How do you see yourself?
My opinions used to be so simple. Men with hot bodies. Yes, please. Washboard stomaches, yum. Then I had to get do some research and ruin it all for myself…
I watched a show the other day on how hard Will Smith and that Green Lantern guy work on their bodies and now I’m all conflicted. (Personal growth sucks.)
Will Smith apparently worked out 5 hours A DAY, to get his body looking like, well like something I’d like to do inappropriate things to. A DAY people. And then when he was done, they put makeup and lighting on him to make his body look even better to me…one of the drooling masses that given the opportunity, might just risk her marriage for the chance to spray fake whip (I don’t like the real stuff) onto the mountains and valley of his abs to go skiing. (He’s on my list. Don’t judge.)
After hearing how fanatical these men had to be to get their body in shape for a role I started thinking about my body, and my body image.
In my late thirties I’m finally, finally reaching a point where I might accept myself as I am, bumps and lumps and all. Sure I want to keep getting better to be healthy so I can do everything I want to do, but I’m getting closer to not hating me. It’s taken me nearly 40 years.
I don’t usually like to play the blame game, but I’m sure that how women were portrayed to me as a young child, shaped my opinion of me. I want the impossible body, even though I know it would take 8 or more hours a day of training, and faithful dedication to get there. Eight hours, and dedication I don’t have or wont give.
Every year, a new generation of girls is born into a world that is conditioning them to expect the unattainable in themselves. Sure, it’s getting better. Dove runs “real beauty” campaigns, and Betabrand recently hired real phd women to model their clothes rather than airbrushed models, but we’ve got a long way to go.
So, we’ve made progress, but now it seems that any pride we can hold about “getting there” for women and girls is being eroded by the newly unrealistic expectations girls will have for their men, and what’s worse, what we’re doing to men and boys.
We’ve raised generations of women to hate their bodies, and now, rather than fixing it, we’re just sharing the wealth and telling the men and boys “look at those abs, that’s what real women want”.
Well I’m here to say, yes, we want those things. But what we want more, is a man who can love himself enough, just the way he is, to love us back, just the way we are. (I got luck on that one.)
Damn it, I hate new information that makes me have to be a better person. Why couldn’t my moment of catharsis have waited until after the 300 sequel was released. Damn it.
Writing Exercise:
I’ve been working on edits for Riveted. The majority of my edits have been re-writing sentences to reduce my use of “I statements”. (Riveted is written in the first person, and I rely too heavily on having my character tell things using “I saw” or “I said”.) Super hard work, but it’s making the book better, so…
At first I thought the edits would be as simple as removing the “I’s”. In some cases that’s true, but in others I realized that I was using the “I’s” to hide a weakness in the paragraph, so rather than quick edits I’m doing re-writes of sentences and I love how its improving my work one sentence at a time.
Pick up a piece of your writing and choose a sentence at random, the try to re-write the sentence three different ways without changing the meaning. If the sentence was descriptive, could the same description come out as dialogue? (Not necessarily someone describing things, but perhaps illustrating the description with how a person reacts?) If the sentence was dialogue, could it be action? Could you use a different sentence construction?
Happy writing.
