Five days ago I was on a cruise with my mom, which means I was wearing a bikini most of the time, and therefore obsessing over my body. I was standing in front of the mirror in our room holding back my love handles, sucking my stomach in, standing up as straight as I could, and imagining the results of a possible liposuction. The TV was on in the background and, as fate would have it, about two minutes later, the news reported the death of Lanusse Martins Barbosa, victim of a liposuction gone wrong. She was 27 years old.
It was a "medical error" that really shouldn't have happened, and the plastic surgeon is being tried for homicide. People are calling him a criminal, and because the victim was a public figure- she was a TV journalist- she is representing the hundreds of women who have died or suffered irreparable damage during plastic surgeries.
I am left with a mixture of reactions. I am wondering who the real criminals are, the doctors who are careless, or the culture we live in that values thinness so much that women (myself included) are willing to cut themselves open and suck out their "excess fat" in order to look like something we have been told (or brainwashed into believing) is not only beautiful, but normal.
Doctors and sponsors who deal with vanity are some of the wealthiest people in the world. Products and programs that promise thinness are part of a multi-billion dollar industry. Go to the Women's Interest section in a magazine stand and you will see another multi-billion dollar industry that is benefiting from telling women that what they look like can always improve, that there's always a new way to be thinner, that self-worth grows as the numbers on the scale decrease.
It's hard- if not impossible- not to be affected by it. I haven't managed yet. Even though I regularly read feminist magazines like Ms. and Bust and Bitch, that fight, among many of the ways society oppresses women, this dictatorship of thinness, and even though I know that butchering myself in the name of beauty is not only unnecessary and ridiculous, but dangerous, I am still caught in an often overwhelming desire to be extremely thin. The kind of thin that can wear low-cut jeans with a glued-to-my-skin shirt, that can wear the smallest bikini without an ounce of fat hanging out around my waist, that can make me feel invincible.
At the same time that I have these thoughts I am completely disgusted with myself for having them. I spend an inexplicable amount of energy convincing myself, every single day, that this is all absurd, that I'm too smart to buy into this manipulative crap, that I do not need to be any thinner, that real women have curves, that the men I'm interested in don't want to date anorexic models, and that I shouldn't feed this negative voice that is not my own and tells me I am not good enough. But, when I'm really really honest with myself, when I look really deep inside, it's all still there- I still want to be really really thin. I want it so much that even after Lanusse Martins Barbosa's death, I can't say I'll never want (or have) a liposuction.
How sad this all makes me. Why can't we all have different bodies? Why do we all want the same one? Why don't I love and respect the body I have, why am I always dissatisfied? It's exhausting, it really is, and it makes me feel weak. I do not want to be defeated by the dictatorship of thinness, I want to believe I can rise above it.
Maybe my mind is split into two armies. One of them is called You Are Not Good Enough, and the other one is called You Are Perfect. I think they fight each other constantly and sometimes one wins over the other. Unfortunately the former tends to win because it has powerful ammunition- most of society backing it up. But sometimes You Are Perfect wins, even if just for instants, and that's a start. I don't think that in this lifetime I will be able to completely abolish You Are Not Good Enough, so what I'm going to hope for is that it can learn to be quiet most of the time and have less power over me. Maybe they can both come to a peace-treaty one day and I can find some sort of peace with myself and my body image issues.
A far-off fantasy, perhaps. But I'm not willing to give up yet.
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