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I’m nervous to post this because It’s embarrassingly personal but I think it highlights one of the reasons so many young girls are seeking a means of escape from “womanhood” right now through adopting various alternate “identities” such as non-binary.
So, I have a regular face. There’s really nothing irregular about it. From this perspective I can see it as a good face because it is not dissimilar to the face of my great great grandmother as she looks over us, in black and white, from the wall in the dining room.
Being ill a long time meant not seeing anyone besides my parents for years. Finding video calls dizzying meant not bothering with those. I didn’t know there was any way in which my perceptions of myself were being harmed until I was well enough to sometimes do those things again
And then, I found it so unbearable to be seen. I wanted to shrivel up and vanish on the spot when someone looked at me. I wanted to recoil. I felt like the ugliest person on earth. I felt unacceptable, like primordial slime made woman.
It made me want to cry&wear a paper bag jauntily over my whole face. It was an extreme feeling. Like being a rectangle in a world of circles and constantly aware of my jagged corners. I also felt bad because it felt like a self indulgence. Why was I focusing on this? How vain!
But I felt that way. And then a friend rang me up&I told her about it.She listened. I poured it all out,all the bad&silly things I thought& how I didn’t know how to get past it.And she,as someone whose life experience had been a lot like mine said “I felt that way,for a time,too”
Which is honestly the most amazing thing to hear when you think you’re the only person feeling a certain way and I asked her “why do you think we’ve both experienced this? Just because we’ve been outside of society for so long and lost the art?” She said “not really that”
And then she proceeded to talk about how, as women who hadn’t seen other people for ages, and who had been essentially living online, the touched up, best photographed, beauty standard conforming, model-based, photoshop enhanced perception of others was all we had had.
We had started to perceive ourselves as abhorrently ugly because we had been given a distorted sense of what was normal. That phone conversation helped me enormously. And of course it didn’t fix it. But it did begin to change things. And it stopped me taking the blame.
To a lesser or greater degree,we are all susceptible to this.We begin to believe what we are seeing is normal rather than largely unattainable and abnormal. One of the things Abigail Shrier pointed out in her book Irreversible Damage was how much teenage girls are online.
Their perceptions are formed in this environment. Just like mine were. And unlike me, they probably don’t have friends who understand what kind of dangerous tea they’re being steeped in and can talk to them about it. Being non binary would be like finding an escape hatch.
Not only would they not have to live up to certain “norms” in their own minds but they would believe others wouldn’t hold them to those “norms” either.There’s a feeling of freedom in that even though it is false. It’s worse than false because it makes them focus inwards even more
The best thing for me was being well enough to walk again, and then to be in a car and go places. To see people in the world and see how I could brighten their day by being kind to them and talking to them, and how none of them, not one, fainted away at the sight of me.
The best thing for me was doing video chats when well enough with people who loved me and who didn’t know how I felt about it. And I found that the more focus I had elsewhere, the more I could let myself exist as I am and not be so cruel to my own face when I saw it.
Being surrounded by feminist women who didn’t adhere to beauty norms was also a revelation. I saw through them that women are far more beautiful as they actually are than in the primped and glossed posters&pictures we are bombarded with. It helped me be so glad to be one of them.
I found a way to love my face through seeing a more accurate version of reality but when people say being NB is for attention&they mock it, I wonder if they’ve considered the level of pain&self hatred being generated in young girls right now.
Maybe more than ever before.
Maybe more than ever before.
Not only with beauty standards but porn too
This is still a world that makes no space for the female sex at all
If young girls fall for the trap in the idea that maybe they’re not women,it isn’t on them
I just hope they, too, find the wonderful, and feminist, women.
This is still a world that makes no space for the female sex at all
If young girls fall for the trap in the idea that maybe they’re not women,it isn’t on them
I just hope they, too, find the wonderful, and feminist, women.
