Wednesday, October 24, 2001

More to self-worth than body image
Commentary by Erin Walsh

Before I came to college, most of my good friends were guys. We played basketball and video games, watched wrestling on TV, rented movies like “Booty Call” and made fun of each other a lot. Last semester when I shared a room with three girls, things were a little different. We watched “Return to Me” over and over again, talked about boys, wasted time trying to memorize the lyrics to “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and shared clothes.

Male and female friends are great for different reasons, but there’s something girls do that bothers me. Sorry to ruin your fantasy, guys — we don’t have naked pillow fights or take showers together. When girls get together, we complain and obsess about our bodies.

I’m sure that at some point, all of you have been unwitting recipients of the dreaded four-word question: Do I look fat? It’s the worst question to be asked because there’s no good way to answer it.

And while “Do I look fat?” takes the cake as the most annoying way girls obsess about weight, we certainly don’t limit ourselves to that. We count calories, pop diet pills and try fad diets, dab the grease off our pizza with paper towels, guzzle Diet Coke to suppress our appetites and dip our forks in salad dressing instead of pouring it over the lettuce. Basically we strive for an impossible ideal and beat ourselves up when we can’t reach it.

For the girls who have never done these things, good for you. But sadly, most girls I know are insecure about their bodies. They’re not alone — while girls are trying to get thinner, guys are worried about bulking up — but the difference is that guys don’t seem to show their insecurities as much.

Let’s be honest; it’s not often that you hear a guy asking his friends, “Do my biceps look scrawny?” I never thought I’d say this, but girls, we need to take a lesson in confidence from our male counterparts.

My grandma, who yells at me for not being more confident, always tells me the story of her Aunt Helen to show me the wrongs of my ways. Apparently Helen was never the prettiest or the thinnest gal. But somehow she ended up marrying Bud, a great guy who far exceeded her on the attractiveness scale. Helen’s explanation: “Honey, I never let him know it for one minute. I made him think I was a catch.”

I’ve never met her, but it sounds like Helen was a pretty cool lady in her day. She didn’t waste her life feeling sorry for herself because she wasn’t better looking. She found self worth in her sense of humor, intelligence and strength, and people were drawn to her because of it.

I’m not saying we should be arrogant; Helen certainly wasn’t. But we shouldn’t put ourselves down, either. Sure, it’s fun to commiserate with girl friends over our shared hatred for our thighs once in a while, but after a certain point, complaining becomes counterproductive.

Unfortunately, we can’t blame the male gender for our obsession with weight — at least not completely. True, they aren’t hanging up posters of Rosie O’Donnell and Camryn Manheim on their walls. But I also don’t think they expect real women to have bodies like Kate Moss.

My male friends get annoyed when girls always order salads at restaurants, and they don’t find a girl with the figure of a 12-year-old boy attractive. Who are we kidding?

We want to be thin to impress other girls. We’re doing this to ourselves. We’re giving ourselves eating disorders and inferiority complexes and competing with each other instead of supporting each other.

There’s no easy solution, especially because the pressure to be thin is so imbedded in our culture. But maybe the first step is to project confidence even when we don’t feel it. If we make other people believe we have a positive body image, eventually we’ll start to believe it ourselves.

And for the love of God, let’s stop whining about our weight. If you want to eat a cheeseburger, just eat one. Don’t feel guilty the whole time and tell everyone that you shouldn’t be eating it. If you think you need to lose five pounds, go running. Take a lesson from Aunt Helen, and don’t complain. Because the harsh truth is that everyone’s sick of hearing it.

Erin Walsh is a columnist for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois. This column was distributed by U-Wire.