You may feel more comfortable with a female photographer, or you may prefer a male. Either way, find out if the photographer does boudoir sets (that’s code for slightly naughty pix), and if so, check out their portfolio. Meet them before the session, and make sure you like them, trust them, and feel comfortable with the idea of disrobing in front of them.
If you can’t (or don’t want to) find a professional photographer, have a girlfriend or boyfriend who’s handy with a camera take the photos for you. (Make sure you end up with the negatives if you use a camera that takes film.) Maybe you can return the favor for your friend later. If you have access to a digital camera, that’s the way to go. Then you won’t have to worry about the film developers seeing you in the flesh, and you can just erase any photos you don’t like.
With a photographer who is not a professional, you may need more than one session to get some pictures that make you just absolutely fall in love with your beautiful body. Play with the lighting, setting, make-up, and costuming. Pictures taken outside can be amazing, especially if shot on an overcast day. Sooner or later you will see a picture that makes your heart sing. That’s the one to enlarge, frame, and place at the center of your altar.
Journaling Prompts: Naked Truth
• My body is . . .
• I am happy that my body . . .
• My body feels best when . . .
Onward and Inward!
Good work, Sexy Witch! You have completed chapter 1. Now, find your first ritual in part 2 of this book (Rituals I for solo Witches, or Rituals II for circles of Witches), and initiate yourself!
[contents]
1. The Mayo Clinic, http://www.mayoclinic.com/invoke.cfm?id=HQ00643.
2. Overcoming Depression, http://www.overcoming-depression.com/depression-and-exercise.html.
3. Free Beauty Tips and Samples, http://www.free-beauty-tips.com/pms.html.
chapter two
I Love Me, I Love Me Not,
I Love Me
★ Magickal Act: Media Fast, page 31.
★ Daily Practice: Nurturing the Self, page 32.
★ Daily Practice: Another Measure of Water to Fill the Well, page 33.
This Is Me Coming Clean About My Self-Esteem Biases and Confusion
In researching this chapter, even after years of awareness and study, I found more data about how bad off women are in relation to body image, self-esteem, eating disorders, and the inability to age with grace and pride than I care to truly comprehend. Being overly image-conscious is a quicksand trap for our generation in ways that it never was for earlier generations of women.
In Defense of the Doll—The Barbie Revolution: Barbie has gone from being a vapid example of how women are supposed to be to being the most successful female in the United States. Barbie has had 75+ careers and has busted through the glass ceiling in many frontiers. “White House Barbie” was launched in 2004! With any luck, we mortals will soon catch up with this versatile, plasticine character.
• • •
Self-Definition:
The creation of one’s own independent structure of ethics, dreams, goals, worldview, and self-image.
The advent of “reality TV” programming, the ubiquitous—yet often subtle—influence of marketing, and the co-opting (and resulting corporate control) of themes from “girl power” to “punk rock” have made a minefield of our sense of self-worth. We have had our identity as empowered women—feminists, in other words, as loath as many of us are to claim that title—put through a shredder, dried out, sterilized, made less dangerous, less unruly, and less effective, and reconstituted into a shrink-wrapped form that we are all supposed to comply with. This “made-for-TV” image of empowerment has been fed back to us by a corporate-controlled media. Is it really helping us reach our true goals to have the media defining those goals for us?
The glass ceiling has shifted up a few floors, but women still make cents on the male dollar. We can find feminist role models in just about any field, but even when we succeed in entering our chosen professions, we are constantly bombarded by the specter of discrimination based on age, gender, sexuality, and image. We are judged more often by how we look than how we think, let alone how we feel.
I don’t have as many answers to the conundrums that are raised in this chapter as I have questions, but I believe that the questions raised here are extremely important for us all to examine. Issues related to body image, self-esteem, and radical empowerment are all part of our struggle toward the goal of self-love. These are arenas in which women are still in a defensive position, even in the very privileged Western world.
Women have steadily gained ground for generations, but in order to hold that ground we must remain vigilant, aware, and strong. We must continue to be self-defining in all the ways we know how, and we must continue to learn more about what it means to be self-defined. We must move forward with our power, our anger, and our love, to protect our self-respect, our dreams, our bodies, our souls, our goals, and our personal values.
Machiavellianism:
The political doctrine of Machiavelli, which denies the relevance of morality in political affairs and holds that craft and deceit are justified in pursuing and maintaining political power.
—Source: American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.
It is also essential that we recognize that each of us must choose our own battles. I am not anti-image-consciousness, I am pro–critical thought. I encourage each of you to decide what the important elements of resistance and celebration are. Don’t let anyone define your personal struggle for self-acceptance and self-definition for you—not me, not your parents, not your friends, not the media, not theorists, not the scientific community.
