Most people who are familiar with Eve Ensler associate her with ‘The Vagina Monologues’, her Obie Award winning play made up of a series of personal monologues revealing different women’s experiences with, relationships to, and stories about that most intimate part of their bodies. Some find ‘The Vagina Monologues’ to be very affirmative and empowering, but it has also been subject to both conservative and feminist criticism.
Ensler is also the author of ‘The Good Body’, a book that offers another take on the theme of women’s relationships to their bodies. Like ‘The Vagina Monologues’, The Good Body’ consists mainly of vignettes and monologue-like pieces–some in Ensler’s own voice, some based on other real-life women she has interacted with, and some fabricated.
I was not impressed with the cover of ‘The Good Body’, which basically consists of a simple line drawing of an outline of a female form with two scoops of ice cream (one vanilla, one chocolate) where the breasts would be. To me, such imagery does not connote female empowerment so much as it connotes female edibility. Was this an attempt to impart wry humor or an ironic commentary about the many mixed messages surrounding women’s bodies? Maybe so, but it reminded me of a certain questionable magazine advertisement for women’s shaving gel which pictures a pair of long, smooth legs stretching up to a soft serve cone instead of a body and face.
Despite these qualms with the cover design, I thought I might very well like ‘The Good Body’, which purports to focus upon body image issues (and other appearance-oriented issues) among women. Since I do experience some such issues and insecurities myself, I appreciated the idea of being able to read about other women’s thoughts and feelings in such regards. I thought such reading material might offer me a sense of commiseration and maybe even affirmation, by making me feel less alone with my own thoughts and feelings of somehow not being good enough and then blaming my not being good enough on superficial factors. Why do I do that?
Why do I buy into beauty ideals that I know are limited, limiting, self-defeating, and insidious? After all, I am a smart, feminist woman with much to offer. It bothers me and even embarrasses me to an extent that I am susceptible to falling into this snare of feeling like I am not good enough because I do not LOOK good enough. Why do I allow myself to think this way? What is wrong with me? Why am I so weak? And why can’t I just have perfect skin?
For me, it’s not so much the body image issues that drag me down. It is more of a warped obsession with my skin; my weird feelings of inferiority and even shame associated with my idea that I don’t mesh with some feminine ideal of smoothness. Sometimes my blemishes, blotchiness, and stubble make me feel like a vile, disgusting, unclean, detestable creature. I realize such thinking is irrational and self-destructive, so why can’t I easily escape it?
I thought that maybe reading other women’s thoughts and feelings about similar issues and similarly self-defeating patterns of thinking might help me arrive at some kind of clearer understanding or productive epiphany in this regard.
Eve Ensler writes from a feminist perspective that focuses on women’s body parts. She has confessed that ‘The Good Body’ was inspired by her fixation with her own imperfect stomach. Some feminists would posit that a variety of feminism which seems to reduce women to their body parts is not the best, most empowering approach. I do not disagree with that. However, I do think there is something very positive to be said for having the opportunity to absorb and consider other women’s experiences that may be similar to (or different from) one’s own. I think this kind of exchange can lessen feelings of alienation and if women feel less alienated in regards to their concerns and insecurities; if they realize that they are not alone in feeling certain ways, then perhaps such knowledge can serve as a catalyst for them to become more proactive in attempting to get to the root of certain problems and move forward with some alternatives or solutions. That was my thinking as I entered into my reading experience with ‘The Good Body’. Despite having been less than impressed with the cover design, I felt open minded and hopeful about the book. Unfortunately, the book did not live up to my high hopes.
Ensler’s writing style often struck me as over the top and overly dramatic. Then again, she IS a playwright, so I suppose a certain degree of drama makes sense. Some of the dramatically presented content seemed overly obvious to me, too, though. For example, how many times have we heard the details about how if a real woman actually had the proportions of Barbie, she would be forced to crawl on all fours? I, for one, have heard that snippet numerous times and there are other details like that, too. Details that do not seem very thought-provoking to me because I probably already thought about them years ago in my college level women’s studies classes. Of course, not every woman had the opportunity to participate in college level women’s studies classes, so perhaps I am just not quite the right demographic for such details. Perhaps such details are indeed new and surprising to other readers.
