檳榔嶼

- Any woman eager to learn the art of loving can start, as the Buddhist teachers say, "right where you are" by being self-loving.
- Females easily endorse a mind-body split that lets us cultivate the false assumption that we can hate our bodies and still be loving.
  - we can hate our bodies and manifest positive self-esteem
  - Father who fret over young daughters who are overly obsessed with staying or becoming thin, telling them all that matters is being healthy even as they continually badger their female partners to lose weight and evaluate other women based on weight are actually promoting female self-hatred.
  - Girls get the message that being thin will determine their value, that it will be a crucial determinant of whether they will be loved.
- Geneen Roth, <<Appetites>> : "Our fantasy of what will happen when we turn a final corner and find the love, respect, visibility, and abundance that's eluded us for a lifetime... is the adult version of childhood longing to be seen and loved. When as children we understand that we are going to get that love, we make up stories, create a fantasy life, try to be someone else. And when we believe that love will be waiting around the corner if only we could transform ourselves into different people, we spend our lives trying to turn that corner." This is self-hatred in action. Female self-love begins with self-acceptance.
- Overall cultural devaluation of the female body affects the self-esteem of all girls.
- What we must say no is a world that tells us we are solely defined by our physical bodies, that these female bodies are inadequate, lacking, and not good enough. Saying no to any devaluation and debasement of the female body is a loving practice.
- We are endlessly told by mass media that our body self-hatred in no way makes us less desirable, more prone to depression and other life-threatening illnesses, or less likely to find love, there is no ongoing collective rebellion.
- Sadly, more and more powerful women, especially those who had been advocates of feminist politics, continued to embrace conventional woman-hating standards of beauty - the primary one being unhealthy weight loss and the emphasis of being thin.
  - In reality, the feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-consuming.
- More often than not, females are the body fascists who police themselves and other females with a brutal harshness that knows no bounds.
  - Before many of us had ever looked at a fashion magazine or even cared how men saw us, hard and brutal body shaming began in our families.
  - My mother felt that our appearance was a reflection of her worth and value. If we did not look good, she did not look good.
- If women are socialized within patriarchy to view all other females as potential threats, as competitors, then we have to consider again and again the ways such thinking shapes and informs mother-daughter bonds.
  - Mass-media and peer-group pressure are not the sole agents of this indoctrination; parents play a role.
  - Given the homophobic, gay-hating thrust of our culture, many parents, male and female, feel it is their responsibility to urge the physically energetic, unashamed young female body to conform to sexist stereotypes of femininity.
- Most girls still experience feelings of shame, revulsion, disgust, and/or embarrassment when menstruation begins. They feel it makes them outcasts or potential objects of teasing and scorn.
- Most parents still think it's taboo to speak openly about female genitalia, despite graphic depictions of naked bodies and sexual acts on prime-time television.
  - Like our culture as a whole, <Sex and the City> sends women a contradictory message: Love your body but make sure you starve it so that you can be thin and beautiful.
- In fact, many people, especially women, act as though the feminist movement was only a negative rebellion, that it had no positive impact. Yet it was the feminist movement that increased cultural awareness of female body self-hatred, of life-threatening eating disorders, of dangerous cosmetic surgeries that damage the health of our bodies.
  - It is much too easy for everyone to forget that awareness of problems alone is not a solution. To solve the problem of female body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new images, new ways of seeing ourselves.
  - Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening.
  - Obsessive control of weight is usually a response to the fear of gaining weight.
- Geneen Roth : "weight has made no difference in the quality of love in my life - ever."
- The mass media are much more interested in sharing stories of female body self-hatred than in depicting women who love their bodies just the way they are.
  - We are much more likely to open a magazine and see an image of an aging woman looking way younger than her years, her body most closely resembling that of an adolescent girl, the article maybe even telling us the dietary and exercise regime that keeps her in shape, than to see gorgeous aging women with flesh on their bones.
- Learning how to love ourselves includes rethinking negative attitudes toward the female body.
- If someone loves us but we are trapped by self-hatred, their love will never reach us.
  - Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?
- All women dream of meeting a partner who will like our bodies as they are. We long for partners who will offer affirmation and unconditional acceptance, particularly if we have never been affirmed or were affirmed only as children in our families of origin. We long for acceptance of our physical beings, to be admired as we are, even as we withhold affirmation from ourselves.
- As we love the female body, we are able to let it be the ground on which we build a deeper relationship to ourselves - a loving relationship uniting mind, body, and spirit.