If make-up makes you feel good, wear it. If short skirts and heels make you feel unstoppable, go for it. If engineer boots and slacks are your idea of perfect, live in them. If cosmetic surgery is your answer to some nagging issue, get the work done.
Each of us is entitled—and, for our own health and sanity, possibly even required—to define our own goals and focal points in our process of redefinition. In allowing ourselves to create a very personalized worldview, the information presented in this chapter will be beyond helpful. This chapter will give you an overview of just how subtle the influences that define our daily concerns are, as well as give you some perspective on how we got where we are now.
One caution I offer you in embarking on this chapter is that looking around you and constantly seeing the Machiavellian workings of our culture is not sustainable in the long term. Seeing the vast underpinnings of our dysfunctional and disempowering culture can be depressing, disheartening, and even paralyzing. In reading this chapter, you may experience a sense of futility, or feel overwhelmed and, quite likely, angry. Remember, anger can be put to good use. Anger raises energy, and you can use that energy to fuel the fire of your own transformation.
Our empowerment lies in defining the boundaries of what is acceptable to each of us, what works, and doesn’t work, for each of us personally. Our power lies in defining our allegiances, our boundaries, and our chosen battles. Out of all this we may find what it is necessary and healthy for each of us to defend, and with that clarity it will become easier to be effective in the work that each of us must do.
In my own struggle with an overactive tendency toward a possibly inflated relationship with compassion, defining the edges of my ability to healthfully create change has been difficult. I have had to find the ability to say, “That’s a good issue to defend. But it’s not my issue.” I encourage each of you to do the same. Let others define their struggles, and allow yourself the same quality of compassion in putting boundaries on your own areas of influence.
Subjugation:
To bring under control, make subservient, to enslave.
• • •
A Magickal Thought: Loving your body i
s a (r)evolutionary, magickal act.
Self-forgiveness is a key component to this process. We may not be able to save everyone, but we can begin the process of healing humanity, and possibly the earth as a whole, by treating ourselves well. The realization that my own health and healing is as important as everyone else’s has given me a new relationship with creating change in the world. I find that self-forgiveness comes more easily when I realize that I am part of the whole, and that my healing is an integral part of creating a sane world to live in, and to pass on to future generations. Self-forgiveness is also utterly important in getting from unwitting participation in our own subjugation to self-defined empowerment. In honoring our process of healing, and allowing ourselves the forgiveness we so need when we fall short of our own expectations, we offer others the skills and permission to do the same.
I am absolutely convinced that through living in our power, holding our dreams and our boundaries as sacred, and allowing ourselves to self-define, we can become the change we want to see in the world.1 Self-defining and becoming healthy are revolutionary acts. By defining ourselves, we stand as proof that it is possible to create a new reality. By becoming healthy, we support others in finding health. Through empowering ourselves with choice, we make choice available to those we love.
Body/Image
Every day we encounter and consume images of women that defy any realistic expectation we could possibly have of ourselves, even while they define a cultural standard toward which we often (consciously or unconsciously) strive. Studies have shown that merely looking at pictures of fashion models causes a serious drop in self-image for many women.2
As advertising becomes more and more pervasive, we are bombarded by massive amounts of these images every day. We see stick-thin, 100-feet-tall women peering down at us from giant billboards; tiny, breakable women in compromising poses pleading with us from the pages of Vanity Fair; and big-breasted, perfectly coiffed, vacuous-looking girls staring at us from the pages of our Victoria’s Secret catalogues.
“Fashion magazines promote such unrealistic images of beauty . . . women feel they can’t live up to them. These are the same women . . . who turn out the lights during sex, and sometimes even while undressing. Self-esteem plays an important role in a woman’s sexual function. If a woman doesn’t feel good about her body or herself, or doesn’t feel as in control or powerful, it’s extremely hard for her to let go and sexually respond to a partner.”
—Laura Berman, Ph.D., http://www.newshe.com.
We check our e-mail and get spammed with messages screaming “Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days!”, “Effortlessly Lose Weight!”, “Secret Weight-Control Patch!” We are horrified by the specter of obesity—the almost ironic climax of our society’s obsessive relationship with weight control,3 and a direct result of our inability to listen to our body’s signals.
Ten percent of eight-year-old girls in the United States have already dieted. Dieting is the most common trigger of all eating disorders.4 People who diet are at risk for developing serious—sometimes fatal—eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. One to three of every 100 Americans over the age of thirteen have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. About half of those treated for eating disorders achieve a healthy body weight in recovery, but 80 percent experience ongoing psychological issues.5 Twenty percent of those who develop anorexia will die of it.6 Ninety percent of people who develop eating disorders are women.7
Average American Woman
Barbie
Store Mannequin
Height: 5'4"
6'
6'
Weight: 145 lbs.
