Weight-think

When studying Simone de Beauvoir for those qualifying exams, I remember being struck by how much of her feminism seemed to be about allowing female geniuses to flourish just as well as male ones do. As a non-genius reader of Beauvoir, it occurred to me that perhaps this was part of what feminism should be about, but really, most of us, male or female, are not staying up nights wondering if we'll be ranked first, or second after Sartre. The question of whether women will number among the super-duper-elite is important, with crucial trickle-down impact as well, but not everything.

So it goes with the problem of women's weight-think. By "weight-think" I mean the extent to which even women who are not all that worried about weight are worried about their weight, and are on some level, at meal times but other times as well, distracted by calories-in, calories-out calculations, thigh-fixations, etc. Isabel Archer describes it well; all I'll add is that it's a mindset that impacts far more women than those anyone would think to classify as having "a problem" in that area, that it extends beyond the yuppie sort, and that it's a major question feminism-of-the-"first-world" needs to be dealing with. Women are wasting massive amounts of time and energy on this, are not necessarily the healthier for it, and - and this I keep repeating - a good number of the women obsessing, if they "let themselves go," would still be quite slim, perhaps just not as thin. (The obsessing tends to be worst among the women for whom magazine-cover proportions seem at least theoretically attainable, so yes, there are some class variations in this.)

Here, as with feminism generally, one finds several interrelated but ultimately separate issues. One is that weight-think prevents some brilliant women from achieving great heights. This, in turn, is a problem both for those women and for society as a whole, which thus continues to associate "achieving great heights" with maleness. The other is that weight-think prevents average/mediocre women from thinking about other things, from enjoying their lives, etc. It's likely that weight-think keeps some women from reaching the "brilliant" category, but even without weight-think, most women, like most men, would not.

The issue, then, isn't - and here, I suppose, Isabel and I may disagree, but I'm not entirely sure, having never read A Room of One's Own - that women must lose themselves in work. Some should, yes, but neither most men nor most women are doing work they're going to lose themselves in. (This in response to commenter Sarah at Amber's.) It's that, as Isabel explains, "self-acceptance" at whichever weight isn't the whole answer. The goal shouldn't be for all women to look in the mirror and see "beautiful." It's for "beautiful" not to be the main important quality in most women's lives, not even most young women. Most women are sufficiently attractive as to attract a partner if they wish to do so; most, even after extreme dieting, will in no way other than measurements resemble runway models. We don't need to be telling ourselves we're just as hot as Angelina Jolie. We need to remember that objective, all-are-in-awe-of-it physical beauty, being largely fixed as well as temporary in its rare occurrences, is not a good goal towards which to channel 98% of one's mental energy. 5%, perhaps. It's not that attention to appearance should or realistically could be totally disregarded. But it should not come close to 100%. Physical beauty is both less important and less attainable than the woman weighed down by weight-think understands. Better to think about something else.

So it's great if weight-think is replaced by finding a cure for AIDS, or by being a more attentive stay-at-home mom. But even if weight-think just gets swapped for taking a walk, watching TV, reading a book, or doing some mundane task at work and thinking about, say, whether Pippa's single again and what this means for Harry, this, too, counts as progress.

(I could go on, re: the difference between devoting mental energy to one's beauty and the kind of physical adornment that's about self-expression and not OMG-cellulite, re: it being much better to ponder whether the toenails shall be pink or purple than how many calories are in that yogurt, but I think the above is enough for one post.)