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Showing posts from March, 2011

Beauty: Part 1

So, it's taken some time to manage some quiet moments when I can write about this, and I'm not sure I can pull my thoughts together completely, but still. One of my friends and mentors guest lectured in my class about eating disorders. She showed this video which is pretty terrific, btw. I has response journals due that week, and I got overwhelming responses from students. An athlete who had been pressured by his coach to lose weight. Students who had watched family members struggle with eating disorders, students who always considered themselves too thick or thin to be beautiful. We later watched Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (since the school's copy of Becoming Barbie was too damaged to use). The book was published in the late '90s, and Wolf's thesis is that whenever women achieve major gains in society, the ideal of beauty becomes something almost unattainable, in order to undermine the power of women. Her examples: The right to vote, followed by the Fla