Girls suffer from body image?
School urges girls to wear “shapewear” to deal with body image issues. Mother not impressed.
So this is what my 8th grade daughter brought home from school today. I am beyond pissed, though I’m not sure if I’m more pissed at the fact that they had the “balls” to send this home or the VERY IGNORANCE of the “counselors” at the school.
So you begin this masterpiece detailing how damaging a negative body image is for girls, how the stress of conforming to an impossible perceived image can adversely affect their mental health, and then OFFER TO GIVE THEM SPANX SO THEY CAN BETTER FIT THE PERCEIVED IMAGE?!? What. The. Very. F@$&. How, in the hell, are you promoting a positive body image by saying “here, you’re too fat. You need shapewear to make you look thinner.” Are you freaking kidding me?
That is honestly the battiest thing I’ve seen in some time. A school handing out bras and other “health products”? Even apart from the twisted message, isn’t that just a tad intrusive? Not to mention “shapewear” – what used to be called “girdles.” I’ve always thought it was progress that girdles went out of fashion; little did I imagine schools would start pushing them.
So many questions. What “other products” are they going to be giving out? Binders?
Is the school getting sponsored by some company? Because I don’t know where they’re getting the money for bras and underwear to be given out. Are the bras going to be sexy?
There are so many ways to help girls build up self-esteem like sports, creative activities like music and arts/craft, but these counselors think giving girls restrictive underwear is the way to go. School needs new counselors.
What qualifications do you need to be a school counselor? This is beyond clueless. It sounds like they’re part of an MLM scheme, and abusing their positions at the school to hawk their product.
We are all stuck with the sex and physical features we were born with, as they are genetically based, but ideas of beauty vary from culture to culture. I remember my biology teacher years ago telling us adolescent students that when an Eskimo man goes on the lookout for a potential wife, he favours the fattest one he can find. According to that received version of Eskimo lore, she will be best-placed to survive a cold winter, though whether that is true or not, I can’t say. But it sounds likely.
But my understanding is that one reason school uniforms were invented was to discourage competitive clothing and fashion/beauty contests among vulnerable teenagers. So girls’ uniforms were also designed to be as shapeless as possible. But the barbarians are ever at the gates, looking for a way in.
When I was younger, people were telling me I needed to lose weight, I was too fat. In fact, I was underweight for my height. I internalized that message. Being fat is unhealthy. Being fat isn’t what a sensible woman would do. So I starved myself. I developed anorexia. I went from hovering about five pounds under my listed desired weight (based, I imagine, on Hollywood beauty standards) to being frightfully thin…and still seeing myself as fat.
These kinds of messages came from my mother and my sisters (all of them larger than me), my teachers, the other students in school…not from counselors. They never took any interest in me. I wasn’t a problem child, and they knew I wasn’t going to make anything of myself, so why bother?
This school should be ashamed of itself.
My cynical, dystopian self tells me there’s a sales contract behind this somewhere, and the school and/or counselors gets a cut.
I wonder what’s in this “healthy literature,” if the other hand has girdles in it.
‘Where does the money come from?’
This was a regular refrain among critics of the Oxford Group back in the 30s-40s. It seems wonderfully appropriate for this story.
If it was JUST bras, I wouldn’t raise a brow–girls develop at different paces, and even parents might miss that a girl has reached the age where physical support is probably a good idea. (And some families might not be ready for an additional product that is often vastly overpriced, so a little extra help on that front isn’t going to hurt.) A few sports bras probably would be an excellent notion, too, since that will help the bustier girls feel more comfortable in PhysEd.
But shapewear? Yeah, seriously, that’s just depraved.