When Your Mother Says She's Fat

This letter written by Kasey Edwards to her mother is beautiful and absolutely heart-breaking. It's all about that self-defeating language women use and how it has to stop. We are all beautiful, we are all important, we are all special. We need to KNOW it. Our daughters need to KNOW it. The letter comes from the book Dear Mum, which is collection of letters from Australian celebrities to their mothers.

I'm posting the entire letter below, or you can read it here.

Dear Mum,
I was seven when I discovered that you were fat, ugly and horrible. Up until that point I had believed that you were beautiful - in every sense of the word. I remember flicking through old photo albums and staring at pictures of you standing on the deck of a boat. Your white strapless bathing suit looked so glamorous, just like a movie star. Whenever I had the chance I'd pull out that wondrous white bathing suit hidden in your bottom drawer and imagine a time when I'd be big enough to wear it; when I'd be like you.

But all of that changed when, one night, we were dressed up for a party and you said to me, ''Look at you, so thin, beautiful and lovely. And look at me, fat, ugly and horrible.''

At first I didn't understand what you meant.
''You're not fat,'' I said earnestly and innocently, and you replied, ''Yes I am, darling. I've always been fat; even as a child.''
In the days that followed I had some painful revelations that have shaped my whole life. I learned that:
1. You must be fat because mothers don't lie.
2. Fat is ugly and horrible.
3. When I grow up I'll look like you and therefore I will be fat, ugly and horrible too.

Years later, I looked back on this conversation and the hundreds that followed and cursed you for feeling so unattractive, insecure and unworthy. Because, as my first and most influential role model, you taught me to believe the same thing about myself.

With every grimace at your reflection in the mirror, every new wonder diet that was going to change your life, and every guilty spoon of ''Oh-I-really-shouldn't'', I learned that women must be thin to be valid and worthy. Girls must go without because their greatest contribution to the world is their physical beauty.
Just like you, I have spent my whole life feeling fat. When did fat become a feeling anyway? And because I believed I was fat, I knew I was no good.

But now that I am older, and a mother myself, I know that blaming you for my body hatred is unhelpful and unfair. I now understand that you too are a product of a long and rich lineage of women who were taught to loathe themselves.
Look at the example Nanna set for you. Despite being what could only be described as famine-victim chic, she dieted every day of her life until the day she died at 79 years of age. She used to put on make-up to walk to the letterbox for fear that somebody might see her unpainted face.

I remember her ''compassionate'' response when you announced that Dad had left you for another woman. Her first comment was, ''I don't understand why he'd leave you. You look after yourself, you wear lipstick. You're overweight - but not that much.''

Before Dad left, he provided no balm for your body-image torment either.
''Jesus, Jan,'' I overheard him say to you. ''It's not that hard. Energy in versus energy out. If you want to lose weight you just have to eat less.''

That night at dinner I watched you implement Dad's ''Energy In, Energy Out: Jesus, Jan, Just Eat Less'' weight-loss cure. You served up chow mein for dinner. (Remember how in 1980s Australian suburbia, a combination of mince, cabbage, and soy sauce was considered the height of exotic gourmet?) Everyone else's food was on a dinner plate except yours. You served your chow mein on a tiny bread-and-butter plate.

As you sat in front of that pathetic scoop of mince, silent tears streamed down your face. I said nothing. Not even when your shoulders started heaving from your distress. We all ate our dinner in silence. Nobody comforted you. Nobody told you to stop being ridiculous and get a proper plate. Nobody told you that you were already loved and already good enough. Your achievements and your worth - as a teacher of children with special needs and a devoted mother of three of your own - paled into insignificance when compared with the centimetres you couldn't lose from your waist.

It broke my heart to witness your despair and I'm sorry that I didn't rush to your defence. I'd already learned that it was your fault that you were fat. I'd even heard Dad describe losing weight as a ''simple'' process - yet one that you still couldn't come to grips with. The lesson: you didn't deserve any food and you certainly didn't deserve any sympathy.

But I was wrong, Mum. Now I understand what it's like to grow up in a society that tells women that their beauty matters most, and at the same time defines a standard of beauty that is perpetually out of our reach. I also know the pain of internalising these messages. We have become our own jailors and we inflict our own punishments for failing to measure up. No one is crueller to us than we are to ourselves.

But this madness has to stop, Mum. It stops with you, it stops with me and it stops now. We deserve better - better than to have our days brought to ruin by bad body thoughts, wishing we were otherwise.

And it's not just about you and me any more. It's also about Violet. Your granddaughter is only 3 and I do not want body hatred to take root inside her and strangle her happiness, her confidence and her potential. I don't want Violet to believe that her beauty is her most important asset; that it will define her worth in the world. When Violet looks to us to learn how to be a woman, we need to be the best role models we can. We need to show her with our words and our actions that women are good enough just the way they are. And for her to believe us, we need to believe it ourselves.

