When you define feminism or any activism-related term, it is often conveyed as a strong and powerful depiction of the movement a group of people believes in. I define feminism as fighting for justice and equity for girls and women. So where does the line blur when feminism and femininity become a negative interchange? When does the empowering act of fighting for justice become the pleading act of being victimized in everyday life?
Why are girls socialized to think that femininity is found when not eating enough to the point of blacking out? Why do our stomachs growl from the lack of food that our bodies need to sustain? Why do we love the feeling of boys being able to tower over us and look down upon us, making us feel tiny?
Why do I crave this feeling?
Why do I crave the feeling of my arm being half the size of any boy’s, my face being slimmer and beginning to look ghostly? Why do I crave the feeling of knowing that a boy could wrap his arms around my waist and think to himself; she’s so tiny, she’s so cute.
Why do I associate these yearnings with being feminine?
As I sit on the basketball bench, I long not to play because boys are watching. I wear a loose ponytail, draping my long hair over my left shoulder, making sure that it’s not too tight so I don’t look ‘too athletic.’ I wear a large sweatshirt over my jersey, making it so that guys can gaze over at me and think of me as a feminine, petite girl, who looks cute sitting and staring at the court in her oversized sweatshirt, admiring the game she isn’t participating in.
Why do I dread the feeling of being put in the game fearing that I will look weird while I run? And you might ask to whom? To whom will I look weird?
The male gaze is patriarchal approval of the stereotypical beauty standard that boys and men most commonly look for in girls and women. Basically, everything we straight girls do is to please and desire the straight male gaze. In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde states, “As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.” This passage is meaningful to me because it says that women have been taught to not trust their place in the world and have been taught to not be confident in themselves. Therefore, they succumb to the roles and norms that men and boys define.
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As a result of reading Audre Lorde in a high school feminism class, I have become angrier and angrier at the fact that I am so centered around this idea of attracting the male gaze. You might think that this anger would get me farther away from succumbing to this desired gaze, however, I feel that it does the opposite. Every day I feel myself wanting to be tinier and tinier, to appear smaller to the boys that surround me. I sit and hold my stomach no matter if I’m wearing jeans, leggings, or sweatpants. I run my fingers across my midstream just to make sure I didn’t grow a size overnight.
Why is this my life? Why am I centered on this feeling of masking my feminist values and increasing my femininity?
Before I learned the formal definitions of feminism, I was already a feminist. You might ask how I knew what feminism was if I didn’t even know what its definition was. My high school feminism teacher, Ileana, asked me to remember my feminist ‘click,’ or the moment in my life when I became aware that something was unfair in the world and realized my feminist consciousness. Immediately after she asked me that question, I exclaimed that I knew when that moment was.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the moment I began to notice the gender divide and began adhering to the male gaze was the moment my eating disorder began to develop. I am often categorized as having a “quarantine eating disorder.” However, my story is a little bit different than others. Maybe it was the time that I began to count my calories on the app, My Fitness Pal, that my dad encouraged me to try to help me eat better, as I had asked him to do. Or maybe it got worse when I paid for my first subscription to the Weight Watchers app where every item of food is given a number of points and god forbid when I ran out of points I could eat for the day.
Monika Radojevic writes in her poetry collection, Teeth in the Back of My Neck, “To be a woman is to grow up quickly: perfection is a concrete slab that encases our feet, heavy enough to make us stand very still.” This line is the perfect representation of how it feels to succumb to the beauty norms that society has set for us.
Starting to eat within the goals of these apps became something I gravitated towards very fast. Trying to stay under my amount of points and calories for these two apps was my goal for the first two weeks. However, it quickly escalated into a game. I started trying to beat the apps and started eating 25% less than they were telling me to eat. Soon this became 50%, then 75% less than what they advised, then close to 90%.
I went from a chubby thirteen-year-old who ate pancakes for breakfast, grilled cheese for lunch, and had multiple cookies after dinner, to a slimmed-out girl who had just begun to alter her life on the wrong track.
What I often think about when looking back at these times in my life is that I genuinely cannot remember the last time I had any of the foods I used to love. My order at a diner turned from pancakes to egg white omelets, my lunch order turned from mac and cheese to a salad with no protein, tons of veggies, and balsamic vinegar not vinaigrette on the side. I realized that I had begun to dread all fun meal outings with my friends because I denied myself any foods that I thought might make me gain weight.
When quarantine hit mid-March 2020, my eating disorder had begun to go from eating clean to eating little to nothing. It wasn’t until my birthday at the beginning of quarantine on April 1, that I knew my mind wires got extremely screwed up. I opted out of the classic Pillsbury cinnamon buns that my family made for me every birthday, and had a coconut alternative yogurt with mango. I was so excited about this yogurt that I had almost forgotten the fact that my brain had tricked me into wanting it.
These occurrences continued throughout the next three years. Whether I just packed fruits and veggies for lunch or had yogurt for breakfast every day, I kept denying myself foods that I perceived as ‘bad.’ I had the same mentality last summer when I traveled to Italy on a teen tour. This tour was something I was incredibly nervous about, not because I was planning on going on it alone. Instead, I was terrified that there would be no food options for me, and, indeed, there were minimal. I went through the entire experience without having a dish of pasta in Italy. I feel ashamed about admitting this because it sounds so incredibly embarrassing. Who goes to Italy and doesn’t have pasta?
