Ever seen the movie Mean Girls? There’s a scene where the girls are standing in front of a mirror together, criticizing their bodies:
Karen: God, my hips are huge!
Gretchen: Oh please. I hate my calves.
Regina: At least you guys can wear halters. I've got man shoulders.
Cady: (voiceover) I used to think there was just fat and skinny. But apparently there are lots of things that can be wrong on your body.
Gretchen: My hairline is so weird.
Regina: My pores are huge.
Karen: My nail beds suck.
(Pause. All look at Cady.)
Cady: I have really bad breath in the morning.
From the outside, this seems a bizarre masochistic ritual of superficial bimbos. However, very few women can look at this common bonding practice from the outside since we’ve all participated in it at one time or another, and probably will again. Since our first sleepovers in grade school, we women have used displeasure with our own bodies to be the bonding force among us. Even the most intelligent and successful of us have hacked away at ourselves when girlfriends have pressured us into joining the self-abuse. After all, to refuse, as Cady tries to do, would be downright rude:
Regina: But you’re, like, really pretty.
Cady: Thank you.
Regina: So you agree?
Cady: What?
Regina: You think you’re really pretty?
Cady: Oh … I don’t know.
Why can’t Cady say, “Yes, I’m quite attractive. I take care of my body and I’m proud of my appearance. I’m too smart to focus on minute, unimportant flaws that aren’t part of the whole picture of who I am.”
In grade school, I had a best friend named “Kelly.” We were both heavy girls and found solidarity in our heaviness. After school and on weekends, we would go over to each other’s houses, plop down in front of the television or computer and nosh, nosh, nosh as we aired our insecurities about our bodies. With Kelly, I didn’t feel like such a freak the way I did with my family or at school. It became totally okay to polish off a bag of cookies in one sitting because now I could do it with her. Our conversations basically centered on which boys we liked and how they would probably never notice us behind our big bodies. We picked apart the “skinny” girls, exaggerating their flaws to convince ourselves that we were the “normal” ones and they were the losers.
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