The Body Beautiful
After watching this film, I began to think about how incredibly obsessed our society is with beauty and the idea of the perfect female body. We obsess over fitness magazines and dieting, we idolize the celebrities who starve themselves to achieve the "ideal" body, and we over-analyze our bodies, picking apart our "flaws." This has somehow become the price we must pay for beauty. In many cases, these women whom we have put on such a high pedestal are so thin that they are unhealthy and malnourished. But this is beautiful. This is what we have been taught to be perfection. Somehow the body of the average woman is not even considered to be worthy of beauty anymore and therefore the deformed body takes on an even lower status than ever before.
Our generation has been brought up in a overly-competative social environment where perfection is always the number one goal. To many, deformation seems like the absolute end of the world. Plastic surgeons make millions of dollars a year "fixing" peoples bodies. From liposuction, to nose jobs, to botox, to breast enhancements, all people seem to want is to stay young and "perfect" forever or to achieve that much-desired level of "perfection" that they have not been given by nature. "Flaws" are not tolerated or accepted in our society and therefore must be eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of dollars go into the beauty industry a year to create new products to prevent and diminish wrinkles and regain the appearance of "youth" and "beauty," which always go hand in hand. It also seems like almost every week there is some new extreme, super-restrictive diet developed to help us attain the perfect body. Subsequently, more and more people are being diagnosed with eating disorders or suffering from malnutrition.
The fact of the matter is, that instead of embracing our bodies, embracing our age and our differences and our "flaws," we strive for this uniform look. We live under the belief that beauty and perfection and youthful are interchangeable terms and that they have very strict guidelines. To stray from these guidelines even in the slightest way, puts you at a sub-level of beauty, making you unable to be a part of the "elite bread of women" as we hear about in the film.
Sadly, deformation makes many people very uncomfortable. Its hard to see, its hard to understand and so we make our own assumptions to make ourselves more comfortable. Just as the women in the sauna do in the film, we turn away and we avoid it. Most people are so quick to judge others, to see only the outside without even bothering to look in. The director herself, when speaking about her mother, even admits that, "The truth was...that if i hadn't come from inside that body that everyone wanted hidden away, then I would have turned away too."
In our society's beauty standards, Madge Onwurah and her daughter are at opposite ends of the spectrum. In our world, women who do not fit into what is "normal" are forced to see themselves as inferior to others, as Madge explains by saying that the "sliding scale of beauty...stops at women like me." This is how she has come to understand the world, a world that has made her feel sub-human and undesirable. Madge is made to believe that cancer has not only taken away her left breast, but that it has also stripped her of her beauty and sexuality as well.
It is in her fantasy about the man at the bar we see her wishes to regain "the right to be desired for my body and not in spite of it" and says how "one caress from him would smooth out the scars." We realize here just how much she wants to be normal again, to feel beautiful, to feel like a woman. She is a woman who has been made to feel ashamed of her "sexless" body, and to believe that she is unworthy of sexual attention, and unworthy of love.
I thought it was particularly beautiful how we are able understand just how unbreakable the bond is between Madge and her daughter at the end of the film. We come to realize that these two women, although opposites in appearance, share one spirit. Madge's beauty is reflected in the image of the daughter, through the beauty which she has been able to create. In her daughter's own words, "She lives inside of me and cannot be separated....I may not be reflected in her image, but my mother is mirrored in my soul."
Submitted By: Tara Scalesi
4 comments:
I agree that we do have an unhealthy fixation on a particular body image. You brought up the point of how much money is spent on the industry of body alteration, I wonder what the effects would be if we spent as much money on trying to feed others and take care of real problems of the world.
Going hand in hand with the consequences of these images imposed on us, you mentioned eating disorders. But let's not forget body dysmorphia. An equally ugly aspect of the human mind as it is touched and molded by societal expectations and pressures.
The quote you included by her was an excellent choice to include here. It's very true that if we don't have experience with a body that's different, as she had been aware of her mother's body being her daughter, we would probably shun it otherwise. This is why we must, no matter our experiences or past, be tolerant and accepting.
When sexuality is taken away in the minds of people because their body is different, it can be devastating. Sexuality is an important and AWESOME part of being human. It's unfair that it can be taken away, or thought to not exist rather.
The ending was indeed a sigh of relief regarding their relationship with one another. Hopefully we can all reach the point the daughter came to; of acceptance, embrace, and understanding.
I do agree with you that there is a huge obsession with "perfecting" the body that we were given. So many people, especially young girls read the magazines, and watch the movies, leading them to be exposed to the images of the ''accepted'' body. I am glad that there are some companies out there, like Dove, that create advertisements encouraging people to be happier with the skin they're in.
I'm glad that the daughter and mother became closer at the end of the movie. I feel like the mother is more comfortable with herself and the body she has, while the daughter is not ashamed, but proud of her mother and all that she has given her.
Tara, thanks for an excellent contemplation of our society's preoccupation with the perfect body. Women particularly, as you mention, suffer from the backlash of the unanimous worship of "perfection" and the endless quest for aesthetics embodied in idealistic physical form. It takes such a mental toll on everyone who is touched by it. The rate of young women with eating disorders are rising at a frightening rate, and in some countries (like Korea) it's not even talked about - there is no awareness campaign, nor is there an acceptance of the reality. The girls simply wither away, and they write it off as poor nutrition, exhaustion, etc.
Recent moves in the American media are the most encouraging things I've seen thus far - the Dove commercials for instance, and their consistent use of women of all shapes and sizes in their commercials. Hopefully, we'll be able to see a realistic representation of bodies on television and the rest of the mass media in the near future.
Women have to fit in a submissive image, and being smaller allows them to physically take up less space. The image glorified in the Americand advertising is a sexualized, submissive woman often in an orgasmic pose/countenance.
Apparently 5% of woman have the model genes. I would like to press this issue of uglyness and beauty and see where one's genes make one lie etc. I want to know who's who in America, related to their relative achievements. For instance, where do the Beatles fall genetically? Probably somewhere near that 5% excepting Ringo of course. lol
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