Virginia Woolf once asked, “Who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” When we are little, we explore our bodies naturally, both girls and boys, but as we get older and our bodies begin to change, we are told, both subtly and overtly that we must sacrifice this natural way of viewing our bodies and see them as objects of shame and derision, particularly women.
Because women are capable of giving birth to life as well as sustaining it by providing an infant with food, they have a certain power over a child from the time the infant is born and are therefore viewed by the child as capable of giving and taking away their lives. Since the child is so small and relies on its mother for life support, its mother takes on gigantic proportions in its eyes. This effects the way we react psychologically and as a culture to a woman’s body and soul.
There is an unconscious hatred or jealousy of the mother having this power over us and we seek to make her less by making a woman’s body have less value. Men are taught that they should be big and strong while a woman is taught that she should be small and weak. In one of its most extreme forms, it accounts for why 90 percent of anorexics are women. They have taken on society’s belief that they should be smaller and not take up too much space.
They starve their bodies as a way to stay in the body of an adolescent girl, with no hips or breasts. Thin models are seen in every fashion magazine, a manifestation of society’s desire to keep women small and nonthreatening. The message is: if you stay in an adolescent girl’s body you will be desirable, attractive and successful. Meanwhile, larger women are viewed as undesirable, unattractive, disgusting and must face constant criticism from society and the media, as wells as friends and family.
While one may argue that overweight men face the same criticism, this is not really true since one need only look at the image of the fat millionaire who is large, successful and enjoys eating and drinking to excess without facing anyone’s criticism of his behavior toward food or having people constantly telling him how much more attractive he would be if he just went on a diet. Men are expected to eat and to enjoy what they’re eating. They are taught to be big and strong, because the idea of being weak and small is considered feminine in a society which unconsciously knows that women are neither of these things.
Kim Chernin writes of how she related to her body, by saying: "This time it ended with a sudden awareness, for I had observed the fact that the emotions which prompted it were a bitter contempt for the feminine nature of my own body. The sense of fullness and swelling, of curves and softness, the awareness of plenitude and abundance, which filled me with disgust and alarm, were actually qualities of a woman's body."(18)
Society’s values become internalized by women who learn early on that they should fear this power their body holds, which is ultimately the power to bring forth life and nurture and provide it with sustenance. As young children, we have no fear of eating well and our stomachs protruding and as men get older this doesn’t change, but for women, as we enter adolescence we begin to worry about how our bodies are taking on the shape of a woman’s, because we know subconsciously that this new sexual power is something society does not value and in fact, fears.
Someone who wrote of becoming aware of her body changing into that of a woman was Anne Frank, who, though she spent her adolescence in an attic hiding from the Nazis, was able to express herself and her curiosity about her body in the pages of her diary. She wrote: “I think what is happening to me is so wonderful... and not only what can be seen on my body, but all that is taking place inside.... Each time I have a period- and that has been only three times- I have the feeling that in spite of all the pain, unpleasantness, and nastiness, I have a sweet secret, and that is why, although it is nothing but a nuisance to me in a way I always long for the time that I shall feel that secret within me again”(157).
This natural way of thinking about our sexuality is something our society asks us to forfeit as we move from adolescence into womanhood. Some women react to this social pressure by behaving like boys. “Wearing boys clothing, playing boys’ games, dreaming dreams deemed suited only to a boy”(170). They understand society’s hidden message and have internalized it: “You can be a little girl or a little boy, but not a woman.”
Everywhere you look there is another weight loss ad (which are targeted mostly towards women), another thin model or actress, another image designed to make you feel bad about enjoying life if you are a woman. It is impossible to go to any gathering with large groups of women without hearing them talk about how they need to lose weight or what they can’t eat. It is a way of controlling something that the unconscious knows is dangerous: feminine sexuality.
