Maybe it has always been ingrained in me as a member of the female species or maybe it got triggered somewhere along my first encounter with the green eyed monster, nevertheless i've come to have this deep curiosity on how women relate with each other. It's very interesting how we hold each other close because of a shared struggle for equality and recognition in a man-driven world, and yet at the same time also struggle against each other, almost like a competition to become the alpha-female in our version of the she-pack but in a completely subdued and twisted way than how males compete against each other.
Whereas males typically measure power, achievement, and wealth, based on the number and quality of their conquests (whether at work or in relationships) what our struggle with what I would call the "other woman" has taken the form of body size, color, achievements relative to a man's, brand names, and boy toys. These too have undertones of power, wealth, and achievement, but the specificity with which we can name them speaks of a uniquely female appetite. And on this subject I found Caroline Knapp's book, "Appetites : Why Women Want", very enlightening.
A book that's mainly on the author's struggle with anorexia, it delves into the abyss of women's appetites - what shapes it, the various forms it takes, and the equally varied ways on how we satisfy or starve it. After all, at the core of our struggle with the "other woman" we find that it is ourselves that we are trying to deal with - our own struggle with identifying our hungers and achieving satiety.
With that i'd like to share two excerpts from the book that are worth pondering over. Both touch slightly on how media shapes and affects our perception of our basest hungers, and how it distracts us from achieving true satiety.
Whereas males typically measure power, achievement, and wealth, based on the number and quality of their conquests (whether at work or in relationships) what our struggle with what I would call the "other woman" has taken the form of body size, color, achievements relative to a man's, brand names, and boy toys. These too have undertones of power, wealth, and achievement, but the specificity with which we can name them speaks of a uniquely female appetite. And on this subject I found Caroline Knapp's book, "Appetites : Why Women Want", very enlightening.
A book that's mainly on the author's struggle with anorexia, it delves into the abyss of women's appetites - what shapes it, the various forms it takes, and the equally varied ways on how we satisfy or starve it. After all, at the core of our struggle with the "other woman" we find that it is ourselves that we are trying to deal with - our own struggle with identifying our hungers and achieving satiety.
With that i'd like to share two excerpts from the book that are worth pondering over. Both touch slightly on how media shapes and affects our perception of our basest hungers, and how it distracts us from achieving true satiety.
"Constantly slapped, constantly measured against perfection, a woman stops seeing straight; the goddess hammers away at perception. In the course of a week, I might see half a dozen ordinary naked female bodies in the locker room at my gym, usually the same half dozen, and literally hundreds of goddess bodies on TV, billboards, and in ads; over time -weeks turned into months, years, decades-reality starts to erode, the ideal bodies start to look normal, the normal bodies ungainly and aesthetically off, the gap between the beautiful and the ordinary grows wider and more distinct. This is why the simple act of walking past a mirror or catching your reflection in a store window can so easily set off the alarm of comparison and critique: flash, a bulge here; flash, a flaw there; flash, imperfect hair, imperfect skin, imperfect stomach, imperfect legs; flash, not Elle Macpherson. This too is why the goddess has such a simultaneously ego-battering and seductive effect: a mere glance at the cover of Shape, and the phenomenon of self-scrutiny can kick in as reflexively as breathing. Hair: Elle’s is so shiny. Skin: Mine is awful compared to hers. Burn 1,000 extra calories a week: How?"
“The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what’s going into the body versus what’s being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, about where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one from scratch, easier to worship at socially sanctioned altars of desire than to construct your own, one that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger.”
- Appetites : Why Women Want (2003) by Caroline Knapp
Hear, hear.
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