#self immage

If you work in retail - especially if you work in women’s clothing.  Please read this and then come back and read the rest of my post: 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208367106073455&set=a.2168793537588.133310.1179185147&type=3&theater

One of the biggest challenges in learning to love your body as it is right now, is teaching yourself to view your own image or reflection with out any of the societally programmed filters in place, and one of the steps toward making that happen for me was to identify them.   I had to take out the filter that said if my thighs touch there is something wrong with me.  I had to dismantle the filter that said a visible outline of my belly or cellulite is gross.  I had to replace the filter that magnified anything that jiggled and labeled it as bad, with one that looked at my whole body as an amazing work of wonder.  As with so many things, it’s an on going process, and on any given day one of those filters I’ve worked so diligently to smash might sneak back in and try to sabotage my feelings about myself.

But, there’s another set of visual filters that I’ve found are even more insidious, and that we can do just as much harm to ourselves with.  They are the ones we view other people with.  It happens most often when we see another human being in an outfit that we ourselves would not be comfortable wearing, one that we judge to be too tight, too short, too revealing, too bulky, too whatever for our own body comfort.  When we see this, we sometimes immediately measure that person against ourselves - judging if they are bigger or smaller than us.  We make assumptions like that they aren’t aware that that belly outline is so obvious,  or that they don’t know that the skirt is short enough to show the cellulite on the back of their thighs.  Sometimes we even think to ourselves “that would be a cute outfit if they wore some body support undergarment with it”.  We have all these thoughts because we are viewing them and their clothing choices with a set of filters that are darn near identical to the ones we are trying not to see ourselves through - we think that that visible belly outline is something that should only be as obvious as we personally are comfortable with and we don’t like it when their cellulite shows, because it reminds us of ours and we still think of it as something bad.  It goes the other way too - when we think to ourselves “she’s so lucky, she can wear that” we are judging her body to be “the right size” or the “the right shape” to wear something we still feel we shouldn’t.

Thank you for my heart that beats.

Thank you for my lungs that breathe

Thank you for my limbs, my hands and feet, fingers and toes.

Thank you for eyes that see, and ears that hear.

Thank you for skin that envelopes all of me.

If you haven't seen the videos I'm talking about, you can find them here: http://realbeautysketches.dove.us/

I realize there has been some controversy about them.  Some people find them so inspirational that they are brought to tears and some people find that they make them angry, and pretty much everything in-between. 

I posted a link to the video the other day, and I've read a lot of what other folks have had to say about them, and I think many of the points made on both ends of the spectrum are incredibly valid.  Here's the thing that I keep coming back to though, there is a large portion of society that has never really thought about this sort of thing.  While I realize that those of us who are involved in size diversity activism or who are actively involved in learning to love our non-mainstream media typed beautiful selves might find it hard to believe - it is, none the less, true.

Is there a serious lack of diversity in the individuals involved in this project?  Yes, absolutely.  Fat, male, Hispanic, red headed, Native American, Indian among many others aren't represented at all, and Blacks and Asians are barely represented. Does it go far enough to be the whole conversation that I think needs to be happening? Nope, not at all.  But that doesn't disqualify these videos as a pinky toe dip into the idea that our self-image is often much more negative then what others see in us.  It presents the idea, the concept that perhaps how we judge ourselves against the unobtainable perfection of glossy magazine covers and carefully shot, professionally made-up movie stars is damaging or at the very least a negative thing.  And, it offers this idea in a way that is non-threatening to people who have never really given it any thought, it allows them to begin to think about it without a knee-jerk defense mechanism kicking in and without them automatically disqualifying the validity of the idea because of who the messenger is.

Some people leap into the deep end, some people need to wade in.  Sometimes when someone has waded in up to their ankles on their own, it's a whole lot easier for those swimming around at the deep end to coax them further out into the pool.  Because of Unilever's (the manufacturer of Dove products) vast media reach, these videos have way more people talking about the subject then were before they were released.  So instead of shouting down individuals who found them thought provoking or inspiring, because the videos "didn't go far enough", why not use them as a stepping off point for intelligent, even more thought provoking conversation? 

How women see themselves and how the world sees them. View all Real Beauty Sketches at http://bit.ly/sketchesdove #wearebeautiful