” It didn’t understand it fully then, but the awe in her voice and that of her friends spoke loudly.

Of course, feminists were deeply mistrusted and seen as man-hating, child-neglecting, bra-burning bitches who took women away from the family and threatened the sanctity of the home. However, the idea of not working outside the home for the sake of the “sanctity” of the home was only a novelty for those who had not listened to history. It was a decidedly classist fear, as working outside of the home had been the daily reality of women of color and women from low income stations for centuries. Women have always tended to tasks both within the realm of the household and outside of it, creating goods, doing business, and managing employees as well. Conversely, the reality is that today, women who are successful doctors and lawyers and pastors have not stopped caring for the wellbeing of their marriages or families. If anything, they are more educated and bring more skill and commitment to these things. Nurturing and relationships will always be important to women. These are not roles to be enforced, but an essence to be freed, embraced, and dare I say, trusted.

Whatever you may think of the feminists, their 1966 purpose statement said, “NOW is dedicated to the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must have the chance to develop their fullest human potential.” The most important thing that has ever been sought through this movement was a full stake in humanness— an elevation to personhood. I will be forever grateful for that. But even as a young woman with so many doors beginning to open before me, I slowly became aware that I needed more than freedom of opportunity. I had truly taken all the rhetoric about personhood to heart, so much so that a counselor friend once said to me, “You see yourself as a person, but not as a woman.” Well, what’s the difference, I wondered? Even so, his statement resonated deeply within me. I needed to discover and embrace the fullness of my female essence: what is unique about being female and what that means for my relationships and my community. It was about far more than roles or what I could or could not do.

In fighting the battle for equality we may have inadvertently lost a bit of ourselves. The truth is, biology does indeed create much of our destinies. But that has too often been looked at in a negative light. It is true that our bodies are more vulnerable than male bodies. Women have paid a greater price in life because of that on many levels. Feminist Lisa Isherwood says that this has caused women to “disassociate themselves from their bodies and even to dismember them through various surgical interventions and in so doing, women are ripped from their bodies as sources of spirituality, wisdom and power.” Women are now faced with more profound ambivalence regarding our bodies than ever. In an age of unprecedented female freedom, we are faced with a cult of extreme, jutting-rib, health-threatening thinness as a standard of beauty along with a proliferation of porn, which portrays bodies that are falsely enhanced as caricature-like representations of the female form. Our bodies are still not our own.

The loss of female flesh and curves corresponded with the movement of women into the corporate boardroom. Apparently female “hardbodies” were less threatening to the powers that be than curvy female flesh. Isherwood says that thinness is ultimately about obedience. Is it not accident that as women have increased in their ability and desire to have a voice and impact in all arenas— corporate America, politics and religion— that our bodies have shrunk in proportion. She adds, “In corporate America, the fleshy, motherly woman is seen as threatening for she represents alternative values, even an alternative way of knowing and understanding. To succeed in the male bastion of power, she needed to reduce and become, as he is, a hard body, devoid of (in comparison to the male body) excess fleshiness. A woman is not to take up too much space.”

This has contributed to the confusion that seems to surround the understanding and treatment of women in our culture today. It had been said by early feminists that women had been controlled and shaped “under the male gaze” and thus we needed to find our personhood in our own right. Woman may have more freedoms now than ever but she is still blatantly objectified in everything from advertising to industry. The message that women constantly receive in this culture is that a woman must change herself according to what others need, but especially in order to fit the male fantasy of woman. Otherwise, our otherness and our uniqueness is too much to contend with. Other than an occasional woman’s magazine article or an Oprah show, there has been a strange silence within our culture on the many confusing and conflicting issues of women’s bodies and body image. Even in the magazines that speak out, there will be contradictory messages, such as pages of ads containing size zero models just opposite of pages of recipes for an easy chocolate torte or dinners fully marinated in butter.  One counselor of teens notes that some teen magazines have eliminated the food advertisements altogether, giving young girls the body-denying message: “don’t be hungry”.

We have also been surprisingly quiet about pornography. It had been the “liberated woman’s prerogative” to decide when and how to use her body for sex. The feminist movement had been supportive of nude beaches, for example, feeling that a woman should be able to bear her bare breast as a man does. However, women will always live in their bodies differently than men. The impact and cost for woman is not the same. Under the male gaze she has been utilized for entertainment, measured, rated and given value according to her sex appeal. Naturally, this has served only to deepen our ambivalence about our own bodies. Women are often alternately pampering them and paying excruciating attention to every ounce, and hating them as (we) subject them to the cult of extreme thinness and impossible standards.

The two issues are related, of course. In a culture that tolerates the demeaning nature of porn, women must wrangle and subdue her body to fit standards of beauty that occur naturally in a very miniscule percentage of women. In doing so, we ironically cooperate with a view of woman that asserts that she is available for the male gaze and is subordinate to that. It is no accident that as a woman ages in America, and the years of youth and beauty are behind her, she is seen as having less power and has less voice. Young women are more likely to see a perfectly sculpted young actress as a role model than a stateswoman or a female astronaut. Isherwood says that we are given two ideals – the pornographic and the anorexic. The anorexic is sexually safer.

Maybe this is all evidence that it is an astounding thing to be a woman. Our bodies and our presence have never elicited a neutral response in any time or culture. We create life, which is an ability so amazing that writer Kathleen Norris says that leaders of religion throughout the millennia (another male bastion) have never forgiven us for it. Our bodies tell a story and reveal wisdom about the journey of life as they change with their unique female seasons. We take on extra weight during menses and pregnancy and we may lose that again while breastfeeding an infant. We get weightier as we near menopause, which I see as a beautiful metaphor for that stage of a woman’s life. We have earned our space and our wisdom. Our bodily rhythms reflect the seasons of earth through which we have created traditions for life together that seem to stop time, holding us in the eternal now for the sheer enjoyment of these moments.

This changeability of woman has been measured in a way that leaves us seemingly lacking. Isherwood says that the male standard is unchangeability, hardness, self-sufficient and power. That has set the standard as to how humanity is to be understood. By contrast, the female body brings forth the ideas of vulnerability, adaptability, relationality and collaboration. Our very being is disruptive to power structures and reductionist ideas of what it means to be human. Our female essence brings vital qualities to the human experience. To fully embrace, love and protect our bodies is the means by which we begin to embrace our female essence. And I suspect that to do this is the kindest way to have positive impact on our husbands, brothers and sons, who need some balance for the competitive jungle mentality of power and violence that often consumes their souls. For their sake and ours, we must learn to “be”.

There are still many inequalities that remain, and therefore much more work to be done. But for women to begin to see the life-nurturing power of our being and to offer that in a culture changing way we must each begin to befriend and embrace the wisdom of the female form. Just as important, we must begin to see the beauty in all female forms and celebrate that intentionally and communally. In this culture, to be tall, thin and blond is to have “made it” and to accept a boyfriend or husband’s attachment to porn is “cool”. To cooperate with that way of thinking is to live disingenuously, as those who live for competition, not as nurturers of life and community. In a society that is about control and submission, winners and losers, we must be the voices that encourage each woman to embrace her body, accept, love and live in it, curves— even rolls— and all, as an assertion of full female personhood. For when we push out or diminish others, we lose ourselves.

Ultimately, to love and accept the female body, which includes hormonally-led placement of curves and flesh, is a justice issue. We can help each other to live out full personhood incarnationally— in our bodies, enfleshed and whole, knowing the fullness of what it is to be beautifully human. In that way, we witness and express the female Imago Dei, the very image of God.

article by ellen haroutunian, all rights reserved

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