On Isolation
Content warning: This piece makes reference to eating disorders and discusses disordered eating. Please take care when reading, or consider skipping this piece if this kind of content isn’t helpful to you right now.
I’m 8 years old, sitting poolside at one of my best friends’ houses. I can’t stop staring in horror and disgust at the width of my thighs while seated in my bathing suit. I comment on how big my thighs are, acknowledging what I am sure others have already observed. “Everyone’s spread out when they sit”, she tells me. She then stands and takes her seat again to demonstrate. Her thighs noticeably don’t hide as much of the floral cushions beneath us as mine do. I swear I can see a smirk which confirms my suspicions that she too has noticed her relative thinness.
I’m 14, shopping with one of my best friends at our new favourite shop. We try on v-neck t-shirts, available in green and brown. I’m drawn to the brown one, but they only have it in an XS. I try it on nonetheless. The fabric slick against my body reveals every morsel of fat. I tell her it is too small, but she still wants to see how it fits on me. She notes that it is far too tight, and when I go to put it back, she tries it on. She buys it. Everytime I see it on her body, it reminds me of the unwanted girth of my own. I expect she counts it as a source of pride that she is markedly smaller than me. I know I would, if roles were reversed.
I'm 16 and notice that one of my best friends has been getting significantly more male attention since losing a substantial amount of weight. We’ve been spending less time together since she’s started dating her new boyfriend and she seems to prefer seeing friends in the context of double dates. I’m not part of a couple, and so I see much less of her than I used to. This shift in dynamic increases my interest in being in a relationship, hoping that it can bring me closer to my confidant. My wonder as to whether I don’t get male attention because of my weight, height and general appearance deepens. I begin experimenting with disordered eating for the first time, in an effort to change my body without adopting the lifestyle changes that might draw my parents’ attention.
I'm 18, celebrating my graduation at my parents’ cottage with family and friends. My cousins and one of my best friends walk around in their bikinis after we swim. I keep a towel wrapped around me at all times, except when I am in the water. After the fact, my mother tells me that her friend noticed and praised my modesty. Unbeknownst to them, covering myself was motivated by my deep insecurity about the size and shape of my body, only heightened by my more beautiful cousin and best friend confident and comfortable in their flattering bikinis. I take the praise, knowing it is undeserved because it stems from shame, not virtue.
I’m 26 and one of my best friends comes to visit for the weekend to celebrate my birthday. I’m ashamed by the selfish relief that I feel when I notice that she has gained weight. I had always felt less beautiful than her, and, deep into my eating disorder, I feel our relative weights now tips the scales in my favour. Despite my deep love for her, I walk a little taller feeling that my relative beauty, and by extension, social capital has increased in her presence.
Throughout history, women’s access to power has been through men. For generations, womens’ physical security relied on marrying well and their beauty was their most powerful asset in that pursuit. Men’s attention and affection was the means to women’s security, and women were in direct competition for it.
Despite social change in which we have won battles for personhood, rights, and access to the public sphere, competition among women persists. It persists because, amid our social progression, the underlying threat hasn’t changed: power among women is in short supply. And beauty remains the means by which we can access it.
In Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach says that “very early on we absorb the idea that a limit has been set on what is available and we learn to compete for what is around”. She explains that it leads to competition among women which “makes us assess each other so we can feel comfortable or uncomfortable when we engage with others. We walk into parties and unwittingly rank ourselves by our own attractiveness compared with the other women” (page 35-36).
For many of us, this comparison is subconscious. It feels almost instinctual because we learned it so young. We were socialised to compare ourselves in the same way we learned other conventions: we observed the women around us, absorbed media messaging, and picked up the cues communicated through body language, coded phrases, and feelings that we could feel but not name. We noticed that our mothers spent a little more time in front of the mirror when she was going out with Denise and knew that she felt “frumpy” in the presence of Denise’s elegance. We saw the heightened anxiety of selecting the right outfit in the weeks after her best friend had lost weight. In these images, we absorb the idea that in every room are balance scales ready to assess our relative worth based on our appearance.
