Body image: How do we view our parts?

Welcome to the fourth in our series analyzing the results of a Body Image Survey run by Silver & Grace. This time we answer two questions:

Which part or parts of your body do you really like?
Which part or parts of your body are you not happy with?

This section of the survey was free form text. What I found really interesting was we were all pretty short and sweet about which body parts we really liked. In general, people responded with one or two parts. But when it came to listing which parts we weren’t so fond of, people became quite verbose.

Once again, ladies, we are awfully hard on ourselves.

The parts we like

The top five body parts we really like, in order of preference, are:

1. legs
2. eyes
3. breasts
4. hair
5. face

What we don’t like:

The top five body parts we are not very happy with are:

1. stomach
2. thighs
3. butt
4. waist
5. upper arms

The stomach was listed more than twice that of the next one in the list, thighs. Add in the fact that waist is also in the top five hit list, and we are seriously not happy with our mid-section. Then add in butt and thighs, also in the top five hit list, and we are so not happy with our lower bodies.

I am just as guilty

My responses are:

I love all my body parts except my facial skin.
I am not fond of my facial skin because I have rosacea and I am very often red and blotchy.

But that’s it. I am good with absolutely everything else. But I’ll be honest, I work damn hard to keep the weight off my mid-section. I have accepted the slight roundness to my belly as a fact of life, so I honoured it with a belly ring.

But that is it. Slight roundness is all I am willing to accept.

What’s that all about?

What happened to our curves?

Look at any statue of ancient goddesses and what do they have? A large butt and a round tummy. Why? Because it was a sign of fertility. And this was sexy!

Renaisaance paintings? Curves. And lots of them.

The average dress size of American women is size 14. FOURTEEN. Not eight, not four, and sure as heck not zero.

And there is no way a size 14 woman has a tiny waist and flat belly. She’s got honest to goodness curves. Frontways, backways, sideways.

And yet we all either hate our stomachs, or work like mad women to in order to like our stomachs.

Notice how the body parts we really like completely avoid our mid section at all? Look down to our legs, or look up to our eyes. And if you want to travel downwards, you can stop at the girls.

But please oh please, don’t go any lower than that, because our waist is too thick and our stomach is too round. And let’s not even talk about our lard ass or thunder thighs.

Ladies, help me out here. When did we start despising any suggestion that we are fertile goddesses? And I don’t mean literally fertile, as in the ability to bear children. It seems to me, that by despising curves we turned our back on the archetypal symbol of our creative and nurturing selfs.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Have your say:

I realize I got rather philosophical here, but let’s run with this. When we started striving for stick thin flat bodies, did we stop embracing our creative and nurturing selves?

More information:

To read the first three installments:

The survey results are in
Do we love our bodies?
Are we willing to go under the knife?

Upcoming body image posts:

April 21 – Who do we compare ourselves to?
April 28 – Are we satisfied with our weight?
May 5 – Are we looking forward to aging?

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