Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall

by Kjerstin Gruys

  In the 1990s, T-shirts claiming THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE became all the rage. They were created to challenge stereotypes about what types of people supported gender equality. Although these still-popular T-shirts were originally intended to celebrate diversity among feminists across race, class, gender, and sexuality, images of actress Ashley Judd—a heterosexual white woman with class privilege—wearing the shirt have arguably become the most iconic (well, at least until 2008, when Ms. magazine put a Photoshopped image of Barack Obama wearing the T-shirt on its cover!). In other words, the only stereotype that Judd seemed to challenge by wearing her THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE T-shirt, and the stereotype that most captured the attention of the mass media and general public, was that of the “ugly feminist.” Now, I’m not mad at Ashley Judd for being conventionally beautiful; she’s a freaking fabulous feminist role model, who happens to champion several of my favorite women’s causes. I bought myself the T-shirt after seeing her in it. Yet it fascinates me that, with all the famous folk seen wearing that T-shirt—Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Stewart, Margaret Cho, and Camryn Manheim, among others—Judd’s image was the one that came to represent the “new” face of feminism.

  And so, by the time I began my year without mirrors, I’d spent close to a decade pondering this curious relationship between feminism and beauty and my own place within these debates.

  It angered me that this antagonism seemed to reinforce the idea that a woman could be either pretty or intelligent, but not both. I agreed with the English writer and poet Elizabeth Bibesco, who insisted that “you don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.” (Not that I’ve ever managed to read every word of Das Kapital!) Bibesco may have been speaking from experience; Virginia Woolf, one of her contemporaries (and an apparent frenemy), once snarkily described Bibesco as “pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun.” Who would have expected Virginia Woolf and Rush Limbaugh to share similar strategies for demeaning their adversaries?

  I agreed wholeheartedly that the beauty and diet industries deserved my skepticism and disdain. It disgusted me to know that entire markets relied on—and actively reinforced—women’s insecurities in order to turn a profit. I’d been a victim of these messages and would never forget it. And yet I remained confused by my own pleasure when partaking in beauty routines. Could I still be a “real” feminist if I shaved my legs and armpits? How about if I wore a push-up bra? Was I supremely naive to feel so empowered by a good hair day? And why did I feel so proud—as though I’d somehow “made it”—when I was interviewed for a book titled Sexy Feminism: A Girl’s Guide to Love, Success, and Style?

  I wondered if a love for fashion and feminism could exist in the same person, or whether these things were mutually exclusive. I’d also guiltily considered that I might actually be a more effective feminist teacher and activist if I didn’t look like a stereotypical “ugly feminist,” though I’d never gone so far as to wear my THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE T-shirts to class. Nevertheless, I felt certain that my students tended to take me, my politics, and the sociological research supporting gender equality more seriously when I looked like a “normal” woman. And one more thing: Why did feminists so easily give patriarchy all the credit for fashion’s existence? Who were we to dismiss women’s own creativity, autonomy, and pleasure when engaging in the world of style and self-expression?

  I had plenty of questions, but no concrete answers. Little did I know, but my no-mirrors experiment was about to propel me smack-dab into the midst of these debates.

  • • •

  BY THE BEGINNING OF JULY I’D MANAGED TO MAKE A SIZABLE dent in TheKnot.com’s “Bridal Beauty: Countdown to Gorgeous” list. Having started two months behind the recommended six-month schedule, I’d had my work cut out for me to catch up. I’d begun a yoga routine, enjoyed some relaxing time away from wedding planning, experimented with different virtual hairstyles, gotten “serious about skin care,” and even jumped ahead of schedule by getting my eyebrows waxed by a pro. My blog readers seemed to be having fun with my mirrorless challenge within a challenge, and so was I. But I’d been intentionally avoiding a few things on the list. Specifically, I had yet to report back on either of the following two items:

  #4: Start paying attention to your nutrition. Bad food habits and too much caffeine mixed with wedding planning stress can transform a bride-to-be into Bridezilla.

  #6: If you’d like to lose weight before your wedding, consult your doctor to develop a nutrition and fitness plan. Set a weight-loss goal and meet it before your dress fittings begin. Once fittings are underway, you’ll need to maintain your weight. (Or reconsider losing weight. Obviously your guy thinks you look great just the way you are.)

  I didn’t forget to do these two BBCTG tasks. In fact, I’d kind of been doing both of them since before my no-mirrors project even started. However, I’d been avoiding writing about them on my blog. At that point in time, my blog readers knew a lot about me, but they didn’t know two important—and seemingly contradictory, and therefore very complicated—things: (1) that I was a recovered anorexic, and (2) that I had (sort of) been on a (sort of) diet over the prior several months.