An example of this paradoxical way of looking at feminine sexuality as both something to be feared as well as something that is very alluring can be seen in the career of Marilyn Monroe. Though she had a very womanly body (one that if looked at by today’s standards would be considered too large and not attractive), she also had a childlike quality which men found very alluring and made her sexuality less threatening.
Another example of this found in another culture is Chinese footbinding, in which the smaller the foot was bound, the more sexually attractive it was to the male, despite the fact that it was a debilitating practice which eventually would lead to the inability to walk for numerous women, who, having no other recourse, were forced into prostitution. It is the desire to make a woman smaller and smaller, despite the costs, that leads to practices like this.
There is a story in the Hebrew tradition before the Old Testament that before God created Eve for Adam, he created another woman, who was rejected by Adam, because God made the fundamental mistake of allowing Adam to watch while he created her. “According to this tale, the sight of the making of flesh caused Adam such disgust that even when The First Eve, stood there in her full beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance”(116).
There is a hatred of the flesh and of a woman’s sexuality as seen in some pornography and the vivid fantasies it creates in mens’ minds about what a woman should be. This pornographic mind has influenced the rest of the media and their portrayals of women. In pornography, the women have been injected and sprayed and shaved and painted and airbrushed so much that they don’t even look human. They represent society’s fear of normal sexuality and what is healthy for both men and women.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
My writing sample for my summer internship.
I want to send in more than this, but I also want to apply as soon as possible so this is the one writing sample I'm sending:
The Process of Becoming Human In Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" By: Sarah Kester
My mom brought home a paperback copy of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" she had found at a used book store the other day. I knew nothing about it other than what I had heard about it in a monologue about rape from a character in the independent film "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" in which a man describes how something like rape can be looked at as a positive experience, because (as he compares it to Frankl's experience as an inmate in a concentration camp) when one ceases to be viewed as a person, as in the case of rape, they are somehow able to become more fully human. At least, that's what I thought he was trying to say, but I didn't grasp the full implications of what he was saying and the way he said it did come off as strange, even when finally revealing himself to have been the victim of the rape. I thought it was outrageous for this man to be talking about rape as being a positive psychological experience, even while comparing it to the dehumanization suffered by Frankl at the hands of the nazis.
And when I sat down to read the book in all its graphic horror, I thought to myself, "What gives someone a frame of reference in order that they might be capable of understanding suffering they themselves have never known? More personally, how does a 27 year old American girl from the suburbs relate to the naked brutality suffered by a Jewish man describing his experiences in Aushwitz? How can anyone who has not experienced that kind of horror possibly ever really understand it?"
It was not until I had finished the book that I realized how easily I was able to relate to Frankl's experience, despite never undergoing something so painful. In "Man's Search for Meaning" Frankl describes how survivors of the concentration camps went inside themselves so far psychogically at some point during their torturous experiences that they suffered many "emotional deaths," which would prove necessary for their survival, though some of them would have parts of themselves die so completely they could never be resurrected, if only in the sense that they shut down their emotions to survive and refused to talk about their experiences after leaving the camps, even many decades later. They said that people would never be able to understand how they felt then or now and as I read this, I thought, "They were right."
How does a person when hearing about suffering so intense that the threat of death is a constant; one struggles to do the most basic things like put their shoes on or get out of bed, because of starvation, despair and sickness. Tortured and abused daily, deprived of your most basic rights as a human being, facing every evil in which all you possess is your "naked existence" (22) and going from the phases of initial shock to apathy to despair and depersonalization are things that most of us have trouble relating to. Even those of us who have faced our own demons and know what it means to be completely objectified and turned into something less than human through experiences such as rape, abuse, torture, murder or war.
And yet, Frankl understood how important it was to tell his story, because he knew that each person's suffering is comparable to a room being filled with gas; the kind his family and friends were sent to to be exterminated. No matter the size of the room, if enough gas is put into the room it fills it completely. Such is the relative nature of suffering. It is such a personal experience that it cannot be viewed in terms of size except relative to the size of the room it is filling. That is how one is capable of understanding another person's great grief despite never having experienced something at that level. That is why when someone is going through their own personal hell they can liken it to being a prisoner of war or in some sort of bondage and be able to relate to the experience of Frankl, who literally faced that kind of suffering.
