really good essay by greta christina, about body image, gender… so much could be said, but it’s said well in this essay.
It’s not that dykes and hetero men don’t ever get anxious and stressed-out about whether they’re attractive. But they aren’t as likely to equate sexual attractiveness with a particular physical ideal. Issues such as status, intelligence, income, hipness, sexual skill and experience, and what kind of car (or motorcycle) one drives seem to have more effect on sexual self-esteem for queer women and het men than how they measure up to some abstract template of physical perfection. I’ve certainly noticed this in my own life and experience as a bisexual woman. Over the last several years, as I’ve gradually become more involved with women and less involved with men, my body image has improved; and this despite the fact that my weight has slowly but steadily gone up over those years. My confidence in my own sexuality seems to be connected less with the bathroom scale and more with the Kinsey scale.
found via here’s your gravy
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tried responding to this before, but somehow my reply was eaten up?
anyway, as far as i know, (this is not my field) the leading academic writing in this area is Susan Bordo, particularly in her book “Unbearable Weight”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Bordo
i remembered why i found Bordo interesting; writing on anorexia:
“I take the psychopathologies that develop within a culture, far from being anomalies or aberrations, to be characteristic expressions of that culture; to be, indeed, the crystallization of much that is wrong with it. For that reason they are important to examine, as keys to cultural self-diagnosis and self-scrutiny. ‘Every age,’ says Christopher Lasch, ‘develops its own peculiar forms of psychopathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.’ The only aspect of this formulation with which I would disagree, with respect to anorexia, is the idea of the expression of an underlying, unitary cultural character structure. Anorexia appears less as the extreme expression of a character structure than as a remarkably overdetermined symptom of some of the multifaceted and heterogeneous distresses of our age. Just as anorexia functions in a variety of ways in the psychic economy of the anorexic individual, so a variety of cultural currents or streams converge in anorexia, find their perfect, precise expression in it.” -Bordo, Anorexia Nervosa, Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture, found in “Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy,” Ann Garry, Marilyn Pearsall, eds.
another person who writes on “cultural symptoms” from a highly analytic, psychological perspective is Gananath Obeyesekere, particularly in “Medusa’s Hair : An Essay On Personal Symbols And Religious Experience” and “The Work Of Culture : Symbolic Transformation In Psychoanalysis And Anthropology.”