But I strongly felt that it was too late to start eating normally again because I had to keep up my physique. I think I assumed these alterations to my life would eventually fade. However, three years later, this femininity that I craved took over my life and there was no going back.
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I often wonder how the yearning for the male gaze began. What prompted women and girls to bow down to the idea that we had to succumb to men’s standards? Did you know that Victoria’s Secret was created by a man? This feminist consciousness began when I realized that we girls didn’t want to become the beauty standard for no reason, it was because men had said that they liked a certain beauty standard the best.
Even before I joined the feminism club in high school, participated in abortion marches, or enrolled in a feminism class, I noticed and experienced inequalities that shaped the lives of so many. It wasn’t until these clubs and classes that I realized that the experience I had starting at age thirteen was a similar experience of that of many other girls’ lives because of the unfair gender inequities that are set upon us by society.
When I joined the feminism club as a freshman, I was terrified. Not only because the girls were so much older than I was, but because they were so wise in their words about feminism and their experiences. However, weirdly enough, it didn’t take long for me to start speaking out in front of that class because every girl in the room immediately agreed with me and praised my experience as if it was their own. As a group, we talked about how we were sick of these standards set by boys and men and how they control our lives. It wasn’t until this club that my feminist values strengthened. I wanted to focus on the feminist desires I craved and the inequality and injustices that I wanted to reverse. This was when I learned the true definition of feminism.
In recent months, I have found my calling in psychology and the activist definition of feminism. I want to touch on how these two ideas interlock because I hold them very dear to my heart. Body image and eating disorders are very prevalent in my life, along with the passion I feel for abortion access and justice. I have grown to notice that just as we may not have control over our bodies within the realm of abortions, it feels as though we may not have control over our bodies within the realm of body image as well.
Decisions are always being made for us, and I am sick of it. Similar to how the U.S. government makes decisions about abortions, beauty standards made by a sexist patriarchy tell us how or how not we should look. Social media only features women and girls who have stereotypical perfect bodies, perfect skin, and flowing hair that dictates how we should all look. It has caused me to compare myself to others since the ripe age of 11 and has been the source of many of my issues and insecurities to date.
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Social media was one of the sole reasons I developed an eating disorder three years ago. Social media taught me how I was ‘supposed’ to view my body and how I was ‘supposed’ to treat it, and because of that, I developed a false perception of myself. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical or mental, but other people always have control over my body, particularly through social media.
The last three years of my life have undoubtedly been the hardest. As the monster inside my head developed and took over my life, the loss of control over my body became more and more real, and I felt less and less in control. It finally came to the point where I had plans to go abroad to Israel for the upcoming trimester this school year. The date of departure is January 23, 2023. Four weeks ago, I was approached by my parents, my therapist, and my nutritionist, who all told me that I am not able to, nor am I in the right state of mind to be so far away from home at this time. It was then that I realized how much social media has affected my body, my life, and my future.
Though it is extremely difficult, I am trying to recover and regain the right to my body back emotionally and mentally. Just as we fight for abortion rights and the ability to control our own bodies, I am also fighting back for the ability to view myself for who I am and not how social media is ‘supposed’ to perceive me.
Last year, I found my feminist stance when organizing a walkout for abortion rights. I felt so empowered and strong that as a tenth grader I was able to bring change to the minds of many. I originally had the idea to organize this walkout at my high school when I saw an Instagram account, Rise Up for Abortion Rights, announce that many people were convening to protest for abortion rights in Union Square in New York City. As the date of the march approached, my feelings supporting abortion rights grew stronger and stronger. When the day of the walkout came and the majority of the school arrived at Union Square surrounded by hundreds of other activists and supporters, I felt empowered.
In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,“ Kimberlé Crenshaw states, “Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women.” This passage is an exemplary paragraph as to why coming together as women with shared experiences is what is going to make the most change in gender equity. When we draw from the strength of shared experience, we grow stronger and are able to voice our beliefs.
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Despite my efforts to stand up for women’s rights, sometimes I feel hopeless for my future and that of many others. I feel hopeless about having no control over my body or the drastic change of course my life could behold. I feel as though I am almost awaiting the life-changing day when I might have no option but to alter the course of my life. I feel anxious that the law can send the route of my life in the opposite direction.
As a young woman, I feel that it is my right to have control over choices around my reproductive health. The government should not have the ability to tell me that I have to have a child if it is not my intention.
We have grown accustomed to the nature of controversy when approaching ideas such as abortion. The popular T.V. show Degrassi: The Next Generation features a two-part episode following a teen character discovering that she is pregnant and ultimately deciding to get an abortion. This episode’s discussion of teen pregnancy and abortion delayed the episode’s premiere by two years due to its controversial nature. This depiction of abortion on T.V. gave me great insight as to see the societal perception of abortion. The simple fact that this episode was delayed two years shows me that as a society, there is an intense stigma against the idea of abortion, let alone the execution of it.
This culture and stigma around abortion are what truly pains me. I want to end this stigma and convey ongoing support to anyone in need of an abortion, and to help them make sure they receive it as well.
The line blurs between feminism and femininity when a woman doesn’t have the right to choose. In the case of abortion, it is deciding whether or not to keep a pregnancy. In the case of vanity, it is that society has dictated how women are perceived and subsequently treated. My hopes and dreams for feminism and femininity is that there are platforms for women’s empowerment no matter what the subject.