"A woman, halfway through her life, will only achieve half the level of body self-esteem as the average teenage male".
That's right. By the time you're a grown-up kick ass woman making it rain, you'll still only feel half as much body-love as a teenage boy. Not quite the pace most of us want our self confidence and self-love to develop.
And if that didn't strike a chord in your empowered-female heart, here are a few more stunning figures: research shows that 70% of women feel pressured by media to have a perfect body. Only 1 in 7 American women feel body positive (happy with their bodies), and about half feel body negative (dissatisfied with their bodies) or body ambivalent (at peace with their imperfections).
Body shame, simply put, is a dissatisfaction with your body. Body shaming is the effort by someone else to make you feel dissatisfied with your body.
And it affects life well behind our perceptions of our physical bodies. According to a 2007 study that used MRI technology to monitor brain function, "viewing images - like ones presented by the media - is proven by more than one study to negatively affect healthy cognitive patterns of the audience, which affects the well-being and happiness quotient of the individual." In other words, viewing idealized, unattainable images of other women not only skews your perception of your physical body but of your overall feeling of health and happiness. Worse, a study conducted at Bucknell University found that feelings of body-shame may actually be making women sick.
These findings, though shocking and sad, are no surprise to most of us. If you're living and breathing in our society, you've probably felt some degree of unhappiness, frustration, or negativity about your body.
As the Founder of Cora, an organic tampon startup with a mission to eliminate period stigma and help women feel more reverence for their bodies, I know body shame goes well beyond looks. As evidenced by recent and rampant public body-shaming via the internet, it seems to permeate nearly every stage of a woman's life, from childhood through adolescence, to motherhood and into old age.
Here are just three moments in life where your female body may be shamed, either overtly or covertly. Thankfully, in every instance, we see a cultural shift occurring, fueled by women who are reclaiming their bodies with defiance and pride.
During Our Periods
News to no one, periods, for centuries, have been treated with disgust, secrecy, and shame. As the oppression of women exists, all functions specific to women are degraded. Every woman I've met through Cora has shared her past feelings of dread, fear, and embarrassment when it comes to her period. It is a sad fact of our culture that we are more comfortable seeing the blood of violence on movie screens than the life-sustaining blood of women's bodies.
At Cora, solving for the perceived "shameful" aspects of managing periods was a priority for us. One of those was ending the classic practice of shoving a tampon up your sleeve when walking to a bathroom in public during your period. We created our Little Black Clutch to enable women to discreetly carry tampons in a sophisticated way. When you use it, you realize it isn't about shame or hiding, it's about elevating the experience and providing confidence. It makes the very intimate experience of having a period feel sexy, feminine, and sophisticated, instead of embarrassingly cheap, girly, and medicalized.
During and After Pregnancy
Though a mother, by all rights, should be among the most revered members of society, there's plenty of evidence to show that women are shamed even during pregnancy. We criticize women for what they eat, how they dress, and even how much weight they do or don't gain.
Although natural and essential changes to a woman's body occur to support her health and that of her baby, the pressure to be thin is so pervasive that a disorder termed "Mommyrexia" exists wherein women attempt to stay skinny during pregnancy, even though eating disorders in pregnant women are linked to higher rates of miscarriage, premature labor, low birth weight, stillbirth or fetal death, delayed fetal growth, among others.
And that's just the beginning. A friend of mine who recently gave birth to her first child told me that while she was pregnant she was treated like a queen, but once the baby arrived she felt like her needs no longer mattered, and she felt massive pressure to quickly return to her post-pregnancy self, both physically and emotionally.
Pregnancy and new motherhood are beautiful and challenging times in a woman's life. Ultimately, what feels right for her body and her baby should be considered correct. Women are showing off their pre-and post-baby bodies at The Honest Body Project, but not like a trashy fitness magazine before-and-after. The project is helping women celebrate the awesome power of their female bodies.
While Feeding A Child
The recent #NormalizeBreastfeeding movement has gained mainstream momentum and attention as moms have found themselves shamed online for openly breastfeeding, an example of how breasts have been so sexualized that they're only perceived appropriate in the context of sex, not in the context of nourishing a baby. Guess what? Most of us, men and women, began our lives nursing at our mother's breast.
Brave and righteous mommas, from the Air Force to the floor of Parliament, have reclaimed social media with the #Brelfie to meet the stigma head on. The movement is spot-on: the more often women assert that when and where they feed their children is their choice and no one else's, the tide can not be turned back.
The Path Forward
If we want to see female body-shaming end in our lifetime, we must first provide body-positive messages to girls and boys from early childhood. Then, we must realize that we as individuals are the ones who will be the role models and examples of what self-love, acceptance, and confidence look like, in all our diverse shapes, colors, and stages of life, and that we have a responsibility to all women to do our part to end this type of subjugation. When we push back against fictional images in the media, and those who would have us believe our natural states and bodies are disgusting or wrong, we chip away at a structure that was built to limit us, and take our rightful place as an equal, powerful, and essential half of humanity.