  I’ve never felt ashamed of having had an eating disorder. On the contrary, I’d usually been very open about it, especially to my students at UCLA and to the girls participating in my About-Face workshops. Being recovered from anorexia helped define who I was and it helped shape my values and commitments to helping other women.

  So why hadn’t I already mentioned my eating disorder in my blog? I hadn’t figured out how to. I never mentioned it in my first posts because I was new to blogging and didn’t know how much personal information I wanted to share. I also didn’t want my blog to be interpreted as an eating-disorder recovery memoir. But not bringing this up in the beginning made it harder to bring it up later. I didn’t want to sound like I was making some kind of coming-out-of-the-closet-style announcement, since anorexia was in my past and being a recovered anorexic was only one part of my current identity. But I also didn’t want to just sneak it into my writing, all casual-like, as though it didn’t matter at all. I didn’t want to trivialize my experiences, or those of other eating disorder sufferers. So I’d dealt with the situation by hinting around at it, by saying vague things like “I used to have disordered body image” or “I know from experience that dieting can be dangerous.”

  But when it came to explaining my thoughts on BBCTG items #4 and #6, I knew that it was time to talk about my experiences in plain language. As much as it made me cringe to do so, the post I wrote on July 1 was very coming-out-of-the-closet-esque. I wasn’t scared to admit that I was a recovered anorexic, but I was terrified to admit that I was dieting.

  Here is the gist of what I wrote:

  Dear friends,

  I want to address tasks #4 and #6 from the BBCTG list, but it’s been difficult. I haven’t told you the whole story about myself, which is what I owe you. Here it is.

  I’m a recovered anorexic, I’m a feminist, and I’m on a diet.

  Because of my experience with anorexia, I know how horrible things can get when one starts obsessing about “bad foods” and setting (and re-setting) weight-loss goals. My eating disorder made me miserable, and I have lasting health issues that could eventually shorten or lessen the quality of my life. This makes me angry and sad, though I try not to beat myself up about it because recovering from my eating disorder is part of what made me a feminist. While battling for my sanity and health, I became increasingly pissed off at the THIN=BEAUTIFUL*GOOD cultural environment we live in.

  Our culture’s valorization of thinness caused well-meaning friends to compliment me on my rapid weight loss, li
terally up until the weeks that I entered treatment. Even after entering treatment, some people didn’t think I was skinny enough to be “really” anorexic.

  In the end, I got better, got angrier, and ultimately rearranged my life so that I could stay healthy and continue fighting the good fight as my career.

  We feminists typically view dieting—and, particularly, the diet industry—as an expression of patriarchy that is bad for women. As a scholar who studies the harmful effects of our culture’s beauty standards, I agree with this. Diets (which FAIL 95 percent of the time) drain women’s energy, happiness, and wallets—often while risking our health. “RIOTS, NOT DIETS!” has become a well-known rallying cheer for many feminists.

  Dieting can also be understood as a type of “patriarchal bargain.” As described by sociologist Lisa Wade on the blog Sociological Images, “A patriarchal bargain is a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact.”

  By strategically losing weight, we accept the THIN=BEAUTIFUL*GOOD equation (which implies FAT=UGLY*BAD) and propel ourselves into positions of greater social advantage. On an individual level, having “thin privilege” feels empowering. (Recall Oprah Winfrey—arguably the MOST powerful woman in the world—has described “going to the gym when I really prefer wine and chips” as her greatest accomplishment!) Yet these THINpowered feelings depend upon a system of inequality in which power/privilege/respect are denied to others on the basis of these standards.

  Frustratingly, given the patriarchal bargain of weight loss, being radically anti-diet as a political stance doesn’t always fit comfortably as a personal stance. Because we live in a society that punishes women for being fat, even the most dedicated feminists, like Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf, report struggles with body image. The threat of becoming a martyr for this cause (i.e., by voluntarily giving up “thin-privilege,” if we’ve got it) can be terrifying. As Esther Rothblum so plaintively stated in the title of her chapter of the (highly recommended) book Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders, ”I’ll Die for the Revolution but Don’t Ask Me Not to Diet.” I know the feeling.

  Add to this the personal fact that I’ve gained an (subjectively) uncomfortable amount of weight in the past year thanks to some unhealthy emotional eating, and suddenly I’m facing a conundrum.

  What’s a good feminist to do?

  You already know that I’ve challenged myself to avoid mirrors, but what you don’t know is that I’m also using the food tracking website from a well-known weight-loss program to monitor my food and exercise. (The “good feminist” inside of me is cringing as I write this, but so far the program has helped me avoid both restricting and binging. When it comes to patriarchal bargaining, do the ends justify the means?) As an advocate of the Health at Every Size movement (which stresses the importance of healthful behaviors but rejects the idea that there is a universal “healthy weight”), I’m trying to judge my success based on my behaviors instead of my weight. My goal has been to consciously reengage in healthful eating habits and joyful activity, and then accept my body size and shape wherever it settles. As much as I’m still tempted to “get skinny,” I know I can live with this, and (more importantly) I know my body can live through it.

