On Conformity
Content warning: This piece makes reference to eating disorders and discusses disordered eating. Please take care when reading, or feel free to skip this piece if this kind of content isn’t helpful to you right now.
I’m 12 years old, standing in the living room of my aunt’s cottage. I’ve just finished a craft in the sun room and am skipping through to the kitchen in pursuit of one of the ginger cookies that she made especially for my week-long visit. Cookie in hand, on my way back into the sunroom, I turn my head to ask my aunt if we could play a game of cards. The way that I’m standing seems to give her a new perspective, a profile view of my body. Before I get the chance to ask about a game of cards, she extends her index finger and pokes me in the stomach. Her gaze focused on where my shorts and T-shirt meet, she says “you’re starting to get a little belly”. She says it with a smile and a laugh. I stand, frozen in place, stunned. I choke back tears and try to will the ringing in my ears to stop. My thoughts consumed with how to dispose of this cookie that I certainly no longer intend to eat. I make excuses about why the rest of the batch goes untouched. Even then I knew that the antidote to fat was restriction.
I’m 23 years old, in the backseat of my parents’ car which is parked in the driveway of a family friend’s house. I’m only home for the weekend, and seeing them felt like a solace from what was a very difficult second year of law school. I came home in low spirits and a fraction of the size that I had been just a few months prior. As my Dad starts the engine, my Mom’s best friend of 30 years stands at the door to wave us goodbye. Just as the car starts to reverse, I hear her shout through the window to me “eat something”. During the same visit, a member of my now husband’s family comments that “your clothes are falling off of you” and when I ask to borrow a sweater, she tells me that she doubts she will be able to find anything small enough for me. Their comments confuse me. I’m larger than many of the women that I have heard them call stunning.
I’m 27 years old, trying on undergarments for my wedding day. I’m at my thinnest. Two older women in the shop whisper to one another, commenting on my beauty. I can see them staring through the crack in the curtain that I’m using to communicate to my mother that I just want to wear a sports bra. On the walk to the car, I share my frustration about their behaviour with my Mom. What I don’t tell her is that, by praising my body without the knowledge of how I achieved those results, they are encouraging what I know is an unhealthy relationship with food and exercise.
I’m 30 years old, spending my first Christmas in Canada since I moved to Ireland a little over 2 years earlier. My body has changed in those two years. I’ve gone up a dress size. My life has also changed. I’ve stopped counting calories. I eat and exercise intuitively, based on how I feel rather than how I look. My family doesn’t necessarily know this, but their words tell me that they have taken note of the physical change. One family member has bought me a few items of clothing that are multiple sizes too small. She explains that she was picturing me at my wedding weight, not my “Ireland weight”. It is the kind of comment I spent the months in advance of our visit anticipating and preparing myself for, but still hoped wouldn’t come.
I consider these interactions calls to conformity; lessons in womanhood handed down to me, as they were handed down to the women with whom I interacted. These social rewards and punishments are offered as guidance. The pain of criticism from loved ones is considered just a scratch, a relational sacrifice to set us straight and spare us from the deep wounds of social alienation which might come lest we meet our society’s standard of beauty. The Western standard of beauty is multi-faceted. It calls for voluminous, perfectly coiffed hair on our heads and a complete absence of hair elsewhere. It demands youth and expects the physical and financial sacrifices required to cheat our biology. It requires thinness at any cost. Thinness is perhaps the most prominent feature of the Western standard of beauty, and as such, the calls to conform to it come most frequently and ring most loudly. These calls are varied in their sources; they come from the images that we consume, pop culture rhetoric, and messages, both spoken and unspoken from our peers and elders. This piece will focus on the calls to conform to the standard of thinness that we receive from the women who shape us into women ourselves.
“For a lot of my life, I didn’t understand my desire to be thin as a desire to conform to a particular standard of beauty because meeting that standard didn’t feel optional. ”
For a lot of my life, I didn’t understand my desire to be thin as a desire to conform to a particular standard of beauty because meeting that standard didn’t feel optional. In large part, it didn’t feel optional because women in my life would point out the changes in my body or I would hear them point out changes in other women’s bodies and I trusted that I was wise to learn from others’ mistakes. It was one thing to ignore the images of pop stars, it was another to, as a child and young woman, ignore the warnings of women that I loved and trusted. Under the backdrop of our standard of beauty, I couldn’t understand those statements as anything but criticism. And so, I treated these statements, even if not directed at me, as indicators that I’d strayed off some mandatory path and invitations to hastily course correct.
I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit replaying every interaction, like the few that I’ve shared above, where my elders commented on the size and shape of my body. Until recently, I understood each of those comments to be judgements: statements about my worth; each one a reminder that it fluctuates with my weight. I used to be angry with these women and hold them responsible for both my suffering and the choices that I made in response to their calls to conformity. I no longer harbour resentment towards them, and instead channel my righteous anger towards the system that put my elders in the precarious position of showing their love by enforcing a harmful standard.