The older we get, the more loved ones we lose to accidents and illness. Their passing is always tragic and far too soon. I sometimes think about what these friends - and the people who love them - wouldn't give for more time in a body that was healthy. A body that would allow them to live just a little longer. The size of that body's thighs or the lines on its face wouldn't matter. It would be alive and therefore it would be perfect.

Your body is perfect too. It allows you to disarm a room with your smile and infect everyone with your laugh. It gives you arms to wrap around Violet and squeeze her until she giggles. Every moment we spend worrying about our physical ''flaws'' is a moment wasted, a precious slice of life that we will never get back.

Let us honour and respect our bodies for what they do instead of despising them for how they appear. Focus on living healthy and active lives, let our weight fall where it may, and consign our body hatred in the past where it belongs. When I looked at that photo of you in the white bathing suit all those years ago, my innocent young eyes saw the truth. I saw unconditional love, beauty and wisdom. I saw my Mum.

Love, Kasey xx

Female Superheroes Revisited

Well, it seems to the desire to see more any female superheroes out there is growing and spreading. Joss Whedon has now weighed in (with the Daily Beast) on the topic of Hollywood's lack of super ladies:

Toymakers will tell you they won't sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, 'You see? It can’t be done.' It's stupid, and I'm hoping 'The Hunger Games' will lead to a paradigm shift. It's frustrating to me that I don't see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched 'The Avengers' and was like, 'My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,' and I thought, 'Yeah, of course they were.' I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: 'If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.'

Yes! Yes! Yes! I have yet to watch Buffy (I know, I know) but this is pushing me just a little bit more to make the Whedon plunge.

Also, in separate but related female superhero news, I bought the first season of the old Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series for my daughter, who now fully understands that girls can be superheroes and loves to say (especially while wearing her Wonder Woman cape), "Wonder Woman. Superhero. To the rescue." My review of the show so far: a tad lot sexist and shows from our youth are not as good as we remember them. Still my daughter likes it. That's all that matters for now.

Self-Defeating Language

I'm pretty good about not putting myself down in front of my daughter. It happens occasionally and I've been quick to recognize it and correct it.

But that doesn't mean I don't hear it internally.

The main source, like so many people who put themselves down, is appearance. Mostly my weight.

I'm not skinny. I never have been and I never will be. I'm also not morbidly obese. I'm somewhere in the middle. And stuck. I so often feel lost, helpless, uncomfortable, ugly, unworthy, unattractive, unsexy. It's these "uns" that I'm most sick of. But when I'm trying to be healthy that helpless feeling kicks in, the struggle to lose weight seems so difficult, that I turn to my usual comfort -- food. But food doesn't make me feel comfortable any more. Chocolate no longer makes me  feel better, nor does it even really taste good. It's a crutch. It's a habit. It's an addiction. I want and need that habit gone. But I really am not sure how to do it -- forever.

One day at a time. One minute at a time. One pound at a time. But one minute can ruin an entire week. One shitty thought can easily turn into a shitty day. I'm sick of thinking about food every minute. I need a new routine. A new habit. But more importantly, I need a new focus for my brain. And I need to stop beating myself up inside.

It all comes back (as everything does) to my daughter. I need to be healthy for her. I need to model healthy behaviour for her, internally and externally. She needs a fun, happy mom who runs and plays with her everyday. I need to be that person. And I just need to do it. Just do it until. Until it's natural. Until it's habit. Until I don't know another way. Until.

Reversing Media Gender Roles

Some wonderfully bright sparks in a Women and Gender Studies class at the University of Saskatchewan decided to show us what it would look like if men were portrayed the same as women in the media. It's a bit cheeky, but some of the statistics and original advertisements that glamorize rape are shocking.

But I'll let this great video speak for itself. Well done!

http://www.good.is/posts/intermission-what-if-gender-roles-in-advertising-were-reversed

Merida: The new princess and her new royal image

Merida, the latest Disney princess from the movie Brave, had everything that mother's like me were looking for. Well, most of what we were looking for. She was strong, didn't need a man or to be married, she was wild, looked after herself and, of course, she was brave. (And it's a great movie -- makes me cry every time.) Merida was the answer to the please-save-me-and-live-happily-ever-after-with-my-prince princess. And last week, Disney was officially inducting her into the Disney princess canon, something I guess they do about a year after each movie comes out, and the 2-D "princess" version of Merida was revealed. Merida went from this:

To this:

No more bow and arrow. No more wild, untamed hair. No spirit. Less waist. More breasts. More sparkle. More sexy. Just what a three year old needs to look up to. No thanks. A petition on Change.org quickly went up, which is how I heard about the change, and it wasn't long before the petition had 120,000 signatures. Merida's creator, Brenda Chapman, even spoke out about Merida's change:

They have been handed an opportunity on a silver platter to give their consumers something of more substance and quality — THAT WILL STILL SELL — and they have a total disregard for it in the name of their narrow minded view of what will make money. I forget that Disney’s goal is to make money without concern for integrity. Silly me.

