Originally posted at FemineUs, a student run blog created as part of their final project for my WS 30: Women and Pop Culture course. Cross-posted with permission. Created by Alexa G.; feminist, blogger, CrossFit badass and all-around amazing young activist and scholar.

Nearly a year ago I became a CrossFitter. For those of you not familiar with what I’m talking about, CrossFit is a high-intensity workout program that’s designed to help build all-over strength. I didn’t enter the program with a specific goal in mind. I wasn’t looking to lose weight nor was I looking to shape myself into a top-tier athlete. At the very least, I figured I would get into better shape and be a bit healthier. So I started taking classes, became hooked to the challenge it provided, and soon found both my body and mind undergoing a radical transformation.

Over the months my body began to change dramatically. Strength I didn’t know I had came out of nowhere. You want me to deadlift and back squat my body weight? I can do that. And you want me to shoulder press and front squat half of my body weight? Hey, I can do that too. Don’t forget plenty of sit ups, pull ups, and push ups for good measure. Having been skinny and without any kind of muscle tone my entire life, being able to do these kinds of exercises was a big deal for me. I felt stronger and more confident than ever- something I hadn’t always felt about my body before.

But even though my body has changed for the better, part of me feels uncomfortable with my new-found biceps and muscular calves. Instead of celebrating my strength and confidence, I sometimes find myself wanting to be skinny again. I’ve put on 20 pounds of (what I’m guessing is mostly) muscle weight and have gone up two pants sizes because of it. And I know that this isn’t a bad thing because I’m the strongest and healthiest I’ve ever been. So while I am blessed with greater health and wellness, I still find myself wanting to go back to a body that wasn’t healthy for me.

I find myself caught in an odd position here. Here I am, a self-declared feminist who is uncomfortable within her own body. I’m well aware (and I’m sure you are too) of the ridiculous and unrealistic beauty standards that women are expected to live up to. But even though I do have this feminist consciousness, I still compare myself with this impossible beauty standard. This is all embarrassing for me to admit to because I do know better and I do know that being a size zero is unhealthy for someone like myself. But even with this knowledge, there is a part of me that still longs to be skinny and tiny and everything that popular culture tells me I should be.

And I know I’m not alone with these feelings. Countless books have been written for, by, and about women on the topic of body image. Some of these books deliver a lighter hearted, but still serious take such as Leslie Goldman’s Locker Room Diaries. Others, such as Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight deliver a more academic take on Western beauty ideals and culture. Both are fully aware of and discuss the consequences and impact that these beauty standards and images have had on women. Goldman speaks freely about her own battles with eating disorders and talks to women of all ages about their body image.

Am I planning on giving up CrossFit any time soon? Not if I can help it. I do my best to ignore what popular culture tells me I should look like, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t affected in some way.

Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, talks about her latest work, Bodies:

Her latest book, Bodies, maps the progress of our alienation, from a time when we took our bodies for granted to one where they are an endlessly perfectible work in progress. “When I was growing up,” she explains, “one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right? We didn’t expect to be that sportsman or that beauty queen. That was OK, that was what movie stars were for. That wasn’t something that was essential for all of us.” Yet today, movie-star looks are not just an aspiration but an imperative, and ordinary people think nothing of starving or surgically enhancing their bodies in a tireless campaign to make them look as though they belong to somebody else altogether.

Just as Donald Winnicott identified the “false self”, whereby a neglected baby will blame itself for its carer’s lack of interest, and create an artificial version of itself in the hope of winning love, so Orbach argues that we are creating false bodies. Assailed by media imagery that celebrates only one type of body and one type of beauty, we assume any discrepancy between our own appearance and this digitally airbrushed “ideal” must be our fault, and that it’s not merely necessary but morally virtuous to do whatever it takes to correct our deficiency. The simultaneous rise of anorexia and obesity is not a paradox, but rather two sides of the same psychological coin – both manifestations of our panic about hunger, in which normal appetite becomes pathologised as the enemy. Crucially, whereas once we might have experienced the pressure to look different as an onerous tyranny, today we tell ourselves that it’s empowering.