They shaved the heads and bodies of the women, men and children in Aushwitz so they would all look the same, thus making it easier for a nazi to see them as all the same without their individual humanity. A mass of nameless faces that can form into one enemy which can be easily exterminated.
Maybe that is the definition of evil. It can be likened to the gas filling the little or big room. It does not care that you are a human being. It has no substance. It is completely hollow and void of meaning and as such it has come to strip you of yours. It fills a room with emptiness where there once was life.
There are so many examples in the book about how the inmates were dehumanized, but one that particularly made an impact on me was when Frankl described how a guard had discovered that a bout of cannibalism had broken out, because chunks of flesh were missing from a dead body and he found them being cooked by the inmates, who had forsaken almost everything except their survival instinct.
At other moments, Frankl describes how the ones most likely to survive in camp were those who refused to surrender their humanity, if only it meant finding it in escaping psychologically as through joking with each other, putting on cabarets to entertain themselves; even skipping meals because they wanted so much to do something to cheer themselves up and especially through daydreaming and fantasy.
Frankl described an experience of spiritual transcendance in which he thought of his wife in moments when alone and it filled him with such an ability to transcend his current suffering that he realized that a person can lose themselves in dreaming of a loved one and so escape the pain they are experiencing in a way that they can't through any other method of escapism.
These things may seem like an abnormal reaction, but Frankl points out that an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is completely normal. Under severe stress and emotional deprivation or when experiencing a strange situation, it is completely normal to have an abnormal psychological reaction.
Ultimately, it is this holding on to one's humanity even under conditions in which one's basic survival is threatened that provides the meaning man searches for. There is no impersonal meaning to life. It is completely personal in the way that each person is completely human.
After his freedom from the concentration camp was given to him and though most of his family had been killed, Frankl writes of reacting to his new freedom by stating: "I called to the Lord in my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space.
How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory I can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step by step I progressed, until I again became a human being" (142).
Through his experience, he was able to become fully human. Stripped of his humanity by the Third Reich he was able, when given his freedom again, to understand what it means to be fully human. This suffering was necessary in order for him to reach this realization and to gain insight into the meaning of life.
One who has suffered is able to gain insight about themselves and their experiences through the autobiographical accounts of someone in an extreme situation of abuse and brutality such as experienced by Frankl and that's how people are able to connect with each other, through their similar psychological reactions to deprivation. Without that common humanity there is no meaning to the experience and no true love, the ultimate salvation from despair.
The Process of Becoming Human In Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" By: Sarah Kester
My mom brought home a paperback copy of Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" she had found at a used book store the other day. I knew nothing about it other than what I had heard about it in a monologue about rape from a character in the independent film "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" in which a man describes how something like rape can be looked at as a positive experience, because (as he compares it to Frankl's experience as an inmate in a concentration camp) when one ceases to be viewed as a person, as in the case of rape, they are somehow able to become more fully human. At least, that's what I thought he was trying to say, but I didn't grasp the full implications of what he was saying and the way he said it did come off as strange, even when finally revealing himself to have been the victim of the rape. I thought it was outrageous for this man to be talking about rape as being a positive psychological experience, even while comparing it to the dehumanization suffered by Frankl at the hands of the nazis.
And when I sat down to read the book in all its graphic horror, I thought to myself, "What gives someone a frame of reference in order that they might be capable of understanding suffering they themselves have never known? More personally, how does a 27 year old American girl from the suburbs relate to the naked brutality suffered by a Jewish man describing his experiences in Aushwitz? How can anyone who has not experienced that kind of horror possibly ever really understand it?"
