"The Obsession: Reflections On The Tyranny Of Slenderness" By: Kim Chernin

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.