In our society how we look and how we feel have become interchangeable. Orbach explains that because “a woman’s body has been her primary asset; how she sees it measuring up against the bodies of other women is an important factor in determining how she feels” (page 65). We have no escape from the expectation to meet the standard because even when in the presence of other women, we feel a need to perform in order to build up our sense of self.
While our standard of beauty may have initially been about pleasing the male gaze, power dynamics, and corporate interests, it is so universal and pervasive because many women, myself included, have internalised these standards. This internalisation means that our sense of self-worth is diminished when we feel that we don’t measure up to the beauty that we see around us. Our dissatisfaction with our bodies, our inability to meet the standards that we’re told we must to be deserving of worth, is heightened and highlighted in the presence of women who better reflect those standards.
“This makes not only our beauty, but our sense of self relative. ”
This makes not only our beauty, but our sense of worth relative. It creates a system where women feel unable to control whether they will be considered worthy, because they can’t know who else might be in that room. We are therefore incentivised to do everything within our control to make ourselves as beautiful as possible - to diet, undergo treatments, cover our faces with chemicals and coiffe our hair within an inch of its life. Within this system, another woman’s beauty is not her asset, it is a threat to each woman around her. This constant comparison between women divides us.
This division is manufactured. We have been socialised to believe a scarcity myth: that beauty, and therefore power, is in short supply. Our society has changed significantly, and with women’s increased independence has come increased access to social power on their own terms. The scarcity myth has cunningly adapted to reflect women’s increased independence while still convincing her that limited social power is available and that her conformity is essential to unlocking any shred of it. While women had previously been encouraged to adorn themselves for the benefit of a mate, she’s now encouraged to do it for a client or an employer, all in the name of independence. Sometimes we’re encouraged to conform as an act of self-care, shelling out our money for a confidence boost to the same corporations that set the standards that make womanhood so exhausting and from which we seek reprieve. We are conditioned to seek after beauty because it is an arbitrary way to limit access to power. We need to be convinced that both power and beauty are scarce to keep us in competition. It keeps us distracted by our reflections and opening our wallets for every new ointment, weight loss supplement and fashion trend.
I first identified false competition and understood its impacts when I was in law school. Each class was graded on a curve of B-. In this kind of a system, grades are distributed based on how well you do relative to the class average. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well you do in absolute terms, you need to score well-above the average to earn the few A’s that are available. The scarcity of high marks made law school a competitive environment. This singular, intentional choice in how marking was structured had a significant impact on the culture within the school of law and the relationships between students.
I found law school intense and stressful. But something about it also felt familiar. I was oddly comfortable with the idea of evaluating someone’s academic excellence before deciding whether I would share notes with them. It felt natural to think twice before correcting someone’s understanding of a concept, to contemplate whether pointing out their error would give them just enough clarity to get the A that I was striving for. It felt normal to look around the library and see whether the classmates who I knew to be also near the top of the class were still studying before deciding whether to leave for the evening.
It felt familiar because I was doing the same thing that I had been doing in my relationships with other women in my life. I apprehensively applied my newest makeup tricks on the faces of my closest friends at their request, wondering with each stroke whether I was blurring myself into oblivion. I loaned my favourite tops to the other women in my dorm praying that seeing their shape in that article of clothing won’t make me hate my body even more than I already do. Each act of solidarity felt like self-betrayal; I couldn’t enhance their beauty without detracting from my own. Seeing another woman flourish simply meant that I was being outshone.
“Each act of solidarity felt like self-betrayal; I couldn’t enhance their beauty without detracting from my own. ”
Law school changed for me when I was invited into a culture of camaraderie. In my second year, 3 brilliant women who were at the top of our class asked me if I wanted to join their study group. Their philosophy was simple: only a few can reach the top, and together we will make sure that we all are among them. We shared everything that we had - notes, questions, knowledge, insight. We would spend hours going over a concept even if there was only one member of the group who didn’t grasp it. We genuinely linked arms and rejected the narrative that we couldn’t all be at the top together. We didn’t compete. One woman’s knowledge was a benefit to the group, not a threat to its other members. At the end of the year, only 8 students in our class graduated with distinction. We were 4 of them.