“We transform the sense of being criticised,” Orbach writes, “by becoming the moving and enthusiastic actor in our own self-improvement programme. We will eagerly repair what is wrong … We see ourselves as agents, not victims. It is the individual woman who feels herself to be at fault for not matching up to the current imagery … She applies herself to the job of perfecting that image for herself and so makes it her own, not assaultive or alien.”

Orbach’s writing is closer in tone to cultural studies than to the jaunty self-help register of most contemporary books about eating, but in person there is nothing abstractly academic about her. Framed by a mass of curls, she is small, even birdlike, but her sprightly energy conveys a vivid sense of aliveness. Her accent has a faint American inflection, which can sound almost antipodean at times, particularly when her sentences end in a question mark – “right?” – and she is surprisingly relaxed, even imprecise, with her words, often letting sentences tail away unfinished. But she is very clear about where we are going wrong.

I’ve been half looking forward to the meeting, and half dreading it because, although it must be 20 years since I first read what Orbach calls “Fifi”, her work feels uncomfortably relevant to my own current state. She is the sort of woman you find yourself confiding in, and I admit to her that halfway through my first pregnancy, my overriding preoccupation is with weight gain. To my dismay, what I’m really thinking about most of the time is how I’m ever going to lose it. And right there, according to Orbach, is the source of our troubled relationship with food. Mothers transmit their own anxieties to their babies; it all begins in the family.

“The only way to solve the problem is to provide very different help to new mums,” she says briskly. “Because every mother wants to do right by their kid. It would mean training health visitors and midwives; you’d raise a mother’s awareness of her own body. This is an opportunity for both of you to find the rhythm in terms of relation to appetite. I don’t think it would be difficult to design. And it would be very cheap. And new mums would really benefit from it. But instead, they are being told to do sit-ups straightaway, and why not even consider having a C-section, so you don’t have to get that last month’s weight gain? All of that nonsense. It’s completely counter to what a baby’s mental health requires – and what the mother needs as well, actually.”

What can parents say, I ask, to a 16-year-old girl who is convinced that a regime of dieting and beautification is not self-punishing but empowering? “Well, it’s awfully late at 16. But I’d be saying to the mums: ‘Watch your own behaviour – how often do you criticise your own body in front of your daughter?’ Stop making the body the cause of the problem, or the solution to the problem. The problem isn’t how she looks.”

But surely a teenage girl would say that how she looks is precisely the problem? “But what she’d be picking out aren’t imperfections, they’re just what makes her her, right?” What if she says she’s overweight? “Well, they all feel overweight. Even when they’re tiny, tiny, tiny. But where are they getting that idea? That’s why I think the mums are doing something.”

If Orbach were just another voice in the cacophony of finger-pointing that surrounds most discussion about weight, I would be feeling unpleasantly guilty by now. But her analysis of what she calls “disordered eating” extends beyond mothers and the family, to encompass everything from the diet industry – “which relies upon a 95% recidivism rate” – to the media, which produces glossy magazines in which “not a single image is not digitally retouched, up to hundreds of times” – and globalisation, in which a culture of “aspirational bodies is the mark of entry”.

One of the things that strikes me is the statement that “movie-star” looks were not always an aspiration or expectation. Each semester my students conduct an oral history and time and time again, women over 60 respond to questions about beauty standards and beauty norms that existed when they were girls and teenagers with the same sentiment. There was a time, before the all out media assault, when standards of beauty existed that weren’t as relentless or unrealistic as they are today.  Girls and women recognized a celebrity figure as exactly that.  A celebrity. A star.  Someone unlike themselves.

Girls and women today are inundated with relentless messages that proclaim that they CAN look like the celebrity du-jour and that they SHOULD and if they don’t attain that image they have failed, they are without value and should try harder.

It is little wonder that girls and women see these “failures” as personal rather than recognizing the failure on the part of the mass media machine to portray “ordinary” girls and women.

