One of the things you have to brace yourself for if you’re going to be actively losing weight at an all-women’s college is that people will assume that you are obsessed with it, you have set your eyes on the prize and the prize is having ‘thin’ become the sole basis of your identity and, worst of all, you’ve been motivated into your delusional health and fitness mania by, wait for it, images of women in the media. Not even the Dove billboards could break you from your diet-induced trance because every publicized female figure from the anonymous chick on the cover of your first issue of Seventeen to the girl with the perky pout in the newest Clean and Clear commercial has skewed your perception of the feminine form. Every time you weigh yourself you are propogating the exploitation of slender women in the media. You’ve been brainwashed.
I would like to offer some evidence to the point that I am not tacking magazine clippings of ladies up around my mirror and flipping through commercials just to rate the spokesmodels on waifishness.
In elementary school, usually once in the fall and again in the spring, my class took a field trip out into a swamp or down to the Norwalk River or across the street to a farm – anything to expose us to the outdoors for a period at least a little longer than the walk to and from the bus stop. The standard dress-code for these events involved light layers, a wind-breaker tied unflatteringly around the waist, a cap with a flat-brim (if you were me and never wore athletic attire unless it was strapped onto my body by my mother) and tube socks – oh, the humanity – rolled up over the cuffs of our pants. I loathed this fashion injustice so fiercely that I would resist until the moment before we disembarked the bus at our destination and almost broke my own ankles yanking my socks down when we boarded the bus again at the end of the day.
If I’d been so susceptible to the images of other girls around me, or images in the media, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much to tuck the cuffs of my jeans into my socks. You know, some people could have pulled a fashion statement out of this look. Not me. I knew my pants looked ridiculous. I knew my socks looked ridiculous. I knew I looked ridiculous in my ridiculous pants and my ridiculous socks. Regardless of how ridiculous every other scrunchie-wearing girl in my class looked right alongside me, I was too busy pouting about my own apparel misfortune to notice.
Something else you have to brace yourself for at an all-women’s college is that people are generally critical when you show signs of self-absorbtion.
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