—
Looking at the scale and scope of the rigging can be painful—scary and enraging and overwhelming. No wonder people hate the word “patriarchy.” It’s a word that exposes and names a source of pain so old and deep we’ve learned to ignore it or treat it as if it’s how life should be. In general, “self-help”-type books try to help people feel good, empowered, in control of their lives, so they leave this chapter out. Acknowledging the large-scale social forces that surround you does not necessarily feel good, empowering, or like you’re in control.
But it’s also like looking at the climate. It’s where you live. You can’t escape it. And you can change it only in tiny, tiny increments. If you don’t plan for it, you won’t know when to plant and when to harvest. If you don’t acknowledge it, you won’t notice that it’s changing, that your world is being cooked alive, and you won’t be able to fix it.
And we’re not done. There’s another enemy, one you confront each and every day. It tells you it’s your friend, when really it’s trying to kill you slowly.
That’s what the next chapter is about.
tl;dr:
? The game is rigged. Women and girls—especially women and girls of color—are systematically excluded from government and other systems of power. It’s called “patriarchy” (ugh).
? The patriarchy (ugh) says it doesn’t exist. It says that if we struggle, it’s our own fault for not being “good enough.” Which is gaslighting.
? Human Giver Syndrome—the contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity in support of others, no matter the cost to you—thrives in the patriarchy, the way mold thrives in damp basements.
? The solution? SMASH. (See worksheet. )
5
THE BIKINI INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Julie was working hard to manage her stress. She didn’t feel great, but she was staying afloat. Until she wasn’t.
Her stomach had been “off” for a few days, or maybe weeks, but she didn’t see anything wrong when she looked in the mirror, so she didn’t think about it. She got away with ignoring it until she woke up in the middle of the night with cramps she couldn’t ignore.
The family had moved—always an exhausting process—and she spent her first night in the new house alternately curled up in bed, lying on the bathroom floor, or sitting on the unfamiliar toilet while nothing happened but cold sweat, shivering, and minor but uncontrollable…um…leakage. When she googled her symptoms, the Internet told Julie to SEE A DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY.
Three hours later, she was being examined in the ER. They pressed on her belly while spasms and cramps caused more leakage. Julie was too uncomfortable to feel embarrassed, but the word embarrassed started repeating itself in her head while they asked questions about risk factors: poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, Crohn’s disease, recent abdominal surgery, opioid use…no, no, no, no, no. High stress and change of schedule? Julie felt her body contract, her face went hot, and she started to cry. The new job, all the tension with her husband…Doesn’t everyone go through these things? Could these ordinary things land her in the emergency room?
After an unnerving scan, they had her diagnosis. It included the word “impaction.” The good news was it was isolated and therefore treatable with a quick, easy procedure that included the word “scoop.” And her follow-up care included the words “bowel retraining.”
Now she felt embarrassed. Yeah, having a poop-related ER visit doesn’t feel super-dignified, but it was worse than that. It was as though she had failed, as though her body was substandard because it seemed to have overreacted to the stress of her normal, average life.
“No, it’s not a disproportionate response,” Amelia told her over the phone the next day. “You may not have been aware of how bad it was, but your body was. Believe it when it tells you things.”
“That sounds…I mean”—Julie hedged—“My body knows things? It tells me things? Come on, what actually happens?”
“Your body holds on to stress,” Amelia explained unhelpfully.
“Well, why can’t it handle my perfectly normal amount of stress?”
“Perfectly normal? You’re changing jobs, moving houses, and maybe getting divorced—that’s facing three of the worst stressors known to the industrialized West all at once. What exactly are you expecting from your body?”
It turned out Julie’s expectations for her body and what it was supposed to be were totally wrong. She thought she could measure her wellness by the appearance of her body. Of course she did; that’s what we’re all taught to do.
This chapter is about how Julie got it so wrong, and what she had to learn to get it right.
* * *
—
On the day a girl is born, she may be lucky enough to have people around her who instantly welcome every roll on her body, every wrinkle on her fingers, every blotch on her skin, and each and every hair, no matter where it is, on her brand-new little body. Her little body is full of needs—needs for food, sleep, diaper changes, being held. The adults are there to listen to the distress signals that her body sends out, and when we’re lucky, they willingly meet those needs, no matter how sleep-deprived, busy, or desperate they feel.
Most of us are met, at our birth, with an enveloping, protective love that holds and cherishes every inch of our bodies. In that moment and in that love, we are flawless. Beautiful.
And then.
And then we are infected with Human Giver Syndrome, which pushes girl babies to grow into human givers—pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others—while it pushes boy babies to be ambitious, competitive, strong, and infallible.
Picture that girl on the day of her birth, perfect and helpless and full of life, maybe held against the skin of a loving parent.
She’s beautiful, right? She’s perfect.
And she’s you.
Here is the secret Human Giver Syndrome doesn’t want you to know: Nothing has changed. No matter what has happened to that body of yours between the day you were born, beautiful and perfect, and the day you read this, your body is still beautiful and perfect. And it is still full of needs.
And yet by the age of six, about half of girls are worried about being “too fat.”1 By age eleven, it’s up to two-thirds, and by full adolescence almost all girls will have engaged in some kind of “weight control” behavior.2 One recent study of more than 4,500 adolescents found that nearly all of them (92 percent) engaged in some kind of weight-control behavior, and almost half (44 percent) of girls engaged in unhealthy weight-control behaviors.3
It hasn’t always been like this, and it isn’t like this everywhere; it happens because our culture makes it happen. In 1994, there was no television on the island of Fiji; there were also no eating disorders. British and American television were brought to the island in 1995. By 1998, 29 percent of the girls had developed severe eating disorder symptoms. Thirteen percent developed these symptoms within one month of the introduction of television.4