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| Writer | Renee Engeln |
| Category | Self Development |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publish Date | 2017 |
| Pages | 318 |
| File Size | 2 MB |
| File Type |
I taught my first college-level course, “The Psychology of Women,” almost twenty years ago. As I got to know the young women who were students in my class, I became both impressed and concerned. These students blew me away with their intelligence and perseverance, their humor, and their consistent openness to engaging with difficult ideas.
Beauty Sick PDF – Renee Engeln
But some of the worries that burdened these talented women surprised me with their intensity. Of course, there were anxieties about things like grades, finding a job, or relationship troubles. But these women also spent an alarming amount of time worrying about their weight, their skin, their clothing, and their hair. Beauty Sick PDF
One student admitted she missed class one day simply because she felt “too ugly to be seen in public.” The other women in the class accepted this claim without surprise, secure in the knowledge that if you’re a woman worrying about how you look, you’ll always be in good company. After offering the obligatory reassurances that she wasn’t ugly, they patted her on the shoulder with gentle understanding.
I recently met up with a friend of mine who is a professor at a small university in the South. As we sat at a local café, catching each other up on our lives, he began telling me a story about the service trips abroad that he leads for college students. A couple of weeks before one of these groups was set to leave for a tropical location, he asked the students to write reflections on whether they were prepared for their trip.
Beauty Sick PDF – Renee Engeln
Out of the seven women in the group, five wrote that they weren’t ready because they had hoped to lose weight before leaving. They seemed more worried about how their bodies might appear than whether they had sufficiently reflected on the work they hoped to do during their trip. Not one man in the group wrote about his body “not being ready.”
When my friend shared that story with me, my mouth actually dropped open for a moment. “No,” I responded. I didn’t want to believe him. “Yes,” he confirmed. “Five out of seven.” “What did you write in their journals?” I asked. “What kind of feedback can you give in response to that?” Beauty Sick PDF
He told me he wasn’t sure what to write, but eventually settled on reassuring those five women that the culture they were visiting was accepting and nonjudgmental. I doubt that it provided much comfort. Even when we travel, we never really leave our own culture far behind, and that’s the culture that led these women to write what they did in those journals.
So many young women today are strikingly bold in important areas of their lives, but still crumble in front of the mirror. They fight so hard to be treated with respect, but seem, at least at times, to be willing to trade it all in an instant if they could only remake their physical appearance.
Beauty Sick PDF – Renee Engeln
Sometimes I wonder if I and the grown women I know are really so different from that student who skipped class in response to what she saw in the mirror, or the young women who weren’t ready to travel because they didn’t feel thin enough. Maybe we’ve never stayed home from work due to a case of the uglies, but how often have we had conversations about our physical flaws, bonding over our displeasure with weight gain or newly appeared wrinkles?
How much more time do we spend getting ready for work every day compared to our male colleagues? When one of my most beloved mentors told a group that she wore a scarf every day because her aging neck was “too hideous to be seen,” why didn’t we question that type of talk? Beauty Sick PDF
Why are some of my women colleagues still worrying about how many hotness-indicating chili peppers they have on a popular rating website for professors? We may no longer play dress-up and pose in front of the mirror the way many young girls do, but I worry that’s only because we’ve internalized that mirror. We never actually left it behind.
Beauty Sick PDF
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