Sitcoms and films from my childhood portrayed more “average-looking” individuals.  Not everyone was primped and polished with the intention of looking “natural.” “Natural” beauty these days is nowhere near natural or easy and breezy.  It is an all out organized campaign with a low success rate.

I’ve heard it a million times…

“I was so sick all week…but (giggling), I lost ten pounds.”

“I’d rather die thin than live fat.”

It’s strange, frightening and altogether not too surprising that girls and women rejoice in weight loss that results from illness and disease.  Most girls and women understand the serious side effects of chronic yo-yo dieting, diet pills, colonics, laxatives, drug-use and over exercise as the torture devices du-jour to pursue insane degrees of thinness. But, the stakes are high and, as a result, too many take the deadly gamble.

Images of thinness have gotten more extreme and a female’s value is wrapped in a stick-thin frame no matter what else she does.  If you’re independent, successful, professional, intelligent and you’re not thin (and attractive, with thin being a means to being considered attractive in this culture), you’re not as valuable as you could be being all those things. And. Thin.

So, when the FDA announced yet another diet pill being pulled off the market, I’m wasn’t at all surprised and I don’t think anyone else is either.

Government health officials are announcing the recall of popular weight loss pill Hydroxycut, after reports of liver damage and other health problems.

Food and Drug Administration officials said Friday the manufacturer of Hydroxycut has launched a nationwide recall of the dietary supplement, used by people trying to shed pounds and by body builders to sharpen their muscles.

Hydroxycut is advertised as made from natural ingredients. It accounts for about 90 percent of the market for weight loss supplements, with sales of about 1 million bottles a year.

Dietary supplements are not as tightly regulated by the government as medications. Manufacturers don’t need FDA approval ahead of time before marketing their products.

I mean, who are we kidding?  It’s not like there isn’t a history of harmful side effects linked to the use of diet pills resulting in recalls.  Think Fen-Phen in 1997.

I don’t think the manufacturers are surprised.  I don’t think the FDA is surprised.  I don’t think the general public is surprised.  I certainly don’t think the users of Hydroxycut are surprised. I mean, really, anytime a pill claims to have the ability to help you lose weight with minimal lifestyle changes such as changing one’s diet significantly and exercising regularly and being able to help you lose wight and/or tone and sculpt your body, you have to take pause.  That’s just weird.  And wrong.

Haven’t we learned that there’s no magic pill or quick fix for anything?  Are we still that obsessed with immediate results and instant gratification that we have ignored the lessons of the past and what our common sense tells us?

Maybe.  But, when the stakes are high logic goes out the window.

Thinness and the pursuit of thinness, no matter how toxic, is glorified in our culture. In fact, the toxic pursuit of thinness and the vile and disturbing results create fascination and stokes the flames of infatuation.

Just this week in Us Magazine’s print version there is yet another article focusing on Lindsay Lohan’s skeletal figure and the claim that she proudly uses Adderall.  Us Magazine’s online version provides the reader with a slide show of Lohan’s “weights ups and downs.” Last week, Star Magazine ran a similar piece focusing on Lohan’s break-up and subsequent weight loss.

Lohan’s weight loss can’t be attributed entirely too her break-up when you consider the sea of images that glorify the cult of thinness and advertisers provide various instruments, pills and potions to make the mirage appear real.

Hydroxcut’s recall is predictable.  Lohan’s severly thin frame is predictable.  The media’s response is predictable.

And, I have no doubt, a new pill will replace Hydroxcut in the same way Fen-Phen was replaced and the cycle will continue until there is some honest dialogue.

Until then, girls and women will put their health on the line for an outrageous aesthetic that is pandered to the masses.

I began my yoga practice in 1996 and knew I had stumbled upon something exhilarating, insightful, challenging and delicious.  There weren’t a lot of yoga studios in 1996 and I had to truly seek out a practice that fit my personality and my needs.  My friend, Marla, led me to Bryan Kest in 1997 and by 1999 I ditched the gym and developed a dedicated and consistent practice with Bryan and Caleb Asch.

