Whereas I grew up quite far from our pervasive image culture's brainwashing, it's pretty sad to realize that I eventually got into it later, in my twenties.
I've been lucky enough as a child, being solitary, educated and quite protected. I never opened a magazine. I didn't care about fashion. I didn't watch tv much, and stopped watching any after 12. I wasn't in a teenage posse neither within a group of friends whose influences and trends shape your tastes too. I didn't care about people or judgements. Even though I couldn't escape all the medias (no one can), I was, for the most, immersed in books - and books don't pollute your eyes with the same kind of imagery.
But then, the internet. Oh - I love internet, in a way I would say it offered me every kind of stimulation and possibilities I needed so badly. But it also soaked me in the images culture I had been eluding for so long. Maybe it didn't damage my views so badly, because at least I was already a grown-up, with a bit more distance and perspective, but let's face it, it damaged me anyway. It shaped my eye and my mind, precisely when I thought I was studying it and trying to fight it - the same way it shaped us all. I feel how my tastes have changed, how they've been oriented and formatted. How I've been taught how to react, what to like, how to identify, how to present myself and how to see and appreciate some sort of aesthetics. And it's so hard to deconstruct. I wonder if it's possible, even. That's the hard pill to swallow : you may be conscious of it, you may fight, you may identify how you've been conditioned - you are, still.
"If the body is evil, and the woman is than body, then the woman is evil." (Susan Bordo)
We also grow up in a society that teaches us self-hate, body-negativity, especially women's body. Oh, women's bodies, always too present, too large, too hairy, too dark, too scantily clad, not sexy enough, too much of this or that, not enough this or that. Double standards, contradictory injunctions, with ugly religious hints of puritanism and asceticism, despising flesh and demonizing the body. Therefore, demonizing women. Genesis, Eve, Lilith…. What's left for us, as women, to learn to love and accept this despicable body ?
The sexualization trap. The more or less conscious objectification. Don't get me wrong - objectification in itself is not wrong. And men are sometimes objectified, and sexualized too. But never at the same scale as what is done for women. We are all, men and women and other genders, trained and taught to see the female body as an object. Women are deshumanised on a daily basis. That, is wrong, belittling, and dangerous. We are so used to think our body like an extension of the self, not the self, a product to sell or use, a machine working for or against us.
Between body-hate and hyper-sexualization, it's hard to find a middle path within the mess.
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SG
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DWAM x FOURCHAMBERS
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