I learned in my Consumer Behavior class last semester that the average consumer is hit with over 3,000 advertisements every single day, from television, radio, Internet, print, and even billboards. And only about 8% of each one of those ads registers on the conscious level of our brains. The other 92% access the subconscious recesses of our minds and stick with us much longer, without us even realizing it.
Sure, these messages influence our purchasing behaviors, but more than that, they reflect whatever values the advertisers imply are important to our society. Marketing starts to mold who we are as consumers, and it also begins to affect how we perceive the world, as well as ourselves. We can say we don't pay attention to commercials, and we can mute them during breaks from our favorite television shows; but they get to us, whether we like it or not.
So think about the power these ads have over the populous. Marketing is the fastest and most effective way to communicate a message to the masses. Many of these messages are good; they're positive, uplifting jingles for BBQ restaurants and serious PSAs for suicide prevention hotlines. However, can you imagine the potential damage a single advertisement with negative implications can have? Even if the negative message is only implied, can you fathom how bad a person could feel if they identified with any of the qualities perceived as negative by the ad? An ad, which is rerun several times, since repetition is key in marketing? What about if negative messages were implied from more than just one ad? Two, or twenty, or five hundred, or a thousand ads? What if the negativity surrounding certain qualities became so pervasive in our advertising, because the advertising is simply reflecting how pervasive the negativity surrounding those qualities is throughout our culture?
I'm talking about the omnipresent, pervasive, and normalized message from society, and in turn, advertisers, that women should be thin. Or at the very least, not to be fat.
Women, especially young women, are targeted by advertisers for products like shampoo, makeup, nail polish, and tampons. But they're also targeted for things like weight loss pills, plastic surgery, and even clothing products that are designed to make a person appear thinner. Young women are the market segment targeted by advertisers because advertisers mimic society. Society provides a cultural script that says young women need to be thin and beautiful, so advertisers come along and offer young women products to help them adhere to society's demands. How kind of them, hmm?
I am a twenty-one-year-old woman living in the Western hemisphere, in perhaps the most commercialized nation on the planet. I've never really had a problem with not caring about what anyone else thinks of me, least of all some advertising executives who don't even know me. But they do know me. They classify me together with other Caucasian heterosexual cisgender female people who make less than $20,000 annually and live in Wichita, Kansas and attend university and drive a car and wash their hair and drink alcohol and eat pizza and listen to Taylor Swift.
These marketers may not know me personally, but they've got a pretty good idea of how I'll behave based upon what society tells me to do. They can guess my hopes and fears and a multitude of other things, because it's feasible to believe that I'll behave in generally the same way as others in my demographic. The power of marketers derives from how closely I follow the cultural script I've been taught. If they can predict my behavior, they can sell me a product.
Now, I must say, that from a young age, I have always considered myself to be very accepting of my body, regardless of whatever flaws society may have perceived it as having. It is my body, after all. I've never really paid any attention to the demand that women be thin, because like most fads and trends, I couldn't be bothered to play along. I've never even really considered myself to be "fat" as society would like it, because, well, I just don't have time for it. It wasn't until this year that I really started thinking more about my body, and I became much more aware of its appearance. Though I certainly didn't intend for it to be, this became a problem.
It all began a little over ten months ago when I returned from studying abroad. I spent four weeks in France, going to school most days from 9 to 4, with little exercise beyond just walking through the streets and across campus. And I mean, I was in France. What do you do when you're in France? You eat bread and you drink wine! So basically, I spent four weeks doing nothing besides conjugating verbs and consuming complex carbohydrates. Don't get me wrong; I had the time of my life! In fact, I was so busy loving life that I didn't think very much about anything else.
I came home at the end of July. It's important to know a few things here in order to understand where my mind was at:
1. I was terribly heartbroken to leave France and my host family, and I went through some rough reverse culture shock.
2. I had missed my biological family while I was gone, but that didn't mean I necessarily wanted to be staying with my mother until school started.
3. Being home reminded me of the breakup I had just experienced prior to going to France, and I was no longer on the other side of the world from this reality.
So, I was generally irritable and unhappy to be back in Ark City. Furthermore, I realized upon stepping on my mother's bathroom scale, that all that wine and bread had caught up to me. So, one day, near the beginning of August, I decided I'd go for a run.