My yoga practice was a wonderful constant in a sea of change and chaos.  It also provided a truly unique place to get to know my body in a new way. It was the first time I paid attention to my body’s rhythms and desires without imposing my own expectations and will.  I became more forgiving, more loving and more in tune.

My teachers and my practice inspired me to give up my obsessive tendency to beat my body during a workout and made movement pleasurable, beautiful and loving. My teachers and my practice taught me how to respect and nurture my body, accept my body and, best of all, love my body.

As a person with a past rooted in dieting, obsessing, over exercising and generally abusing my body, this was new and welcomed territory.  The yoga mat had been one of the few places in our media-driven, thin-obsessed and youth-oriented culture that I was not subject to these distorted messages about what I should look like or who I should be.  I could just be.  Sometimes that meant happy, other times sad, often times tired and curled up in child’s posed without judgement and at other times, fierce and energetic.

As yoga became more and more absorbed by the mainstream and yoga studios popped up around town like Stabucks coffee houses, I noticed yoga’s message of unity and acceptance become filtered through the lens of the dominant consciousness and consumerism.  I began making public commentary on these changes in 2003 that I presented at  a variety of conferences and public lectures: Celebrity Yogis: The Intersection of Yoga, the Cult of Personality and Consumerism, Yoga and Popular Culture, McYoga: The Spiritual Diet for Consumer America, Consuming Spirituality and Spiritual Consuming: Capitalizing on Yoga, and the McDonaldization and Commodification of Yoga: Standing at the Intersection of Spiritual Tradition and Consumer Culture.

I was particularly interested in the reproduction of mainstream beauty standards in the pages of yoga magazines. All the models were thin and polished. After examining the mainstreaming of yoga for several years with frustration and sadness, I put down the yoga magazines and withdrew from the increasingly commercialized yoga community that had previously provided me with solace and acceptance and made my practice more personal and, in many ways, made an attempt to safe guard it.

It worked.

Recently, though, I picked up a copy of Yoga Journal and was dismayed to find advertisements for diet pills. I’d noticed more and more corporate ads before I abandoned my subscription but this hit home.  Not only had Yoga Journal succumbed to accepting corporate dollars for products that seemed unrelated to a healthy yogic lifestyle but now they had allowed the ultimate self-esteem crusher to enter: advertisements that reinforced larger cultural messages telling individuals that they must lose wight and that they don’t have to do the work of eating healthy and exercising.

Pop a pill.

In so many ways, the proliferation of ads for diet pills confirmed what I had already known for years: yoga had passed through the filter of the mainstream capitalistic consumer culture, and in passing through that filter, had emerged altered.

Yoga had come out thinner, sleeker, more polished with soy latte in hand, designer yoga bag slung over a lean shoulder and a bottle of diet pills in the belly.

In this week’s Us Magazine, we have yet ANOTHER story of success: a new mother of twins sheds all her baby weight after a mere 11 weeks.  How did she do it, you ask?  Oh, ya know, it’s just an illusion created by a “good dress.” Oh, and by receiving deliveries of assorted Asian fruit and vegetables, mussels, crabs and prawns.  No exercise, though.  Nope.  Just good genes and the usual claim: breast feeding! Salma Hayek spoke out against this myth. As she said to Oprah, “The only way women lose weight this way is by not eating AND breast feeding…and this is bad for the baby.”  Amen, sister.

The emphasis on unhealthy, often deadly, thinness is bad enough but to add that same pressure on pregnant women and new mothers moments after delivery is ludicrous! This signals an unhealthy and potentially dangerous trend by creating unrealistic expectations for ordinary women that don’t have the time of the means to devote their all of their energy to weight loss. Not to mention, even with the time and money, baby weight gain is not designed to fall off immediately.  No matter who you are (Nicole, Angelina, Jessica, Katie).

Bump watch has taken over the tabloids in a furious and obsessive way over the last few years and includes the intense scrutiny and public commentary on how much weight pregnant celebrities gained and how much they lost soon after birth.  Salma Hayek was absolutely chastised for not losing her pregnancy weight immediately after her daughter was born. which is one of the reasons she chose to publically address this craze on national television.