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USA (The Good Body)
MOTIVATION
1. How do you feel about your body? Are you proud of your body? or why not?
2. What kind of body is idealized in today's society? Do you agree with this ideal? Why or why not?
3. Do women have a harder time than men do when it comes to the standards of society regarding beauty
and body image? Or do they both have to deal with the same issues today?
BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
Many people believe that the fashion industry and women’s magazine construct a negative body image for
women. The standard of beauty around the world tends to lean toward fair skin, western features, and thin
bodies, it has resulted in women opting for skin whitening creams, plastic surgery; and damaging eating
disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia.
The Good Body (USA)
[Excerpt]
Eve Ensler1
My body will be mine when I’m thin. I will eat a little at a time, small bites. I will vanquish ice
cream. I will purge with green juices. I will see chocolate as poison and pasta as a form of self-
punishment. I will work not to feel full again. Always moving toward full, approaching full but never
really full. I will embrace my emptiness; I will ride it into holy zones. Let me be hungry. Let me starve.
Please.
Bread is Satan. I stop eating bread. This is the same as not eating food. Four days in, a scrawny
actress friend tells me, “Eve, your stomach has nothing to do with diet.” What? “It’s the change of life,”
she says. “All you need is some testosterone.” I try to imagine what I would be like, totally bread deprived
and shot up with testosterone. “Serial killer” comes to mind.
I’m walking—actually, I’m limping—down a New York City Street, and I catch a glimpse of
this blond, pointy-breasted, raisin-a-day-stomached smiling girl on the cover of Cosmo magazine. She is
there every minute, somewhere in the world, smiling down on me, on all of us. She’s omnipresent. She’s
the American Dream, my personal nightmare. Pumped straight from the publishing power plant into the
bloodstream of our culture and neurosis. She is multiplying on every cover. She was passed through my
mother’s milk and so I don’t even know that I’m contaminated. I just want to be like her. I want to be
Barbie. And it doesn’t matter that if I were anatomically structured like Barbie, I would be unable to
walk and would be forced to crawl on all fours. Don’t get me wrong, I’m my own perpetrator, I’m my
own victim. I pick up the magazines. No, no, no. It’s the possibility of being skinny good that keeps me
buying. Oh, God, I discover a Starbucks maple walnut scone expanding in me, creeping out. Flabby age
leaking through the cracks. Big Macs, French fries, Pizza Land, four helpings, can’t stop. My stomach is
chicken wings, dipping butter, fried shrimp, fried zucchini, fried ice cream, fried dumplings, fried
anything, fried right. My stomach is America. I want to drown in the cement. There’s obviously
something I’m just not getting. I am going to go and find the woman who thought this up. Maybe if I
listen carefully, she’ll reveal the secret.
1
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random051/2004057592.html