It was not until I had finished the book that I realized how easily I was able to relate to Frankl's experience, despite never undergoing something so painful. In "Man's Search for Meaning" Frankl describes how survivors of the concentration camps went inside themselves so far psychogically at some point during their torturous experiences that they suffered many "emotional deaths," which would prove necessary for their survival, though some of them would have parts of themselves die so completely they could never be resurrected, if only in the sense that they shut down their emotions to survive and refused to talk about their experiences after leaving the camps, even many decades later. They said that people would never be able to understand how they felt then or now and as I read this, I thought, "They were right."
How does a person when hearing about suffering so intense that the threat of death is a constant; one struggles to do the most basic things like put their shoes on or get out of bed, because of starvation, despair and sickness. Tortured and abused daily, deprived of your most basic rights as a human being, facing every evil in which all you possess is your "naked existence" (22) and going from the phases of initial shock to apathy to despair and depersonalization are things that most of us have trouble relating to. Even those of us who have faced our own demons and know what it means to be completely objectified and turned into something less than human through experiences such as rape, abuse, torture, murder or war.
And yet, Frankl understood how important it was to tell his story, because he knew that each person's suffering is comparable to a room being filled with gas; the kind his family and friends were sent to to be exterminated. No matter the size of the room, if enough gas is put into the room it fills it completely. Such is the relative nature of suffering. It is such a personal experience that it cannot be viewed in terms of size except relative to the size of the room it is filling. That is how one is capable of understanding another person's great grief despite never having experienced something at that level. That is why when someone is going through their own personal hell they can liken it to being a prisoner of war or in some sort of bondage and be able to relate to the experience of Frankl, who literally faced that kind of suffering.
They shaved the heads and bodies of the women, men and children in Aushwitz so they would all look the same, thus making it easier for a nazi to see them as all the same without their individual humanity. A mass of nameless faces that can form into one enemy which can be easily exterminated.
Maybe that is the definition of evil. It can be likened to the gas filling the little or big room. It does not care that you are a human being. It has no substance. It is completely hollow and void of meaning and as such it has come to strip you of yours. It fills a room with emptiness where there once was life.
There are so many examples in the book about how the inmates were dehumanized, but one that particularly made an impact on me was when Frankl described how a guard had discovered that a bout of cannibalism had broken out, because chunks of flesh were missing from a dead body and he found them being cooked by the inmates, who had forsaken almost everything except their survival instinct.
At other moments, Frankl describes how the ones most likely to survive in camp were those who refused to surrender their humanity, if only it meant finding it in escaping psychologically as through joking with each other, putting on cabarets to entertain themselves; even skipping meals because they wanted so much to do something to cheer themselves up and especially through daydreaming and fantasy.
Frankl described an experience of spiritual transcendance in which he thought of his wife in moments when alone and it filled him with such an ability to transcend his current suffering that he realized that a person can lose themselves in dreaming of a loved one and so escape the pain they are experiencing in a way that they can't through any other method of escapism.
These things may seem like an abnormal reaction, but Frankl points out that an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is completely normal. Under severe stress and emotional deprivation or when experiencing a strange situation, it is completely normal to have an abnormal psychological reaction.
Ultimately, it is this holding on to one's humanity even under conditions in which one's basic survival is threatened that provides the meaning man searches for. There is no impersonal meaning to life. It is completely personal in the way that each person is completely human.
After his freedom from the concentration camp was given to him and though most of his family had been killed, Frankl writes of reacting to his new freedom by stating: "I called to the Lord in my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space.
How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory I can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step by step I progressed, until I again became a human being" (142).
Through his experience, he was able to become fully human. Stripped of his humanity by the Third Reich he was able, when given his freedom again, to understand what it means to be fully human. This suffering was necessary in order for him to reach this realization and to gain insight into the meaning of life.
