My first blog post...I'm doing it! I'm doing it!

Having sent e-mails out to friends and family that are the equivalent of blog posts for years now, I think it's time to go ahead and do the real thing. I don't have time for this. I'm working on several freelance projects right now. I have a three-year-old who is currently sitting semi-comatose in front of Curious George. I have a fear that this blog is going to consume me completely and I will forgo work, exercise, and mothering in favor of putting my little, squirming, delicate thoughts and ideas and rants and so forth out there into the vacuum of the world.

But...onward.

My first post henceforth shall address an article I read on the lefty Web site Alternet.org. It's an article that is an excerpt from a book about how much women hate their bodies. You know -- all the old stories about the anorectics and bulimics and girls who hate themselves because they don't fit the supermodel mold. I understand this so well. I spent countless hours in my childhood and adolescence wishing to have a different sort of face and body, and I recall being mortified when my butt started to bounce around when I walked. I never had a weight problem. Even so, I'm pissed that I lost so many hours and days to self-centered body obsession, staring and staring into mirrors, waiting for myself to turn into...what? I'd keep checking. Every time I'd walk past a mirror, a reflective wall, the window of a parked car. And now, with post-nursing boobs, rapidly burgeoning wrinkles and age spots, and a belly that is starting to jiggle like a bowl of jelly, I would like to bludgeon that stupid teenaged me into consciousness.

My daughter, nearly 7, came to me the other day with her belly sucked all the way in, navel to spine, and said, "I wish my tummy looked like THIS!" Holy fucking shit!

Comments below the Alternet article ranged from "yeah, well, most women are fat pigs and if they'd just eat right they'd BE beautiful," to "guys don't mind a little junk in the trunk -- lighten up!" to "I don't have any sympathy for those skinny white girls who obsess about being too fat when people are starving in Darfur," to "oh yeah? well I have an eating disorder and this is why you're all totally like MEAN," and more along those lines.
No one mentioned that as women have more and more spending power in this culture, it behooves the moneyed ones who wish to become more moneyed to appeal to their sense of lack, of falling short, of never having/being enough, then treating it like fun and games. Whee! Manolo Blahniks! Face creams that cost more than a week's groceries! You too can look like [fill in blank] if you fork over enough bucks! It's nauseating. Your lover doesn't give two shits about whether you look like a supermodel. But the consumer culture makes a killing off of women's longing to shape their outer selves into an unattainable model of perfection. Women: cast off your cosmetics! Wear what's comfortable! Figure out who's trying to tell you how you can make yourself More Beautiful Through The Wonders of Chemistry...and stop giving them your money.