Another personal gripe for me was the somewhat frequent usage of the term “skinny bitch” in the text. I happen to be skinny and I have a pet peeve with generalizations about skinny women. Of course, I realize that there are more profuse and more derogatory generalizations flung around about fat women. Perhaps Ensler was attempting to counteract an anti-fat bias. Still though, even though Ensler’s main appearance-oriented issue may be her un-flat tummy, she must be well aware that is not every woman’s main appearance-oriented issue and why would she want to alienate readers with other appearance-oriented issues? A term like “skinny bitch” is quite a generalization, which would seem to contrast with her supposed aim of embracing and celebrating the individual details of many different kinds of women. A term like “skinny bitch” also sounds catty to me. Perhaps I misinterpreted her usage of this term and she was actually attempting to make some kind of underhanded statement about female cattiness, but it seemed like every time a “skinny bitch” had anything to express within the text, that “skinny bitch” came across as superficial, simplistic, and vapid. I do not appreciate that categorization and I certainly do not think such traits walk hand in hand with skinniness.
The book certainly presents some interesting perspectives, too, though. Here are some excerpts that resonated for me:
“When a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the United States was recently asked about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the majority of these women said they would lose weight. Maybe I identify with these women because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat, then I would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved.”
I appreciate her expressing this, because in a way, it sounds naive and weak, but I think a lot of women have experienced similar thoughts and feelings. I know I have. Not about my weight specifically, but about other aspects of my appearance. I have also experienced the shame and self-hatred she goes on to describe.
“Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty, and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all my self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed rage. Like a toxic dump, it is where the explosive trajectories collide: the Judeo-Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet, be less; the consumer-state imperative to be better, which is based on the assumption that you are born wrong and bad, and that being better always involves spending money, lots of money.”
“I could never be good. This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and terrorist the badness becomes.”
“It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose all sight of the world.”
“The crazy thing is he’s always thought I was beautiful, but of course that doesn’t count, I mean, he loves me.”
“Fat is as low, disgusting, as gross as you can get. Like when I’m shopping in the regular stores they always keep the plus sizes in the back like porn. I feel like a ho trying things on and the PLUS SIZE sign is always so huge.”
“She was blond and glowed. In her pack of golden puppies I was dark and hairy. Eew! Eew! How did this one get into my litter. My mother would do anything, everything to clean me up, shut me up, make me good, make me right.”
Wow, that’s an awful lot of low self esteem, isn’t it?
Even though I can relate to some of it, I can’t say I feel affirmed as a woman after having read it. Not that everything is supposed to be affirmative, but part of me feels exhausted by reading such a litany of negative thoughts.
Some of the scenarios she presents are downright depressing. For example, I read about a woman in her forties who was frustrated with her sex life because it was so much work to get her husband hard. She compared this to the process of eating lobster because you have to crack and peel and bend and pry just to finally be graced with a flimsy strand of meat that doesn’t really satisfy you. So what was her solution to this dilemma? Vaginal laser surgery. I’m reading this and thinking couldn’t the husband have taken Viagra or something? Wouldn’t that have been less extreme than having her vagina surgically altered and tightened? To each their own choices and in this case, this woman’s choice ended up working out, at least for her husband. He was so excited by her virginally tight new vagina he acted as if he was a teenager again. His erectile issues went away and he wanted sex multiple times per day. This might have been a good thing except that the woman’s new vagina was so tight that every single penetrative session was painful for her.
Then I read about another woman who feels like vomiting every time her partner touches her tummy. By this time, I’m feeling depressed from reading about all these women who are so terribly unhappy and unsatisfied with their own bodies. There would seem to be no positive solutions in sight, as I am subjected to excerpts such as:
“For the first three days I live on espresso macchiatos. I am totally insane. I can’t stop talking, but I feel skinny. Then I get hungry. I try to write about the patriarchal paradigm of invasion, occupation, and domination but all I can think about is pasta.”
“So here’s what I think I’ve learned so far: In order to be good, I’ve got to be a smiling psychopath, deprived of pretzels, deeply involved with a Nazi trainer, fortunately numb from the botulinism, white vanilla fat sucked out with rods, and my pussy tightened.”
Oh dear. Unfortunately, I can still relate to such thoughts and feelings to an extent, but part of me also thinks this is getting out of control. I know it’s not easy to avoid media pressures and consumer pressures and pressures to fit the mold of the perfect and beautiful woman, even for those of us who are free thinkers, but perhaps we could shift our focus away from the realm of our bodies and into the realm of our minds for a while now. Perhaps we could concentrate on creating our own definitions of beauty.
‘The Good Body’ is a pretty quick read that offers some interesting thoughts and a few semi-provocative little nuggets, but overall it just seemed too obvious to me. I felt like I had heard most of it before, thus it failed to surprise or enlighten. Another reason it failed to enlighten is because it didn’t offer much in the way of an in-depth analysis of the root of all these women’s self esteem issues, nor did it offer much in the way of ideas for positive solutions.
Identifying a problem and venting about it can certainly be cathartic to a degree, but after a point I’d like to move beyond the presentation of the problem, towards suggestions for how to fix it or at least transcend it.