This wasn't unusual for me, as I'd gone for runs off and on many times at Mom's house. I knew my preferred running route well, and it didn't present itself as very dangerous. It was only about a mile and a half total, but I ran it so inconsistently that it always seemed to be a challenge.
I came home, stretched, did some abs, and that was it. Until two days later when I decided I'd do it again. And after that, I kept up with an every-other-day schedule pretty well, running in the evening as the sun set so as not to die from heat exhaustion. School started a few weeks later, and I kept my routine pretty consistently by running on campus in the evenings. I was proud of my diligence and commitment to something that was better for me than Netflix. Then I started to notice my weight loss.
I hadn't begun running back in July with any particular motivation or goal in mind. I guess I just felt like I'd gained a little weight in France, I wanted out of the house and away from my mother, and I felt like exercising regularly was a healthy outlet for dealing with my residual emotions from the breakup. I wasn't doing it because I had a man "to keep happy" or because I thought I was grossly overweight. Overall, running seemed like a healthy thing to do just for me. And that's why I liked it.
I've never felt like I'm very good at running, and in high school some of my rude track teammates made fun of me because I stomped when my feet hit the ground. I was not highly involved in sports, and to this day, I don't consider myself to be very athletic. So it was never about that, for me. It was always much more about having my own personal time to let my brain flat-line and forget my worries. Running was an escape. But when I started to see visible changes in my body, which were confirmed by the scale, I got excited. I was proud to see that something I'd chosen to do by myself, for myself had benefited me in this way. But "benefited"? Who says?
My pants started to get looser and looser. I had to go buy new jeans, this time in a size 5 instead of a 9. My legs were no longer sore from running like they were when I started, but the mornings after doing an ab workout, I'd feel the burn while trying to sit up in my bed. I noticed my shirts and dresses were now laying more flatly around my body, and this made me happy.
But as the over-analyzing feminist that I am, I began to wonder if perhaps my happiness as a result of a change in my physical appearance was actually a good thing. I've always been a firm believer that happiness comes from within, and if something as vain and external as physical appearance was making me happy, that couldn't be a good thing. Right?
I kept running, though my every-other-day schedule started to waver as the semester progressed and I became busier. The cold weather moved in and I started making visits to the Heskett Center to run on the treadmill, instead. I didn't really allow myself the time to mull over my thoughts about my weight loss, because I was busy with work and school, and finals were approaching. But all the while, doubt started to creep into my mind about whether or not I actually wanted to lose the weight in the first place.
Part of me wanted to keep eating salad before every meal and doing crunches after I ran. Part of me wanted to go to the nearest grocery store and buy all the candy with high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified junk food as I could afford, and eat it all in an hour as I binged on Netflix. The cantankerous feminist devil on my left shoulder was arguing with the self-loving feminist angel on my right. And I was caught in the middle.
Had I actually, perhaps subconsciously, wanted to lose the weight when I started? Did that mean admitting to myself and others that there were parts of my body with which I was dissatisfied? That, in fact, I wasn't this portrait of an all-accepting, self-loving überfeminist? And did all of this mean that I valued my twenty-pound-lighter body more than I did the body I had in August? Did any of this have any bearing on the way I thought, and had I become convinced by my experience with weight loss to value skinny people the most and fat-shame others? My brain extrapolated possible conclusions well past the point of rationality.
Of course my thinking hadn't changed. My values and convictions run deep. If intersectional feminism were a color, it would be the same pigment as the blood that pours out of my leg when I nick myself shaving. I know this, in the very fiber of my being. So why was my brain running amuck with extreme ideas about what a change in my weight meant? Were people really treating me differently because of a few less pounds, or was my feminist brain just imagining things, as it sometimes does? There was just so much to reconcile.
