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When I was a little girl people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? Good, I would say. I want to be good. Becoming good was harder then becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lifeguard. There are test to pass to become things-you have to learn dissection or conquer gravity or practice treading water. Becoming good was not like that. It was abstract. It felt completly out of reach. It became the only thing that mattered to me. If I could be good, everything would be alright. I would fit in. I would be popular. I would skip death and go straight to heaven. If you ask me now what this means, to be good, I still dont know exactly. When I was growing up in the 50's, 'good' was simply what girls were supposed to be. They were good. They were pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist cinchers and pumps. They got married. They looked married. They waited to be given permission. They kept their legs together, even during sex.
In recent years, good girls joined the Army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. They accessorize. They wear pointy, painful shoes. They wear lipstick if they are lesbians; they wear lipstick if they're not. They dont eat too much. They dont eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin.
I could never be good. This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and terriorist the badness becomes. I think for many of us-well, for most of us-well, maybe for all of us-there is one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our breasts, our hair, our nose, our little toe. You know what I'm talking about? It doesnt matter where I have been in the world, whether it's Tehran where women are-smashing and remodeling their noses to look less Iranian, or in Beijing where they are breaking their legs and adding bone to be taller, or in Dallas where they are surgically whittling their feet in order to fit into Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Everywhere, the women I meet generally hate one in particualr part of their bodies. They spend most of their life fixing it, shrinking it. They have medicine cabinets with products devoted to transforming it. They have closets full of of clothes that cover ad enhance it. Its as if they've been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they loose sighty of all the world.
 Explosive~DuCkY · Sun Dec 31, 2006 @ 08:31am · 0 Comments |
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