101 lbs.
Not available
Dress size: 11–14
4
6
Bust: 36–37"
39"
34"
Waist: 29–31"
19"
23"
Hips: 40–42"
33"
34"
Source: Health magazine, September 1997; and NEDIC, a Canadian eating disorders advocacy group.
The Great Weight Debate
There are many obesity skeptics coming out of the woodwork (or is that out of the closet?). Finally, some experts are stating a sane and viable truth: It’s not about being skinny, it’s about being healthy. Exercise is a must; dieting is not. Eating healthfully—getting adequate nutrition, avoiding processed sugars and empty calories, consuming diverse types of food—and maintaining a physically active lifestyle, not dieting, will improve your chances of living a long and healthy life.
Fat = Poor?
In his 2004 book The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos points out that poverty and obesity often go hand in hand. Is fat the new lower class demarcation? Campos claims that the “American elite,” who value thinness over all else, may be projecting fears based in the realm of over-consumption (SUVs, environmental pillage, American imperialist tendencies) onto the easy target of over-consumption of food.
Die Young and Leave a Beautiful Corpse
Not only are we afraid of getting fat,8 we are mortified of getting, or at least of looking, old. Maybe getting old isn’t a bowl full of cherries, but as they say, it sure beats the alternative, right? Wouldn’t we really rather be old, alive, and well-worn than young and dead?
Well, apparently not all of us. Women are literally dying to look young and get thin. Cosmetic surgery is under-legislated and overhyped. We get wrinkles buffed, numbed, and even cut out. We dye our hair to cover the gray. We paint our skin to hide stretch marks. We tan even though we know it might end up killing us. If we can afford it, some of us get tummy tucks to hide the effects of aging or of having had children. We get breast lifts or implants to remove the inevitable sag.
And it’s not even about just the aging or the weight. It’s about having the “right” nose, eyes, lips, face, hair, and clothes. It’s a prepackaged, pleasure droid–inspired, “new and improved” you!
It’s a real challenge not to succumb to these social pressures. Even having all the information does not instantaneously transform us into healed and whole individuals who are not affected by our social conditioning. Though I can see the set-up that allows (encourages?) us to entertain the notion of cosmetic surgery, to diet, to fear aging, to mistreat our bodies—and creates the genesis of a mentality that is comprehensively prone to self-destruction—I am far from immune to the effects of this set-up. I have a pretty good perspective on how it all works and who’s really in control of the cultural standard-setting, and I still can’t say that I don’t ever diet, that I have never thought about getting liposuction, or that I always treat myself fairly, kindly, or well.
Lookism:
A recently coined term that defines the fact that in this culture our looks have a lot to do with how we are treated. Studies have shown that people who fit the cultural ideal of beauty get hired more readily, taller men make more money on average than shorter men, and overall people treat those who are “attractive” with more kindness. Lookism relates to body type as well as facial features.
As a matter of fact, I can’t even say that I’m totally against cosmetic surgery. I know there’s a chance that someday I will decide that microdermabrasion, or an eye lift, or breast implants are exactly what I need. Part of me believes that anything that makes a woman feel better about herself has got to be a positive thing.
Another part of me is aware that the statement I just made is an extreme oversimplification. I know that it doesn’t take into accoun
t the whole structure that defines what makes us feel better (or worse, as the case may be) about ourselves. What I’m sure of is that I am against the infrastructure of self-hatred, image obsession, and imposed insecurity that makes us willing to spend our hard-earned cash on creating an outward image of “perfection,” or willing to starve ourselves to death in an effort to fit an unrealistic mold.
What is feeding our willingness to starve, cut, and deny ourselves into this empty and illusive size-four fantasy? In a word, marketing. The diet industry was a 30-billion-dollar-a-year industry in 2004,9 and the cosmetic surgery industry far outranks that, coming in at a whopping 136 billion in 1998.10
Big Business and Big Revenues
Annually, the buttock lift segments account for national revenues of $712 million. Total market billing for facelift procedures for the age group 51-64 was around $195 million in 1998, representing 39,000 procedures at an average price of $5,000. In 1998 the 19-34 age group spent over $91 million dollars in these categories. The total market demand for nose surgery yielded about $187 million in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery procedures. This fat injection market segment generates over $41 million in revenues for the cosmetic and reconstructive surgery industry. With nearly 37,000 customer-patients for this forehead lift procedure, the gross market segment value to plastic surgeons is around $111 million annually. The category of Retin-A treatment grew over 350% in the years 1992–1998. Approximately 107,000 procedures are undertaken annually. At an average price of $90, this market segment generates a modest $9.3 million in industry revenues, and is a high demand segment.
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