One who has suffered is able to gain insight about themselves and their experiences through the autobiographical accounts of someone in an extreme situation of abuse and brutality such as experienced by Frankl and that's how people are able to connect with each other, through their similar psychological reactions to deprivation. Without that common humanity there is no meaning to the experience and no true love, the ultimate salvation from despair.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Home Sweet Home
When I was in my Psychology of Women class we had a woman come talk to us from Stand! Against Domestic Violence. She told us her story and said on her myspace now she had the quote, "I'm not your bitch. Don't hang your shit on me" from none other than Madonna. I just mentioned this, because sometimes in order to be truly free you have to go away and start a new life somewhere. It is wonderful to be a woman without shame with the whole world waiting for her. I want to go to South Africa and Ireland after Prague.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
That's right. I said FRIED CHEESE!!!! Cheese that has been fried!!!!
I know it's early to say, but I feel like I've really turned a corner when it comes to how I eat and I feel free from the eating disorder finally. Something happened and my whole thinking about food changed. My whole thinking about my body changed. I feel so free.
That's the tricky thing about eating disorders. You have a completely different way of looking at food and your body than a "normal" person. It's a whole eating disorder mentality. That's one thing you notice and are able to recognize after you've gotten past it and there's no magic trick that I can say will break you of that eating disorder mentality. I don't know what it is. I just know that there's no use trying to help someone if they're still in that mindset and no amount of stuffing food in them is gonna work to bring them out of it. It really is a choice you make between living and dying and maybe it's not even a conscious choice.
Another thing you notice after you've finally made that choice is how different the way an anorexic or a bulimic thinks shows up in the way other people talk to you. People mean well. Sometimes they have the best intentions, but they really don't understand, because they've never viewed food the way an anorexic or bulimic has and sometimes the things they say sound ridiculous. They'll tell somebody with an eating disorder, "Just eat healthy."
Oh, is that the trick? Is that all there is to it? Because for the past six years I've been eating two bowls of peas and a yogurt everyday or binging on an entire pizza and throwing it up until my throat's sore and I feel numb and tired, because I cared so much about my health.
It's pretty funny the things people have said to me. This man (who was a psychologist) told me, "You know you'll probably never be obese even if you gained a little weight. You won't be like those fat people you see at Costco."
First of all, what the hell are you talking about? Secondly, huh? You don't tell someone who is scared to gain 1 pound that they'll probably never look like Jabba the Hut, because they already feel like Jabba the Hut.
But it's not their fault at all. They just can't comprehend what it's like to have this death grip on life in which you're so scared of losing control and falling off the edge into forever that you just can't let go. But the moment you do just let go you are finally able to free yourself of that mindset and you realize how much time has gone by that you wasted holding onto something that is just gonna give you an illusion of control.
There's nothing you need to control that you can do by starving yourself or making yourself throw up. It's just a way of coping when the world overwhelms you. Saying, "Why don't you just eat?" to someone with an eating disorder is like telling someone with a heroin addiction why don't they just put the needle down and go out and be like everyone else. It doesn't work like that. They're sick and need treatment, but even still, until they accept that fact on their own, no treatment will ever work.
It's a choice you make.
That's the tricky thing about eating disorders. You have a completely different way of looking at food and your body than a "normal" person. It's a whole eating disorder mentality. That's one thing you notice and are able to recognize after you've gotten past it and there's no magic trick that I can say will break you of that eating disorder mentality. I don't know what it is. I just know that there's no use trying to help someone if they're still in that mindset and no amount of stuffing food in them is gonna work to bring them out of it. It really is a choice you make between living and dying and maybe it's not even a conscious choice.
Another thing you notice after you've finally made that choice is how different the way an anorexic or a bulimic thinks shows up in the way other people talk to you. People mean well. Sometimes they have the best intentions, but they really don't understand, because they've never viewed food the way an anorexic or bulimic has and sometimes the things they say sound ridiculous. They'll tell somebody with an eating disorder, "Just eat healthy."
Oh, is that the trick? Is that all there is to it? Because for the past six years I've been eating two bowls of peas and a yogurt everyday or binging on an entire pizza and throwing it up until my throat's sore and I feel numb and tired, because I cared so much about my health.
