Month: September 2010

A guest post by Spilt Milk

Once, when I was in my late teens, I had a fleeting reunion with my mother, with whom I’d had very little contact since childhood. It had been about five years since we’d seen each other in person; I was apprehensive about our meeting but mostly I was excited. Fantasies about happy mother–daughter bonding even after such a long estrangement are really that seductive. She did me a favour though and squashed them right away with her greeting: where I had imagined tearful embraces and a tumble of words was simply “My gosh, you’ve gotten fat! I was never that fat in my life, you know.” Evidently I’d smooshed her happy families fantasy too — I wasn’t the daughter she’d ordered. I was kind of shameful.

I’m aware that my little anecdote is not typical (my mother is ill and we’ve never had a ‘normal’ relationship). But I also know that some version of body-shaming goes on in most families. Mothers sitting around prodding their own cellulite and reprimanding themselves for eating a slice of cake condition their children to think it’s normal to hate their bodies. We know this so well it’s practically a cliché. It’s also a familiar kind of mother-blaming: someone develops an eating disorder, and everyone starts asking questions of the mother. Publications wanting to promote a fuzzy ideal of healthy body image may typically devote column inches to admonishing mothers for engaging in diet culture in front of their daughters. These sit nicely alongside narratives about neglectful mothers lazily ordering take-away and overbearing mothers plumping up their children with too much sugary love and fatty indulgence. Hence, I’m wary of the misogyny lurking behind critiques of mothers’ behaviour towards their bodies and food. Whilst it’s a goal of feminism to allow for the dissection and transgression of narrow beauty ideals, it’s clearly not feminist to lay the blame for the perpetuation of young people’s low self esteem upon women in the way that popular narratives about mothers and daughters often seem to do.

Still, there’s a kernel of truth in there. I do wonder how my own relationship with my body may have been different had my mother been kinder to me. Body shame is a great tool of kyriarchy and we often get it from our mothers first, as we learn how bodies can be reduced to a collection of parts and how those parts can be ranked in order of acceptability. Thighs and bums, boobs and upper arms, back-fat and belly-rolls can all be prodded and critiqued, despaired over, disparaged, loathed. This is often a social activity, too. Who doesn’t love normalising misogyny over a cup of tea and a (low calorie) biscuit while the kids play in the next room?

Me, actually. I don’t love it.

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