On older women and body image – Emily L. Hauser

Extract

Late last night I discovered the following on BuzzFeed: “Women Over 50 Plagued By Eating Disorders, Body-Image Issues.”The hell you say!

Reports BuzzFeed:

Today’s dieting young women plagued with body-image concerns aren’t necessarily likely to grow out of them when they get a little older, have kids, retire — just you know, age — according to new research. A study from the International Journal of Eating Disorders shows that women over the age of 50 commonly struggle with body image and eating issues. Researchers from the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program, led by Dr. Cynthia Bulik, found that 62 percent of 1,849 women aged 50 and older surveyed across the U.S. said their weight or shape had a negative impact on their lives.

Ok, I have a question: Why on earth would we be likely to “grow out” of our body image issues?

Women are told, our entire lives, that our greatest worth is measured in conventional attractiveness, and that furthermore, we are never attractive enough. We are told this in our movies and TV shows, in our supermarket check-out lines, in our social circles, in our jobs, and often in our families. We are told this by bloggers, by commenters, by Twitter, by Facebook, by complete strangers on the street. We are told this from the moment we are born (else why did people feel the need to assure me that my chubby girl baby would “thin out”?), and we are told this until the moment we die.

We are told this so often, and so convincingly, that we women punish ourselves with deprivation, torture ourselves with self-doubt, and sometimes spend our own money to cut out our own flesh. And then we bond over it all. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t suffer from a certain amount of body-image anxiety (or flat-out self-loathing) or hasn’t had to struggle on occasion to keep that anxiety/self-loathing at bay — and every single one of us talks about it (or is expected to).

One never just eats — one laughs about how much one is eating, or announces that one will have to not eat tomorrow to make up for it, or compares and contrasts the relative fat contents of Food A vs. Food B. One never just gets dressed — one has to consider what will be said about one’s muffin-top, or flabby arms, or cankles. One never just ebbs and flows with the years — one is expected to constantly strive for a physical ideal that is rooted in pre-pregnancy youth and which for many women isn’t even remotely possible (or healthy).

To think that we might lose these thoughts and behaviors as we age and get ever farther from that youthful mirage would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. There is health — there is a body functioning at or near its potential peak because it has been well-maintained (and its owner lucky) — and then there’s this destructive, obsessive bullshit.

SOURCE: Emily L. Hauser, Blog Post, “On older women and body image”, Emily L. Hauser – In My Head

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