I have always felt uncomfortable in my body. Growing up, I was always told I was “too skinny.” I remember eating tubs of icing by the spoonful and always baking decadent treats as a hobby with the hidden hope that, if I could pack on a few pounds, I would develop a more “womanly” body. Then, all of the sudden, puberty hit and those extra pounds I had always felt I needed became the weight on my shoulders reminding me that I am inadequate. To this day, I would consider my incessant battle with how I feel the need to grow, shrink, or maintain my body as one of my biggest, most taxing struggles in life.
At eleven years old, I participated in a program offered to young girls at my school called Athena's Path. From what I can remember, the program had the makings of a stereotypical after-school special of sorts: an afternoon spent in the sharing of pre-teen girls' sob stories with the hopeful outcome of "understanding despite difference" or to "end bullying," or something equally cliché. Slideshow upon lecture were shown, ultimately instilling the naive conception that "we are all the same in our struggles" before a conversation of our respective hardships dramatically proved otherwise.
One girl described her battle with a question of her sexual orientation and her looming fear of never being accepted. Another girl talked about how she was being raised by a single mother in a bad part of town and cried as she recalled times when they were unsure if they would have enough food to last the week. Tears spread contagiously by the telling of each story until it was my turn. "I don't think I'm pretty," I stammered. After lifting what felt like the weight of my world, my biggest personal hardship, from my shoulders in a moment of vulnerability, I was comforted by the sight of fellow cisgender, white, upper class girls nodding their heads in understanding, whereas girls of varying minority identities furrowed their brows or cocked their heads to the side, obviously confused by how my hardship could even be truly deemed as such.
My eyes flicked around the circle as I waited impatiently for the empathy that had been circulating the room to reach me, but instead was shocked out of my self-pity by a seemingly inconsiderate but retrospectively insightful comment. Tia’s* head shook slowly from side to side, until finally shaking out the words, “that’s such a rich person problem.” My face burned red with defensiveness; my eyes welled with tears as a victimizing silence choked the room. Clenching my jaw to keep it from dropping open, I was stupefied by her demonstration of what I deemed to be such blatant disrespect— an utter dismissal of the gravity of my hardships. Today, I cannot ignore the fact that she may have been right.
As a white, upper class, heterosexual, cisgender female, my identity has enabled me to regularly dodge first-hand experiences with most every form of common oppression. Coasting on a level of privilege so great, the decided ease of my identities has positioned me in such a way that even my awareness of my status has been comfortably framed in expressions of gratitude for my advantage rather than outrage over another’s subsequent disadvantage. I have rarely felt as though my identity is underrepresented, I have rarely been underestimated or dismissed on the basis of my skin color, my sexuality and gender identity have never been reason to outcast or isolate me. In short, I have never had to swim against the current; I have always been able to float, weightless and without care.
I am so privileged, in fact, that many of the ways in which my intersecting identities have posed problems in my life have been due to cases of over or misrepresentation, while minority identities are largely rendered invisible in the marketplace. Because so many aspects of my identity fit our favored societal standards or our standards of superiority (wealth, whiteness, heterosexuality), most of my worries in life result from an obsession with to what degree I am socially accepted rather than a question of whether my identities could inhibit me from being accepted at all.
Our culture tends to define a woman’s worth by their decided beauty, one of many modern disadvantages of identifying with femininity. Girls learn from a young age that to “be a woman” and to “be beautiful” are largely synonymous; thus, a woman must always strive to achieve our culturally accepted, yet unbelievably limiting, standard of beauty or forever struggle with inadequacy.
Because thin, white women are often considered the epitome of beauty and femininity, the intersection of my racial, class, and gender identities serve to position me directly atop that cultivated pedestal, leaving me vulnerable to the pressures that accompany my inherent responsibility to well-represent this norm. In this way, I am both advantaged and disadvantaged. I will never have to struggle to resonate with a woman I see on TV or modeling in an advertisement but, because this image has become so prioritized, it inflicts a complex sense of insecurity and self-scrutiny as the standard that is represented becomes more and more unattainable, even for a person who generally fits the mold, like myself. However, and far more obviously, the prioritization of my image simultaneously places me at an incredible level of privilege. I recognize that I was born with an incredible leg-up on other women; one that, try as they might, other women of minority identities may never be able to gain. I was gifted with a massive head-start in countless walks of life and, though all of us women are in fact struggling to run in the same race, I cannot ignore the fact that I started in a much different position than most others.
In no way do I mean to negate the incessant influence of the media on women or our society’s standard of beauty. Namely through the sexualization and objectification of women and a display of rigid gender roles, the media delivers an inescapable pressure on women to conform to these strict standards rather than diversify them, creating a growing population of women who experience self-hatred and body dysmorphia. These struggles are ones I have dealt with for my entire life and continue to battle.
And still, this struggle to “be beautiful” is an incredibly privileged struggle to have. The influence of the media on Tia’s ability to “feel pretty,” for example, lives way further down Tia’s list of oppressors than on mine, entirely due to the fact that she represents a different set of identities which unfairly place her in a societally less-favored and, thus, more disadvantaged position than mine do. Further, the fact that I spend so much of my time in constant concern with how my beauty compares to that of others, rather than a constant question of if I would be discriminated against at my local grocery store or have enough food to last the week, only further displays my inherent and often unrealized advantages. The very idea that I once used food as a tool to make myself “look prettier” while other people cannot afford to think of food as anything other than a bare necessity reveals the elevated plane I mindlessly coast on, yet still manage to find issue with. Essentially, and what I believe Tia insinuated, I demonstrate privilege in my ability to formulate discomfort from comfort and consider this experience a “struggle,” while others must struggle to even feel comfortable in the first place.
All of us face hardship. We are all disadvantaged by something and advantaged by another; yet, this fact alone highlights only the consequences of those larger, more deeply rooted systems of sexism, classism, and racism that construct these experiences of privilege and oppression in our lives. To use the fact alone that “we are all the same in our struggles” to indicate likeness or form camaraderie across races, classes, and genders (as Athena’s Path arguably tried to do) is wildly too broad of a stroke. Rather, to understand the differences between our particular advantages and disadvantages and those of other people, to remain aware of our privileges despite our oppressors, and to tirelessly eschew self-sympathy by voicing outward empathy are the methods to deconstructing these divisive systems. By communicating these distinct and complex differences within our identities rather than remaining comfortable in our assumptions of sameness, we inch closer greater individual, societal, and cultural understandings.
