The XX Factor: What women really think.

Orbach's "Bodies," Ourselves

A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:

Those interested in the crazy things we do to our bodies might want to look at Deborah Solomon’s interview with British psychoanalyst Susie Orbach running in this week’s issue of the New York Times Magazine (not online yet).  For fellow children of the '80s not familiar with Orbach, her best-selling 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue argued that women’s struggles with food and weight were linked to their still subordinate status in a male world. The book, which Orbach refers to in the interview by the not so feminist acronym “Fifi”—I think of a French poodle or some Eva Gabor-type toddling around in kitten heels—got women questioning how much of their negative attitudes toward their bodies they had absorbed from the society around them.

Orbach’s latest book, Bodies, came out this week, ironically published as part of Picador paperback’s “Big Ideas, Small Books” series—apparently we want even our books to be thin. It examines the spreading belief, no longer confined to the West, that our bodies are badly in need of altering. In the Times interview, Orbach cites as an example young South Korean women who, with their parents’ full support, have plastic surgery to Westernize their eyelids. “They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots,” Orbach says. “They see it as a chance at modernity.”

While I’m not sure it’s fair to call the Korean girls “passive" if they genuinely believe that the procedure will give them a better chance of success in the larger world. If they do, the surgery seems like an active, if unfortunate, attempt to get ahead. But why in the West do people with no shortage of opportunity obsessively revise their bodies? I suspect it's to avoid confronting what is imperfect about the way we live. Instead of addressing bad relationships, unfulfilling jobs, unhealthy behavior, or the helplessness we feel in the face of events we can’t change—death, crime, recession—we make our bodies into all-consuming projects, convincing ourselves that reshaping our bodies will somehow reshape our lives. And thanks to Orbach and  many others who have written about the cultural forces encouraging us to dislike our bodies, we, unlike those young Korean women, know that our bodies are not the problem, or the solution. So what’s keeping us from acting on that knowledge? What will it take to ditch the diets and the botox and deal with the issues for which there is no cosmetic fix?