The success that I shared with these women was revolutionary for me. It was humbling and it was healing. We continued to exist within a competitive environment, but in that group, I didn’t feel the pain and burden that I had before. We chose connection over competition. We refused to believe that the paltry offering of power and success for the few meant that we couldn’t all rise to the top together. In the face of a call to competition, we drew different lines and made sure they weren’t between us.
“In the face of a call to competition, we drew different lines and made sure they weren’t between us.”
Perhaps the most dangerous thing that the capitalist and patriarchal interests behind our standard of beauty have done is to have created division between women. Women respond to the promise of social power only to the few who conform by drawing lines between themselves and other women. Women who feel like they don’t or can’t meet the standard of beauty can grow to resent the women who do, their faces and physiques a projected reminder of what our society considers their personal failure. Women who try to conform can become frustrated with the women who don’t, fearing that they will be perceived to be frivolous and insubstantial. Ironically, each group envies the other for the satisfaction that they perceive their “opponent” to have. This also means that neither body, neither “choice”, neither life, can feel fulfilling.
Most of the women in my life have tried conformity. We have followed food rules, exercised to exhaustion and worn excruciatingly uncomfortable shapewear. We’ve learned to curl and straighten our hair, no matter the texture or time commitment that it requires. We’ve spent hours learning to apply eyeliner, learning where to place blush and highlighter to change the shape of our faces, creating or removing freckles as the trends change. We do these things because we are told that if we’re compliant enough, we will be rewarded. If we starve ourselves into a fog, tone our muscles, and cinch our waists, we will eventually find the love, acceptance and power that we all seek. That’s the social contract.
We seek after beauty because of what it promises us. But many of us haven’t found that promised power in our pursuits.
We come out of conformity dissatisfied because this system can’t actually offer us true power. When I look at our social expectations of women, I see a system designed to make women smaller (in both physicality and power), to isolate us, distract us, and extract money from us. I see an industry which has defined and redefined beauty countless times to the detriment of women’s sense of self to line the pockets of the same people who want to limit our power.
We are allowed to reject this system. We can refuse to compete for the crumbs of power that it offers. We can claim the power and measure of worth that we deserve. We can implement acts of resistance in our lives. We can draw the lines differently and make sure that they don’t fall between us.
My awakening came in stages. It started when, at 26 years old, I was the thinnest I had ever been, and also the most miserable. But it began in earnest when, a year later, one of my best friends revealed that she too had struggled with disordered eating for years. We had been best friends throughout the time that we were both struggling, but had never talked about it. We shared the feelings of resentment that we each felt at the others’ changing body and its consequences for our own self-esteem. We talked about the great expense at which thinness came for each of us, and how isolating it felt.
My isolation ended when I understood that her thinness also came at a great cost. My envy of the social power that her thinness and beauty gave her dissipated in light of her pain. Her experience cemented my understanding that the standard of beauty to which we are asked to conform is naturally and safely accessible to very very few of us. This has only been deepened by the revelations from other women in my life who I had perceived as having met the standard of beauty have revealed that it came at great personal expense to them, too. Each of their stories feels like a new layer of foundation, giving me the strength to make life choices which may result in my weight gain or wrinkle development, but soothe my soul and lift my spirit. Each of their revelations has deepened my resolve to continue to make those lifestyle changes, even when it feels painful.
When that pain feels like its own kind of isolation, I remember the conversation that I had with my best friend. I remember the countless women whose beauty I envied revealing the pain behind their conformity. I remember the dissatisfaction and powerlessness that I felt when in its pursuit. And I remember my study group and how we lived in a competitive environment but not in competition with one another.
We can refuse to comply. We can refuse to conform to the standard of beauty. We can refuse to compete for the limited, costly power that it promises. I believe that we can only do that effectively in community with other women. This burden is lightened when shared. When we hear other voices echoing our pain, our frustration, our dissatisfaction, and cheering on the choices which may take us further from the standard of beauty, but closer to true fulfilment. When other voices remind us that we already have the beauty and worth that they threaten to give and take away to keep us compliant. It is lightened when we link arms with other women who refuse to believe that their success must come at the cost of their connection to themselves or to one another. That’s why their system is built on isolation.
