Censoring Women’s REAL Bodies

“In Women and Self-Esteem, Linda Sanford and Mary Ellen Donovan report that the majority of females studied in therapy groups over a five-year period habitually downgraded their worth, and poor body image was a central factor in their self-rejection. […] Most viewed their bodies inaccurately. They distorted reality in two particular ways: either they saw themselves as having the wrong size and shape (fatter, wider, rounder than they really were), or they saw a certain body part as grossly abnormal.

[…] Sanford and Donovan assert that one reason so many women experience their bodies as a problem is that our culture teaches women that they must be pretty to be worthy, and sets up beauty standards that are unhealthy and unattainable. The poor body image that underlies a variety of adjustment problems is largely a product of social conditioning.”

from: Rita Freedman, “Beauty Bound” – p.25 

The following passage is taken from Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” – its subject is women’s breasts, but the concept could easily apply to any other body part:

“Women of all ages have a fixation - sad in the light of how varied women’s breasts really are in texture – on “pertness” and “firmness.” Many young women suffer agonies of shame from their conviction that they alone have stretch marks. Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that their breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong. […] The trend towards breast surgery is created by a culture that blocks out all breasts that are not the Official Breast, [and] keeps women ignorant of their own and other women’s bodies.”

My take: after spending almost 2 months reading literature on the beauty industry and its effects on women’s self-esteem, I have come to the realization that a documentary would only be part of a bigger plan.

I’m starting to think about a parallel project – a photographic one, that is. The details are still fuzzy, since when it comes to photographing women’s naked bodies it is easy to fall into the trap of exploitation. But I’d like to collect images of women of various demographic backgrounds (different age groups, shapes, sizes, racial/ethnic backgrounds), in order to go against the media censorship Naomi Wolf talks about – and to show how varied women’s bodies really are. Indeed, in the last chapter of “The Beauty Myth”, Wolf says,

“We need, especially for the anorexic/pornographic generations, a radical rapprochement with nakedness. Many women have described the sweeping revelation that follows even one experience of communal all-female nakedness. […] A single revelation of the beauty of our infinite variousness is worth more than words.”