It's pretty funny the things people have said to me. This man (who was a psychologist) told me, "You know you'll probably never be obese even if you gained a little weight. You won't be like those fat people you see at Costco."
First of all, what the hell are you talking about? Secondly, huh? You don't tell someone who is scared to gain 1 pound that they'll probably never look like Jabba the Hut, because they already feel like Jabba the Hut.
But it's not their fault at all. They just can't comprehend what it's like to have this death grip on life in which you're so scared of losing control and falling off the edge into forever that you just can't let go. But the moment you do just let go you are finally able to free yourself of that mindset and you realize how much time has gone by that you wasted holding onto something that is just gonna give you an illusion of control.
There's nothing you need to control that you can do by starving yourself or making yourself throw up. It's just a way of coping when the world overwhelms you. Saying, "Why don't you just eat?" to someone with an eating disorder is like telling someone with a heroin addiction why don't they just put the needle down and go out and be like everyone else. It doesn't work like that. They're sick and need treatment, but even still, until they accept that fact on their own, no treatment will ever work.
It's a choice you make.
Anyway, there are so many pretty girls in Prague. There are so many pretty girls that come from that part of Europe. I wonder how much eating disordered thinking influenced by the media and Western society has effected them. I hope not much.
And how could a country that brought us the dish in the photograph be so easily effected by that? Yes, that is fried cheese and yes I'm gonna eat the hell out of it. Yum.
New Chapter
I don't understand how one place can be so good, but I have yet to hear anything negative about Prague other than that the language is indecipharable (I was listening to it on Czech radio the other day and I think it sounds more complex than Russian), the traditional Czech cuisine is not exactly vegetarian-friendly and it gets cold there. Like, really cold. Not like "coldest winter I ever spent" Mark Twain San Francisco cold. But none of those things seem that bad, either.
I was thinking about the fact that I'll be 29 by the time I get my Bachelor's Degree. It's publishing that I want to go into so I've been looking for internships (unpaid and something I can do this summer before Prague and it's almost June!!!!!), but I only found one publishing internship near where I'll be living. It's at a small publishing house in Alameda. I'm gonna apply for it, I think. This could be disastrous, simply because of my lack of experience, but I have pretty good writing skills so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I went through a period recently that was probably the hardest time I've ever been through in terms of how I felt about myself, but I got through it and I'm so ready to have a great summer. Also, I no longer have an eating disorder!
Best movie just recently viewed on Netflix: "Cherish" starring Robin Tunney. So far I've only seen two Czech films: "Zelary" (which only had partial subtitles and wasn't terrible considering I didn't understand most of what was going on) and "I Served The King Of England," which was quite good. Let me know if you know of any good Czech films.
I was thinking about the fact that I'll be 29 by the time I get my Bachelor's Degree. It's publishing that I want to go into so I've been looking for internships (unpaid and something I can do this summer before Prague and it's almost June!!!!!), but I only found one publishing internship near where I'll be living. It's at a small publishing house in Alameda. I'm gonna apply for it, I think. This could be disastrous, simply because of my lack of experience, but I have pretty good writing skills so I'll keep my fingers crossed.
I went through a period recently that was probably the hardest time I've ever been through in terms of how I felt about myself, but I got through it and I'm so ready to have a great summer. Also, I no longer have an eating disorder!
Best movie just recently viewed on Netflix: "Cherish" starring Robin Tunney. So far I've only seen two Czech films: "Zelary" (which only had partial subtitles and wasn't terrible considering I didn't understand most of what was going on) and "I Served The King Of England," which was quite good. Let me know if you know of any good Czech films.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Getting It Back On Track Or Ending It...
This blog is supposed to be about moving to and living in Prague, but I haven't done much about that lately and so I haven't had much to write about except personal things that are maybe too personal to be shared in a blog, but hopefully will have more to write about soon. I actually haven't even sent my papers to Empire State College yet for financial aide. :(
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