Growing Up Beautiful

Loving your inner nine-year old

by PAMELA POST photo Jaime Kowal

It’s a rainy Vancouver evening. My 15-year-old daughter Holly and I snuggle up together on the couch for some precious mother/daughter bonding time. Tired after a busy day of work and school, cooking dinner, and homework, we pull a cozy wool comforter around us. We click on the TV…we channel-surf…nothing on…as usual. Yet, on we surf, stopping finally, stunned by the blare and glitz of one of those ubiquitous celebrity gossip shows. For a while, we lie there like a couple of zombies, staring. I am the first to pull myself out of the trance, annoyed by the sheer banality of this voyeuristic tripe: Britney’s bare-assed escapades; Lindsay’s trip to rehab; entertainment “reporters” who look like Barbie dolls. I look over at my daughter’s innocent, intelligent face. I watch the flashing images being burned into her retinas and see her eyes cast a dubious, downward, minesweeping glance at her breasts, arms, and thighs, after viewing this circus parade of anorexic celebrity starlets. I know she is comparing, judging. My heart sinks like an anvil into my stomach. I think seriously, for the first time, about disconnecting our cable.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and remember the last time you felt uncomplicatedly good about yourself—most of the time. Chances are, if you are female, you were playing tag with mad abandon in the schoolyard. Maybe you were soaring high on that swing over the lake, or eating an ice cream cone with joyful relish twirling with your best friend in Grade 3 until you fell down on the grass, laughing with your gap-toothed grin, smiling so hard you thought your face would break.

In Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Strength to Resist, a 2000 documentary about the impact of the advertising industry on teenage girls, academics such as Dr. Carol Gilligan and Dr. Gail Dines state that most girls have good self-image until age nine. Then puberty hits, and all of us little specimens of adventurous wonder and perfection start to see ourselves as sexual beings. We look up from our innocent, joyous tumbles on the grass to a mind-numbing kaleidoscope of images from TV, music videos, tabloid covers, and the internet that show us something that is all too often very different from ourselves. And for a growing number of adolescent girls worldwide, it can be the start of a long, hard fall into a lifetime of low self-esteem, self-loathing, depression, eating disorders, and even suicide.

Suzann Kingston

For years, scholars, feminists, and psychologists have been raising a warning flag about advertising-fuelled pop culture and its direct impact on plummeting female self-image. The diet industry alone is estimated to generate $100 billion US a year. Because it is a relatively new phenomenon—but one growing at a ferocious and deadly pace—eating-disorder statistics are hard to pin down. What we do know is that, based on statistics from the U.S. National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, an estimated 10 million girls in North America suffer from them. While men and boys are increasingly affected, the US National Health Information Center reports that 90 per cent of those with eating disorders are female.

Vancouver writer Suzann Kingston used to be one of them. Kingston is an elegant, articulate black woman with big eyes, expressive brows, slender curves, sensuous lips, and a shaved head that accentuates her exotic beauty. Yet she has battled disordered eating for much of her adult life. Her book, Step Aside, Barbie! You’re Blocking My View—of Me!, is her deeply personal account of two decades of trying to model herself on versions of the plastic blond fashion doll. It’s also an indictment of “The Beauty Sellers,” or as she calls them, “The Bull Sh*tters.”

Kingston got rid of her TV years ago, when she realized it was making her feel bad about herself. “TV is toxic,” she says. “As a society, we’re bingeing on poison.”

The beauty sellers have a vested interest in perpetuating a sense that “you are not complete,” says Kingston. “I wrote this book because I want girls and women to know they are already complete.”

Detoxing from this media onslaught is not an easy road, she admits. “Am I confident now? Yes. Part of that was shaving my head. Am I accepting myself? Yes. Do I still battle with my thighs? Yes. But growth hurts. We need to learn how to live our own lives, instead of living the lives of others, vicariously. We should question the Cinderella story about a handsome prince being the happy ending of our story. All women should spend some time in their lives living alone and being comfortable with that. Learning to be comfortable in silence, in our own skin, getting to know who we are in our essence. We have to remember what it was to think for ourselves, instead of having the media think for us.”

How did we get so programmed by this beauty myth that has us gnawing away on our own leg like we’re caught in a leghold trap? No animal is self-loathing. The cat does not stare at the mirror for hours each day, frowning in disapproval, looking at the other cats with obsessive and obstinate envy and jealousy of their thinness. The duck in the pond does not stop eating the seeds thrown to it, preferring to starve because it hates its imperfect and tubby reflection in the water. The lioness does not compulsively seek out the opinion of its mate about whether “my ass looks fat in these jeans” and then vomit up the zebra meat behind the nearest tree, in shame and misery.

But humans do. Female humans do. How twisted and against nature is that? And what has brought us to this cultural self-loathing?

Robin Rice is unequivocal in her answer to that question. It’s a culture, she says, that has abdicated its inherent wisdom to commercial interests and lost a vital connection with the cycles of nature. Rice is a world-travelling author and workshop leader whose website, meditationmovie.com, showcases her work: books and films that combine self-empowerment messages with her perspective as a modern shaman.

“In shamanistic terms, it’s a kind of soul loss,” she says. “In my workshops, I ask women this: When did you stop singing? When did you stop dancing? My goal is to lead women back from the culturally conditioned belief that there is something wrong with them. I tell them this work is not about changing ourselves, but learning to be ourselves.”

Rice’s website (meditationmovie.com) contains a powerful nine-minute film entitled There Is Nothing Wrong With You. She calls it a “balancing meditation to counter the messages of contemporary socialization.”

Abigail Breslin as Olive

Rice is confident a critical mass of mostly 30- and 40-something women is forming and waking up from the trance of being controlled. They are ready to re-inhabit the power and joy of those strong, inner nine-year-olds we all once were—women with a powerful and urgent message to pass on to our adolescent daughters.

In the murky sea of media images of stick-thin celebrities and airbrushed supermodels, two beacons of hope recently emerged.

Seven-year-old actor Abigail Breslin, who plays the chubby, bespectacled, glowing-with-life little champion Olive in the breakaway hit Little Miss Sunshine, has been nominated for an Academy Award. And Latina actor America Ferrera, who won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of TV’s Ugly Betty. In stark juxtaposition to an evening of ego and disingenuous agent-thanking, Ferrera gave the most authentic, unrehearsed and important speech at the Golden Globes. Ugly Betty, she truthfully pointed out, is “bringing a new face to television and such a beautiful message about beauty that lies deeper than what we see.”

What the world needs now is less Paris, Lindsay, and Britney, and more Olive and Betty.

Pamela Post is a CBC journalist and broadcaster. She and her daughter Molly recently made the decision to disconnect their cable, knowing they can buy the latest season of The Gilmore Girls on DVD.

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