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Contact University Of Dayton Women's Center 212 Alumni Hall Dayton, Ohio 45469-0322 Phone : 937-229-5390 |
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Love
Your Body Month 2007 The 2007 Be A Better You: Love Your Body Month Committee:
“Looks, girls learn early, collapse into
a metaphor for everything else. They
quickly become the defining criteria
for our status and our
worth. And somewhere along the
line, we stop believing in
the power of our minds and our
bodies.” “ Primarily girls are told by advertisers what is most important to them is their perfume, their clothing, their bodies, their beauty. Their “essence” is their underwear. Girls of all ages get the message that they must be flawlessly beautiful and, about all these days, they must be thin. Even more destructively, they get the message that this is possible, that, with enough effort and self-sacrifice, they can achieve this ideal. Thus many girls spend enormous amounts of time and energy attempting to achieve something that is only trivial but also completely unattainable."- Jean Kilbourne, From the book: Can’t Buy My Love 2007 Love Your Body Month focuses on self-acceptance and health matters
Page According
to the National Organization for Women (NOW) Foundation, 80% of women in
the United States are dissatisfied with their appearance. This boils
down to only one out of every five women having a positive body image. To
counter this, the UD Women’s Center has dedicated the entire month of
October to building a positive self image. The theme, Be a Better You:
Love your Body Month will focus this year on prevention. The Women’s
Center and other UD departments are sponsoring many events on campus to
inspire women to take comfort in and love their bodies. Check out the Women’s Center’s website for a complete calendar of Love Your Body Month events. (www.womenscenter.udayton.edu/ calendar)
Love Yourself, Invest in Yourself As a woman, I am very much aware of the social pressures placed upon women to uphold a standard of youth, beauty, and motherhood. As a psychologist in training, I am also very aware of how these social expectations of women can have a very detrimental effect on women’s self-worth and overall happiness. As a feminist, I can envision how things could possibly be different through consciousness raising and providing support through sisterhood. Many people believe that the social expectations for women to be young and beautiful and also mothers are fading. I would argue that many of these expectations have simply taken on a different form. For instance, many women can look and see how restrictive and oppressive corsets and girdles were to the women who were expected to wear them. The popularity of these items has decreased, but with their decline there has not been a decline in a thin ideal. I truly feel as though thong underwear is the new corset of the day. If you think about it, the increasingly shrinking undergarments leave women feeling as though they must be able to wear them and look sexy doing it. The same expectations are present with thongs as with corsets— to be attractive and to be thin. Overall, the social expectations of beauty are still constricting women even if it is not in the literal sense. Women do not experience these expectations in isolation and it may be helpful to begin a dialogue with other women in our lives about how these expectations make us feel. During Love Your Body Month, it is especially pertinent that we begin to talk with other women about our own bodies and how we can begin to feel proud of our bodies, as well as of our womanhood. Loving one’s body can be difficult at times but it is important that we provide ourselves time each day to truly invest in who we are. These do not have to be large grandiose investments. They can be as simple as learning a new word each day or as complex as teaching yourself to play an instrument. I I propose that we, as women, begin to support ourselves and each other in loving ourselves as well as loving our bodies.
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