YOUR SURRENDER IS SIGNIFICANT
A lightning bolt of a post by the ever-intrepid Holly (the brilliant fellow warrior-friend of mine that inspiringly served as a catalyst for many of the ideas in this book) of Eating a Tangerine; I’m honored to have the privilege of publishing it here on cynosure.
The photos, of course, are mine.
Your surrender is significant
To my fellow women-folk:
For every one of you who capitulates to unfair standards of beauty, it is THAT MUCH HARDER for the rest of us to resist.
When you deny yourself food when you are hungry, when you call yourself names, when you let yourself feel guilty for eating dessert, when you spend more time and money than you can afford to on bringing your appearance into line with The Man’s dictates, IT AFFECTS US TOO.
It affects me, a young woman for whom continuing to recover from an eating disorder requires daily effort. It affects my friends. It affects my younger sister and my little cousins, who are figuring out whether it is possible to be a woman and at peace with your body.
For all our sakes, stop going along. Stop agreeing with the message that your worth can be judged by your appearance – as if you were some collector’s doll or show dog. Stop doing things that you think are stupid just because you’re told it’s mandatory. Stop accepting these standards of beauty without asking where they come from, what they signify, who they serve, what you think of them. Stop, stop, stop.
Don’t you see? This heaviness you feel, we all feel it, and for us part of the heaviness is what you have added by complying. And yes, some of the heaviness you feel is my fault. It belongs to me too.
Your compliance is significant. Your surrender carries weight. Your capitulation is not just personal.
I am angry, yes. At myself too, for believing that it could ever be a merely personal matter for me to agree to hate my female body, my female self. (I promise I have never written an imperative statement or word of advice that I don’t write also for myself.)
It is inescapable: we affect one another.
So I’m going to keep saying no to all this bullshit, even when it hurts and it’s really tiring. I’m going to look my reflection in the eye even when it’s all wrong, and I’m not going to say that I FEEL FAT as if “fat” were an actual emotion. I’m not going to idolize emaciated women while calling myself a feminist. I’m going to eat as much as I need and I’m going to keep it down, and I’m going to do what I want to do with my days even when I’m not confident in my appearance.
I don’t want to come off like I’m saying I’m somehow stronger than all this and above all this. Frankly, some days I feel like I cannot deal with myself and these pressures, and believe me, I know what poison is like.
But I need this defiance even more. I need to know that I am not making this society any more oppressive for my sex.
And you see, the flip side is this: if your surrender means something, then your defiance means even more.
Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal … therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety … As soon as the alternative appears, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations.
- Václav Havel
It is only with the act of resisting, of refusing to play these games and swallow these lies, that one of us can show another that it is possible to do so.
It is only in believing that I deserve better – and fighting for that – that I can assure you in any meaningful way that you do too. That we all do.
And it is how we give each other strength to keep fighting.
So if you decide to give the finger to The Man and his beauty culture, you won’t be alone. I’ll be there too, and we can stand together and wave at the horizon and tell each other when we notice one of us starting to cave, and then help hold each other up. You won’t be there alone. Promise.
love and defiance,
HOLLY.
Holly makes her home at tangerine-eater.com. She wrote this piece in 2010, a year into recovery. She is a feminist, an anthropology nerd, and a native San Franciscan. She likes ideas, words, mindfulness, and photography.
