My friends are independent thinkers. As a group, one of their defining characteristics is and always has been that they're good at rationally interrogating social mores and cultural values. Not all of them want kids. Not all of them want home-ownership. Most of them have their own standards of what constitutes "success," and they rarely correlate to the default American standards.One thing we, myself included, are terrible at, however, is extending that "rational interrogation" to include body image issues. Especially as the average age of my friends up and down the left coast hits 30 and metabolisms slow down accordingly, many of us are horrified as our bodies change. More to the point, most of us know and have known that we are of a certain body type since we were adolescents; for all the weights I've lifted over the years, I've known that I'm basically a tall, lanky guy, not a tall, bulky guy, since I was about 15. Very few of my friends eat fast food, almost everyone exercises, and as a group we're "healthy" people, but for some reason we can't get over how we're built. My point here is not that a certain height/weight ratio isn't, supposedly, "healthier," but that we all have different defaults within that healthy range. Despite that fact, most people still strive to achieve a standard that has very little to do with how their bodies are designed.
I'm genuinely puzzled by this. Why can we distance ourselves, more or less, from imposed standards in every other realm but our bodies? Is it something about the impression images make, rather than ideas? Why are we able to accept, reject, or modify standards of how to live but we can only accept (and struggle with)standards of how to look?
P.S. Appropriately enough, my plans for when I get home involve a bunch of crunches.
6 comments:
Hummm. Me thinks there is more here than meets the eye. (No pun intended.)
Do you include within the striving for "body image" eating well and exercise in order to stay "healthy"? I agree that the two can be (and are) conflated, but they don't have to be. For example, women who build muscle (something all women need to do) don't fit nicely into the "womanly" body image, yet it's healthy for a number of reasons including protecting those bones as they age.
I agree there is a dangerous - while at the same time vague - overlap between these two.
On a different note, what any one of us finds physically attractive may not necessarily fit with popular standards.
Yep - I'm specifically talking about appearance, not health, and the fact that many (most?) people I know aren't satisfied with the former. And the double irony is that most of us have very broad standards of who of the opposite and/or same sex are attractive to us - we're infinitely harder on ourselves.
Oh.
I think "being hard on ourselves" is epidemic among graduate students. What you're describing is (just) another manifestation of it.
you're right about the what we find attractive part- the picture you posted is slightly disturbing. I don't think any guy with such an obsession with his own body (as evidenced by the amount of time that must have gone into those abs) would have time to be interested in anyone else.
My body image is severely distorted by an unrealistic desire to morph my body into what was. The injuries simply don't allow the results from working out to show anymore. My aging process has been magnified by injury in a way that makes living in a place like LA that much harder. The physiques prevalent in this land of sun and fitness make me bemoan my old self that much more. I just can't recapture my younger 'player' mentality anymore without my old looks to back it up. Alas, the bitter sorrow of vanity and unsatiated lustful desire. My blog has returned, hope you are well!
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