Women raising girls or actively participating in girls’ socialisation have the challenging task of teaching young women to adapt to a sexist society. That is, a society where women’s value is determined predominantly by their appearance and their care for others. Women’s social value being derived from these sources has tremendous implications on the way that we are socialised and has specific consequences on our relationship to our own needs. The standard of beauty’s emphasis on thinness leads women to restrict their food intake. But so does their role as carers and feeders. Women often eat last and least, and tend to their own needs only if others’ have first been satisfied. Their social value increases with their denial of their needs. And so, whether consciously or unconsciously, women often teach their daughters, or the girls in their care, to deny their own needs. For their social benefit. To their personal detriment.
“We learn that we can’t trust our body’s cues. We learn to swallow hunger. It can’t tell the full story of our needs because our social value depends on not meeting them.”
Within our society, a woman’s value is not self-determined. It is based on others’ perception of her adequacy relative to the standard of beauty that she must meet and the standard of care that she must provide to others. This has trained us to look around, not inwards. We learn that we can’t trust our body’s cues. We learn to swallow hunger. It can’t tell the full story of our needs because our social value depends on not meeting them. We must often choose between social acceptance and satisfying our needs. We learn to make this choice before we even know that is what is being asked of us. We watch our mothers host parties at which they dish up heaping platefuls for their guests and eat but two bites. We, wanting to be like her, played hostess at the next party, following her practices to a tee. We, seeing our future in our mothers’ lives, jump to help her with chores, putting off our physical and emotional needs until her burden has been lifted. Before we know it we’re willing our bodies to recognise water and two almonds as lunch and declining birth control and antidepressants because we can’t risk the side-effects of weight gain. We trust the voices outside of ourselves and consider our pesky needs deceptive saboteurs. We fear our taste buds' inclination towards sweet, rich foods, knowing that what we really need is an abundance of leafy greens untouched by salt and fat. We distrust satiety, having rarely experienced it and not recognising it as compatible with womanhood.
We’re taught that non-conformity, that meeting our needs, has social consequences, so we try not to meet them. We’re lulled into compliance by the sound of “good girl” ringing in our ears as we spend our mental energy on calculating calories, and our lower wages on diarrhetic skinny tea. When we falter, we learn that meeting our needs also has relational consequences. Because conformity is communicated, taught and learned by the people with whom girls have their most intimate relationships as children, the criticism about the size of our body feels like the same kind of punishment that we received as children - rebuke for misbehaving.
What I was never taught is that conformity has a relational cost too. The costs of conformity simply affect the relationship that we were not taught to value, if we were taught that it existed at all: our relationship with ourselves. I would like to say that I responded to comments about the size and shape of my body with indifference. That my self-esteem propelled me confidently through the turbulent journey of becoming a woman. That I spent my twenties resisting and challenging a system that I know devalues my personhood. But I didn’t. I, like most girls, began intervening to change the shape of my body when I hit puberty. I have spent most of my life dissatisfied with the size of my body. My most prescient memories of my twenties are long days in a library made longer by my physical inability to bring myself to eat anything at all.
Eventually, the path of conformity brought me to the end of myself. Years of ignoring my physical needs rendered me so emotionally unwell that I struggled to go through the motions of daily life. Sleep eluded me. I cried at work most days. I exacted complete control over every mouthful that went into my body. I was so skilled at tuning out my body’s cues that hunger was simply a state of being. I had achieved conformity, but I found its rewards wanting.
This turbulence eventually led me to a therapist’s office. And our work together gradually introduced me to my needs. As I learned to identify, meet, and honour my needs, I found myself building a relationship with myself. A relationship which, in time, centred and prioritised those needs. A relationship where I valued my needs and valued myself. In building this kind of relationship, I built a sense of self independent of my social value. I stopped building a life around the size of my body. Instead, I let the size of my body reflect the life that I have built around my needs and values. And this, for me, was the key of my journey from conformity.
“ I stopped building a life around the size of my body. Instead, I let the size of my body reflect the life that I have built around my needs and values.”
Building a life around my needs and values has meant that the size and shape of my body has changed. I have felt the social and relational consequences of that change. Fewer women compliment me on my figure. More women make critical or cautionary comments about my body. And while that has been painful, it hasn’t been nearly as painful as the restriction that I inflicted upon myself for years. Their words pale in comparison to the harsh self-talk in which I would engage when I “gave in” and satisfied a craving. I’ve learned that I can handle the cost of non-conformity. But, I refuse to submit to the cost of conformity again.
I can view the calls to conformity that I now encounter compassionately because I have built a sense of independence. In women’s comments about my body, however explicit or benign, I used to see someone judging me. Now, I see someone who is entangled with the same system with which I am actively cutting the strings. I can see their statement about the size of my body as a reflection of their values, whether inherent or learned, conscious or unconscious. I have learned that other people’s feelings about my body, or perhaps more precisely, the feelings that my changing body brings up for other people are not my responsibility. What is my responsibility? Meeting my needs. And so I choose to meet them. Even on the days when I feel dissatisfied with my reflection. Even on the days when I long for the extra space that used to exist between my skin and the fabric of my favourite shirt. Everytime that I respond to my body's internal signals over external voices, I withdraw my tacit consent to this social contract which limits my value and that of other women. On the hardest days, the ones where I’m tempted to ignore my hunger pangs, I remind myself that I was dissatisfied with my body at every size. I remind myself that I’ve found greatest fulfillment by choosing to meet my needs rather than to focus on conformity.
