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Body Image

"If we place pornography and the tyranny of slenderness alongside one another we have the two most significant obsessions of our culture, and both of them focused upon a woman's body." -Kim Chernin

Body image involves our perception, imagination, emotions, and physical sensations of and about our bodies. It s not static- but ever changing; sensitive to changes in mood, environment, and physical experience. It is not based on fact. It is psychological in nature, and much more influenced by self-esteem than by actual physical attractiveness as judged by others. It is not inborn, but learned. This learning occurs in the family and among peers, but these only reinforce what is learned and expected culturally. 

In this culture, we women are starving ourselves, starving our children and loved ones, gorging ourselves, gorging our children and loved ones, alternating between starving and gorging, purging, obsessing, and all the while hating, pounding and wanting to remove that which makes us female: our bodies, our curves, our pear-shaped selves. 

"Cosmetic surgery is the fastest growing 'medical' specialty.... Throughout the 80s, as women gained power, unprecedented numbers of them sought out and submitted to the knife...." - Naomi Wolf

The work of feminist object relations theorists such as Susie Orbach (author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, and Hunger Strike: Anorexia as a Metaphor for Our Age) and those at The Women's Therapy Centre Institute (authors of Eating Problems: a Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment Model) has demonstrated a relationship between the development of personal boundaries and body image. Personal boundaries are the physical and emotional borders around us.. A concrete example of a physical boundary is our skin. It distinguishes between that which is inside you and that which is outside you. On a psychological level, a person with strong boundaries might be able to help out well in disasters- feeling concerned for others, but able to keep a...