Body Image under Patriarchy **ED TRIGGER WARNING**

Since being back in University for another semester, I've been really paying attention to the social culture there, especially between men and women. Now, I've been in school for quite a few years now and I know what a big change it is. It's also incredibly bad for pressuring women to look a certain way, act a certain way and feel about themselves. I remember back in my first year, i was so insecure, I saw a lot of women had expensive clothes, cars, accessories and I also noticed a lot of incredibly thin women. Of course, being 18 at the time, I was always feeling "not good enough" and i got obsessive about my body. I started to feel guilty when i ate, so i ate less...and i started caring way too much about my clothes, hair and other mundane things. I felt like the "competition" created in my mind was too much...I started becoming everything I'm not.

I felt my heartbreak several times, too...I would see young women fresh out of high school completely emaciated. These women couldn't want properly - their legs were bowed outwards. They stumbled around in high heel shoes, laughing around with their friends...but i could see how sad they were.

Here are some depressing statistics from South Carolina Department of Mental Health website

- The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 – 24 years old.

- It is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder – seven million women and one million men

- Only 1 in 10 people with eating disorders receive treatment

- A study by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders reported that 5 – 10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease; 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years and only 30 – 40% ever fully recover

It made me feel awful that I was almost allowing myself to go down that road. Of course, the men there don't help...Never, but in my first year, have i met SO many spoiled, shallow, privileged, rude and misogynistic men in my LIFE. I don't know why i hung out with such creeps, but I did. Probably because i felt that male attention was the most important thing in the world. I'd always hear comments about this woman being fat, or this woman being ugly. This whole juvenile way of behaving seems to keep getting worse as our rape culture advances with new technology that provides new porn, fashion trends etc...


I wonder if things would be the same if we had grown up in a different, non-male dominant culture. I'm almost positive they would be.

I think university is great, I love it and I acknowledge the privilege that comes with that. But, I hate a lot of the student culture. Half of it attempts to be political, but gets nothing done and the other is consumers r us kids who don't give a shit about anything but getting loaded and having their dick sucked. Which will bring me to my next post on post secondary and rape, and possibly the post secondary dude culture in general.

Also, my apologies for potentially unclear sentences...I feel really sick today, in order to help ease it, i had a couple of puffs of mary jane...