My Body

Portfolio Assignment
Chapter 6, Exercise 2

Honestly, I can't remember a time when I wasn't feeling pressures or criticisms on my body. Whether people were actually criticizing me, or whether I was just feeling societies pressures, I'm not sure, I'm not sure the differences are too great. I'm the youngest of 3 siblings, 2 brothers and 1 sister, and we constantly harassed each other at any given opportunity. No one in my family would be considered overweight, but growing up I was definitely the chubby one. My family would never say anything to make me feel bad, but I got little jokes and side remarks quite frequently.
I think that this is because my family is part of a society that values a certain set of looks. Unfortunately, we value a set of looks that is very hard to accomplish while still maintaining good health. My family valued good health higher than achieving these good looks, but still used this perspective of beauty as their orientation to looking healthy. I was ushered into soccer as a way to stay healthy and keep active, which I played all the way through high school. In high school, I learned how to appreciate my healthiness versus my body definition. However, I began working out and lifting weights in order to start shaping my body to fit our cultural norms. I think that men have it easier, and my pressures in high school were never anything that would effect my mood or happiness. I knew girls that were greatly effected by these norms, and I think men are a lot quicker to disregard a woman that is not considered "pretty".
Beauty is purely cultural, you can look at different standards of beauty within our own country as evidence. Our culture has been increasing the importance of being thin, and sometimes unhealthily thin. Delaney talks about Marilyn Monroe being a size 12, while most admired women now-a-days are around sizes 2 or 3. The media is a huge contributor to this, mostly because they primarily choose women who hold these unreasonable standards of beauty as representations of all women. I think that a lot of people can surpass our cultural importance of beauty and realize the importance of who the man or woman really is. There is a group of people in our own culture that refuse to abide by our standards of beauty, these people are confident in who they are and know where true beauty lies.