The summer after 5th-6th? grade, I went to camp for a week. The counselor for the girls’ cabin had the half-dozen of us go around the circle and tell everyone a part of our bodies we really liked. The first girl picked the most harmless and uncontroversial thing she could think of: “um…my eyes? I guess?” and the rest of the girls promptly followed suit with the now-instantly-obligatory “my eyes” “uh, my eyes…” When it got to me, I said

“My FEET!”

After a few seconds of silence, one of the girls who’d gone before me said “…I want to say my feet, too, now. I like them.” Within a minute everyone had decided they liked their feet, and we had moved on to all hands, most knees, someone’s fingernails, at least one set of elbows…

I’ve since worked my way up my body a fair amount, from just liking my feet. (My internal organs, for example, I am nearly always pleased with!) I hope some of the girls from camp, if/when they start thinking crap about their bodies, remember that they at least like their feet!

(On a more analytical note, it seems that feet don’t get a huge amount of media attention. At least, not that I’ve noticed. Shoes, sure, but feet seem to be about as judgment-neutral a body part as a woman can have nowadays. Maybe finding something relatively easy to love –or at least something slightly less rigidly idealized– and then working your way out to the rest of your body could be a helpful strategy for adults and/or kids.)

This is seriously the grossest show I have ever seen and I can’t believe this shit even got on tv.

You’re so right, it can’t be about how any one individual woman looks. And being conventionally attractive has its downsides too.

I think the key is to dismantle standardized beauty ideals while still allowing for physical appearance to matter.

If we all dared to deviate more from conventional beauty standards and just go for what pleases us as individuals, fewer people would try to fit the standards for the wrong (as in other-imposed) reasons, and more people would feel freer to see beauty through their own eyes, not those of the media or a social consensus.

As in, some guys like women with curves, some like them skinny. Some people like blue eyes, others brown. I like guys other people describe as “malnourished” or “half starved”. Not everybody even goes for blond, skinny and big breasted if they’re honest with themselves.

If someone wants a boob job, and it’s her decision alone because she thinks it will make her so much happier that it’s worth going through the surgery for, then more power to her, and congratulations for the people who then happen to like that look.

If a woman gets a boob job because she’s worried she might not be attractive to her partner or the general public after breast feeding, or past a certain age, I think that’s kind of tragic.

I’m very involved with body modification culture (picture me sitting here with 25 piercings, tattoos round my wrists and some decorative scars) and there people sometimes get a lot of flack for fitting the “wrong” beauty standard or looking too “mainstream”. While I think that with something as ultimately private as which exact way who feels comfortable and yes, beautiful, inside their own body should not be subject to any standardized rule be they subcultural or mainstream.

“I’ve started to examine what it means to be attractive and how, for me, that’s not really a positive thing. More than anything, it feels like just another way for my society to control me, to restrict my actions, and to objectify me against my will.”

Sometimes I get the feeling that women look at me and assume we’re playing for opposite teams. As a lifelong feminist and a strong, intelligent, and motivated woman, I find that the imbedded assumptions I see written across other womens’ faces, while very different from the kinds of objecification I experience from men, are also a form of objectification, and something that I have also internalized. I remember my shame and frustration during a particular discussion in a college women’s studies class as my classmates derisively referred to “blonde, blue eyed, big breasted bimbos” while I, the only person in the class who fit the physical part of that description, put my head down and sank into my chair. I can also remember a similar instance during a meeting of my campus’ Eating Disorder Reachout group (which I, a survivor of an eating disorder, was very active in) in which someone was trying to think of a way to convey on a poster the fact that “skinny, blonde women aren’t the real role models–ordinary women are.”

My basic point I think is that it’s important to remember that trying to empower ourselves by distinguishing ourselves from those with “idealized” body types only perpetuates the kind of framework we’re trying to escape. As Audre Lord said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” If we continue to frame a debate around a discussion of what we look like and what we don’t, we’re perpetuating the objectification we’re trying to move away from.

As a second point, I want to say that from the standpoint of personal experience, speaking as someone who developed early and began to get sexual attention from men at 12 or 13, after more than a decade of this, I find myself very closed off to men in a lot of ways. I find that I almost always am suspicious of any man that approaches me, be it on the street, at a party, in the workplace, or anywhere else. I think in large part because of the walls I’ve put up to protect myself from the constant barrage of objectification, I don’t date much and when I do it’s usually only longstanding male friends. I wonder if anyone shares this type of experience or could offer advice about how you’re able to let your guard down enough to meet men worth meeting. I feel the need to be suspicious and self-protective because when I make eye contact with a man on the street and he smiles and I smile back and then he turns around and yells “nice ass” after me, I feel so deceived and angry that it makes me not smile at the next man who comes along. How does one navigate this fine line of self-protectiveness without becoming totally closed off to people to the point of isolation? Any thoughts?