Join Me for Lunch?
If you are a teacher like me, you are coming up on the end of the year, a time for reflection, reassessment of practice, and thoughts about next year’s goals. One of the personal goals that I set for myself this year was to be more conscious about the way that I talked about myself in front of my students, especially my female students, particularly around the topics of weight and food. Being more conscious of this kind of language made me realize the incredible amount of time that the women I know, myself included, spend thinking, talking, planning, and shaming around food and body image. So, let’s chat about it.
I confess that this wasn’t something that I came to easily. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a queen of self-deprecation and dark humor, and there are many ways that this behavior manifests in class. For example, when I first got my PhD, the kids asked if they should start calling me “Doctor”. I said no, since I wasn’t a “real” doctor in the way that they thought of. What?!? Now I look back on that statement and cringe.
Fast forward a couple years: I was teaching a specific grammatical construction in my Latin class. The example I gave was, “I want to eat only brownies, but I do not, lest I may gain 100 pounds and not be able to buy pants.” The kids laughed and we moved on with the lesson. But then, a week or two later, I was listening to some girls in class practice their grammar and one of them used my brownie example. And then she said, “If I gained 100 pounds, I’m sure life would not be worth it.” I was startled to hear this and I checked in with her later about it. She said she didn’t even remember saying it and I realized that girls learn these behaviors so early, from the media, from their peers, and from their parents, that they don’t even realize it when they say body negative things. Yet we know, based on the prevalence of eating disorders, anxiety, and body issues in teenage girls, that the pressure is getting to them. And so I started to push myself, away from talking about my own appearance, except in body positive terms, and away from engaging in discussions that centered around the good or bad nature of some foods.
At the end of this year, my feeling is that I did pretty well with this goal, but I would like to continue it in the future. And then I ran across this op-ed, which proposed a new take on the Bechdel Test. The author suggests,
Women, can two or more of us get together without mentioning our bodies and diets? It would be a small act of resistance and a kindness to ourselves.
When men sit down to a business lunch, they don’t waste it pointing out every flaw on their bodies. They discuss ideas, strategies, their plans to take up more space than they already do. Let’s lunch like that. Who’s eating with me?
I would like to metaphorically eat with this author. We cannot possibly create a world where our girls feel safe and empowered if we, as adult women, continue to fixate on food and weight. We cannot expect them to focus on other things if we are secretly or loudly lamenting how we’ve eaten “good” food or “bad” food. Food is not moral. Sure, there are choices that are healthier and those that are not, but moralizing food nurtures an internal dialogue that tells women that they are worthy or good based on what they eat. And that is patently false.
I know that this is a hard ask. We have been so programmed to look at our bodies with hatred and scorn. We have been so trained to think that if we just ate right, we would look right, and then everything would be perfect. Even though I am conscious of this, I still find myself going down the path, engaging in the food shaming discussions with women around me on almost a daily basis. But we owe our students and the girls in our lives more than that world view. We owe them, as the op-ed author says, the default of sitting down talking about ideas, plans, and dreams, rather than pant sizes and new diet fads. As educators, one way that we can do this is being very thoughtful about our words every day, in each conversation. So next year, I will work harder on this. And I hope you will be joining me at that lunch.
-Amy