Bonded Bodies

Inside any of the reality-warping bubbles that contain places like Park Slope, Brooklyn, Princeton, NJ, Palo Alto, CA -- or, just so we don't think they all begin with Ps -- Beacon Hill, Boston, MA, and Highland Park in Dallas, TX, you'll see this on a daily basis:

A tall, beautiful, younger mother with long hair and a hefty diamond ring on her finger, perhaps some other understated though conspicuously expensive jewelry.

She'll be wearing Lululemon tights to accentuate her slim figure.  

(Amazingly, for a product that's otherwise hard to differentiate, LuLu has been beyond brilliant in setting the twenty-first-century standard for things Spandex -- a term of derision and disdain back in the big and baggy 80s and 90s! They have enough of a devoted following to seek protection as a religious institution.)

The top doesn't matter all that much.  Maybe a t-shirt from an Ivy League school, or better yet, a towny prep school like Deerfield or Sidwell Friends.  

Then you'll notice her eight or ten year old daughter.  Exactly the same.  Maybe a few feet shorter (mom's tend to average 5'8"+).

Standing in line behind one such couple at a Starbucks yesterday, I had this disturbing realization that the mother and daughter had the same size calves. Now I didn't measure, but eyeballing it they looked very close. Mom did expand slightly more in the thighs and waist, but this particular woman was trending more toward anorexic than athletic.

I felt sad.  I felt outraged.  All in all, just mystified.

Here's my reflection on patriarchy and misogyny for today:

Women learn that to be beautiful and desirable they must maintain a (newly liberated feminist) body molded in the image of a Lolita-like prepubescent beauty.  (Even if Nabokov describes Lolita as being rather gangly and unattractive, no matter—that book foretells the future more than most.)

Slim hips, flat tummy, lithe arms, the fairly normal ten or twelve year old female.  Stay that way!

So as puberty takes over, and our bodies begin to change, women must combat that change to maintain their ideal body type.  No extra fat, nothing.  Just taller.

Girls learn to hate their sex.  The hormones, the urges, the desires—all to be repressed as part of this evil force stealing the body on which their future recognition depends.

It's tragic.  Eve-like shame.

Boys, on the other hand, welcome puberty with wide-open arms.  Bigger, thicker, stronger -- muscles to develop, voices to deepen, abs to harden.  Every moment is a gift for becoming more manly -- and finding yet another woman to idealize and objectify in the model of the young women they idealized at the moment of their sexual awakening.

Why?

I don't know.  I'm curious to know women's perspectives.  Is it the same for gay women?

I just hope we can all have fit, healthy bodies and enjoy them safely, responsibly and consensually without such terrible burdens of shame and self-denying self hatred.