There was a very good line in an otherwise very silly movie. To paraphrase: Women in America seem to punish their bodies, punish them through strict diets and hard workouts. It is almost as if they are trying to punish any curves, any softness, any maternality out of their bodies and souls. Rather than see curves as signs of physical and emotional strength, things to wear with pride, some women choose to view them as signs of weakness, negative softness, a status of being less-than.
Curves are the physical manifestation of an extraordinary sensuality. Curves come about through loving and caring and eating...eating well and eating lovingly...eating foods that not only nourish the body but excite the soul and palate. I think that some women run from and punish these curves because the sensuality they represent is powerful and thereby terrifying. Terrifying because...we have been trained to be tough but not powerful...because we are afraid to become alienated from these very social circles that are invested in keeping us alienated from ourselves...because recognizing our own power may cause us to question the secure trajectory of our lives...
MFK Fisher wrote in response to the critique that she did not write of important things that when one writes of food and hunger and the sensual satiation of that hunger, one is "writing about love and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one." When we spend time with food, with making, with giving and with eating, we are trying to care for each other as we seek out fulfillment of the "wilder, more insistent hungers." We can starve ourselves and leave our bodies no time to feel anything of those wilder more insistent hungers. We can gorge ourselves and leave our bodies no room to feel anything of those wilder more insistent hungers. Or we can surrender to the sensuality, the fulfillment, the ecstatic joy of a full stomach and a pleased palate, and then face head-on those wilder passions for which there is no socially acceptable expression.
1 comment:
This is such a good piece. I am not sure I can respond to all of it, but what strikes me is the damage that denial of food does to women.
The denial of food and the punishing exercise regime that many women adopt in an attempt to achieve some strange definition of beauty -- tall, stick-figure models, undernourished and pale, with their blank stares and empty facial expressions -- is not only a repudiation of the female form, but a preoccupation that distracts and disempowers us. While obsessing about what we can and cannot eat, how much we weigh, and whether we meet commercial beauty standards, we are not focusing on more important matters. We disparage ourselves
when we should be exercising our uniquely female capacities and communicating our womanly point of view.
The world needs our feminine contribution: our woman power.
To quote from Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman":
"Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me."
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