I began to think I liked it better when I was "fat and happy" because then at least I could dish out the "your opinion of my body doesn't matter" attitude and people accepted it. When a "fat girl" says that, she's just that: a fat girl, automatically silenced by her appearance, and invalidated by her nonconformity to societal demands. When a "skinny girl" says that, she's a stuck-up bitch who can't take a compliment. Before, I was familiar with defending my appearance to those who criticized it, and funnily enough, I never found myself being one of the critics. But accepting compliments based on my physical appearance -- some kind of "accomplishment" at making myself more attractive to society -- has never really sat well with me. It's a strange, convoluted, messy entanglement between my brain, my heart, feminism, and patriarchy; but, I know I'm pretty because I think I'm pretty, not because someone else does. I guess the problem came when I started to wonder if people were treating me nicely because of who I am and they genuinely wanted to treat me nicely, or if it was just because I had recently dropped the weight of a very small child.
It wasn't until very recently, like within the last two weeks, that I came to an epiphany about this mess of emotion and flawed logic that was brewing in my head. I wasn't unhappy because I had lost weight. That was never the change that caused any of these problems. I was unhappy because I started to worry about what other people thought about the weight I lost. Before I lost the weight, I had already accepted myself and my body the way it was. I already knew what I looked like and how to expect people to treat me based on it. (Not that it was ever nearly as bad as many millions of other people in the world, by any means.) But it was familiar. Then I lost the weight, and as a result, I expected people would treat me differently, because I know a woman's physical appearance is her most important quality in our world, for some godforsaken reason. Then I became so acutely aware of and militantly defensive to everyone's interactions with me, that I was thinking so much more about their opinions of me, than I was about my own opinions of me. And that's just it!
I realized that because I've been indoctrinated by society, via television ads and magazine covers for twenty-one years to believe "thin is in", that I was the one who actually internalized the message. Me, with the impenetrable wall of feminism specifically designed to detect and repel patriarchal garbage in every form! I had somehow unwittingly allowed the messages from advertisers to creep into my brain, and then I let the opinions of others overpower the importance of my own self-acceptance. I had handed my power right over to the patriarchy. Then I sat and wondered where it was I had gone so wrong and why I was in such a state of emotional unrest. It was because I started subconsciously comparing the state of myself to the unattainable standard which the advertisers set for me. Then I constantly wondered how closely I measured up, instead of simply not caring, as I'd always done before.
I never realized that I had actually changed two variables, not just one. Instead of blaming the real culprit, which was ever giving a damn about what others think, I blamed the most visible change I could think of, which was a change in my physical appearance. Because, once again, we've all been taught that a woman's physical appearance is what matters the most. It just goes to show that even the most passionate of know-it-all feminists can be taught to play right into the hands of a patriarchal society if they are exposed to its harmful values enough.
I never should've worried for a second what anyone else thought about my body. It is my body, after all. I never gave the opinions of others a second thought before I lost the weight. Because I already accepted myself as I was, and I was happy with that. Then my body changed, and as I had to begin accepting myself as I changed, I began to worry if perhaps the rate at which others were or were not accepting me had anything to do with it. Happiness does come from within. It comes from accepting yourself and loving yourself right now, today, right where you are. Consciously or not, no advertisement can ever sell you that.
So I look in the mirror today, and I see a woman whose body has indeed changed. I see a woman who knows she can run farther and longer than she ever even tried in high school. I see a woman who really, honestly did accept her body before she lost the weight, and who wouldn't hesitate to give a middle finger to anyone who disagreed. I also see a woman who worried herself entirely too much over the thoughts and opinions of others about her body for a time. I see a woman who got caught between two opposing sides in a false dichotomy of options for women in our world: unmotivated, lazy, fat girl, or healthy, vegetable-eating, athlete. I see a woman who is somedays both, lazy and healthy. I see a woman who painted herself into a corner with internalized patriarchy without even realizing it, because the message was ingrained so deeply into the subconscious of her brain. I see a woman, whom for a time, played right into the cultural script that society has laid out for women to always be concerned about the perception of their physical appearance. I see a woman who felt more pressure to remain skinny after she'd lost the weight, than she ever did to lose it in the first place. I see a woman who knows her happiness, along with her self-worth come from within herself, and nowhere else. And I see a woman who realized all of this, just now, as she wrote this, and who became very relieved as soon as she understood, once again, that the opinions of others -- advertisers, a patriarchal society, or anyone else -- have never actually mattered in the past, nor will they at any point in the future.
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