In the November issue of marie claire you will find an interview I did with the famous feminist and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. Jackie Frank approached me to interview her as part the magazine’s reporting on their recent survey of Australian women. I jumped at the chance to talk to Orbach, having read both Hunger Strike and Fat is a Feminist Issue at university.
In her latest book Bodies Orbach returns to familiar territory exploring the pressure on both men and women to be perfect and design our bodies as perfect through everything from extreme dieting to surgery.
For my full article buy a copy of the magazine and see http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/marie-claire/ for more information about the issue.
Here is a snapshot of my interview with Orbach.
RH: The marie claire survey of Australian women found that nine percent reported that they were happy with their body and actually reading your book that sounds a bit high. Nine percent sounds like quiet a positive number considering the intensity of body shame and distress in our society. So when you hear a statistic like that what do you immediately think?
SO: I think it’s so crazy because you can say to me ‘that sounds quite high’, and I can think, yeah, it does sound quite high. But really, I mean we should be getting the result the opposite way but we’re not. The reality of only nine percent of women feeling ok in their body means that three kids in a primary school class or a secondary school class are feeling ok and all the rest are obsessing and upsetting. It depends how you look at that statistic. We’re so used to how awful the situation is.
RH: You say in your book, that we’ve normalised this level of body discomfort.
SO: You have to ask another series of questions to that nine percent, which you know might yield very unpleasant results. But we don’t want to go there because we really want them to feel ok about their bodies.
RH: Another thing reading your book and also looking at the survey marie claire did, there seems to be quite a broad spectrum of body distress, everything from the ‘if I had the money and the opportunity I’d re-haul my whole body with cosmetic surgery’, to what I call the ‘couple of kilo syndrome’, which is the ‘I’m fine but if I just loose five or six kilos’.
SO: I think that is a very common one actually. I mean that’s the ordinary madness, right? If I could just lose a couple of kilos somehow everything would be alright and then when people look at themselves [in] pictures five years ago they think. ‘I look gorgeous not ugly’. But they didn’t feel it at the time because they were still in the ‘if only I could have lost five kilos’ [state of mind].
1 comment:
I loved this interview and found so much of what Susie had to say both refreshing and sensible. I have quite a positive body image and good self esteem but I am constantly frustrated and sometimes scared by so many of my friends' negative image of themselves and their bodies. It has become such a "normal" conversation topic for women. Dieting, exercise programs, size, weight, what they eat and don't eat and the latest amazing solution to help make them thin. I always wonder if they realise that being happy is actually far important. I think they really think that being thinner will make their life so much better. Will people "like" them more? Will they be more succesfsful in their career? Will they have better friendships? Will their partner love them more? We really need to start focussing on happiness as such an important part of "wellness". If only we could portray that on the front of a magazine? It's so much more valuable than having the "perfect" body!
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