Her words and the signatures may have worked. The new image of Merida has been removed from the Disney website and we may be spared the sexy Merida merchandise machine. Or maybe Disney is simply waiting for all this to blow over. Only time will tell. But only one of these Meridas is welcome in my home, and she's already there.

Book Review-ish: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

I've not done any book reviews on this blog before and since I just finished one, I thought I'd give it a shot. But I don't have lot to say about it, really. The book isn't new; and since I might go back and review books I've already read and as my pile of books grows faster than I can read, up coming reviews, should there be any, probably won't be of new books either. I didn't really read the book with a critical eye or with the intent of doing a book review. So, rather than a proper review, I'm just going to chat a bit about it.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein has been sitting on my pile of books for a while -- it got pushed back a bit more than expected even, because I really wanted to reread the Hobbit for the fifth time before the movie came out. I bought the book with the expectation that I would generally agree with everything Orenstein wrote about. After all, the reason she researched and wrote the book are pretty much the same reason I started this blog. And really, for the most part, I did. There is very little that's mind blowing in the book. It makes sense. Marketing to girls starts at a younger and younger age, the sexualization of girls starts at a younger and younger age, parents embrace the pink toys and princesses because they believe it will stave off the sexualization of their daughters. But instead in makes them prime marketing material for that very thing. Girls are looking and acting older at a younger age, but their minds and emotions are not, and cannot, make that same leap. There is a disconnect and it is troubling. The book is honest in how Orenstein struggled with the issues with her own daughter (not buying a Barbie, feeling guilty and buying the Barbie, feeling confused about buying the damn Barbie) and the role her friends played in teaching her the very things that Orenstein was trying to avoid (in one sequence her daughter's friend tells her daughter that her bike helmet isn't a girl's helmet because it isn't pink). Navigating through the marketing machine isn't easy and Orenstein shows that being an expert on women's issues doesn't necessarily make it any easier.

I'd recommend this book to anyone with a young daughter, and by young I mean tween or younger, as this book also looks at the what's influencing our daughters when they move on from the princess phase. This book just reiterates that we have to involved in our daughters' lives, look at what they are into and just discuss things with them. You can't control what they will like, nor should you be able to, but you can help them think about things critically. That critical thinking is something that they can carry with them when you're not there. They may not always use the tools we give them, but sometimes, when it's most crucial, they might.  The book helped me put on my own critical thinking cap and distilled the issues for me. Definitely worth a read (for both moms and dads, by the way).

I'd love feedback from anyone else who has read the book.

Here is the copy from the back of the jacket, for those who would like to know more about it:

Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as the source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe; eventually they grow out of it . . . or do they?

In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.

Superheroes

A few nights ago, my daughter came home and said she wanted to play superheroes, but she couldn't be a superhero because she was a girl. My heart sank. Not yet three years old and she already thinks there is something she can't do or be because of her gender. I stopped what I was doing, knelt on the floor and asked her, "Who said you can't be a superhero?" It turns out one of the boys in her preschool had said it. I looked her in the eyes, made sure she was listening to me, and told her that girls can be anything they want to be. I must have said it five times in a row, at least. Then I told her that there were lots of girl superheroes, and we could play superheroes any time she wanted to.

We ate our dinner and talked a bit more about what superheroes did and how they were strong and had special powers or skills like flying. Halfway through dinner, my husband came home and I told him to tell her about how there were lots of girl superheroes, quickly explaining what happened. He said all the same things I did and when to grab our tablet, so he could look up female superheroes on YouTube for her to see. But they all had enormous breasts, tiny waists, and were sexed up to look like porn stars in a Superman rip off.

I quickly thought of the Power Puff Girls (which are not without their problems, message-wise) and put on an  episode for her to watch. I know comic books are mostly drawn by men for men, and frankly she is too young for comics anyway, but something needs to change in the superhero comic book and video game world and it needs to change fast.

Some people are taking it upon themselves to start that change. Two dads in the past year have been in the news for changing the coding in video games for daughters, one with Donkey Kong and one with Zelda. DC, Marvel, Nintendo, Sony -- are you listening? People are going to the trouble to create non-damsels in distress characters themselves. People are creating female characters to get the job done. The public are requesting this. Make it so.

FYI -- If anyone knows of some good female superheroes, let me know. I need all the resources I can find.