  Clicking “post” after writing all of this was cathartic. I felt proud of myself for telling the whole story, but still nervous that my readers—particularly my feminist readers—might think less of me. I reminded myself that, even if following a diet program made me a bad feminist, I was right to prioritize my mental health; “sanity comes first,” even before feminism.

  • • •

  SHORTLY AFTER SHARING MY ENTIRE BACKGROUND WITH MY blog readers, I finally hit the one-hundred-days mark of my project. Even though I wasn’t quite a third of the way through the full year I’d committed to (and thus didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself), it seemed like an auspicious time to give myself a progress report on my growing independence from mirrors. Despite facing doubts at times, with a hundred days of work behind me, I felt certain that I’d be able to make it through to the entire year. I was no longer dependent on mirrors for my daily life, which felt phenomenal. That said, it had been incredibly difficult in a practical sense, and sometimes I still had slipups. In other words, I wasn’t yet 100 percent mirror-free. In truth, there had been only a handful of days over the prior three months when I hadn’t seen myself at all, and most of those were days when I hadn’t left the house. With mirrors and reflective surfaces everywhere, even the most stringent preventative measures couldn’t prevent accidental glimpses (damn those ATM security cameras!). Those peripheral peeks were mostly benign, but every so often, “seeing myself” had led to “looking at myself,” which was totally against the rules. This didn’t happen more than once every week or so, which wasn’t too bad, but I wanted to do better.

  Even though I’d tried to find ways to compensate for the creativity that had previously gone toward my daily makeup and hairstyling routines and my outfit choices, I was still feeling a lot of temptation when getting ready in front of my curtained bathroom mirror. I’d look longingly at my (exceedingly excessive) collection of abandoned beauty products and would feel incredibly tempted to just push aside the curtain and play. The good news was that this new temptation seemed motivated by body-positive creativity rather than paranoid insecurity. This represented a form of progress indeed, but I still had work to do. To start, I decided to box up all of my fancy makeup and hairstyling products and put them away until the end of the project. A key lesson from my readings on willpower: Why battle temptation when I could avoid it?

  Had my body image improved since giving up mirrors? It had, subtly. This was motivating. I never expected to reverse a fifteen-plus-year issue in only a few months. That would be ridiculously simple, and—as is true for most women—my body image remained ridiculously complex. Yet I was seeing small changes, all in a positive direction, and they gave me hope. I also believe that finally doing something about my body image (rather than just thinking about it) was one of the most empowering things I’d ever done. I was proud of myself for what I was accomplishing, and that was starting to matter more to me than what I looked like.

  Despite all of this pride and progress, I was still haunted by one nagging task on TheKnot.com’s BBCTG list. According to TheKnot.com, the last thing I was supposed to do before walking down the aisle to marry Michael was to “take a few moments to reflect on the meaning of the day before giving yourself one last once-over in the mirror.”

  The “last once-over in the mirror” was definitely not permitted in my rules, but it’s something I felt scared that I’d regret not doing. I knew that I’d probably be desperately curious to know what I looked like on my wedding day. This, alone, I could handle. After all, I’ve felt desperately curious about my looks on other days, managed to resist, and been okay. But a lot of people had told me that my wedding day would be different. So many trusted, sane, wise, and not-ridiculously-vain women in my life, including my own mother, had told me that I needed to spend a few moments alone to see myself in the mirror on the day that I got married. I’d been told that this moment wouldn’t be about my looks, but about quietly recognizing myself for just one calm minute during a whirlwind day of momentous transition. This minute alone in front of a mirror would mark an important life moment for my own memory, and that didn’t sound so horribly bad or wrong. Would I be able to create this important moment for myself on my own terms? I didn’t know.

  Or maybe this was just one more overly romantic bridal must-do myth, and by looking at myself on my wedding day I’d only be buying into the myth at the cost of my beloved project’s integrity. I was at a complete loss about what to do. I was glad to have another three months to mull it over.

  • • •

  A
FEW DAYS AFTER DAY 100, MICHAEL AND I FLEW TO ST. Louis to visit my parents for the great “parents meeting parents” weekend. Michael’s parents, Sherry and Doug, were flying in from Louisville, Kentucky, along with Michael’s sister, Mandy, and her boyfriend, Jon. I was sad that Hanna and Peter couldn’t make it. I was excited for this weekend, almost certain that it would go well. Michael’s mom had already met my family about a year earlier, when both were in San Francisco at the same time. Sherry and my mom are both known for their strong personalities and passionate politics, but they’d gotten along great (a huge relief!). Michael’s dad and sister hadn’t yet met my parents, but we weren’t too worried about any clashing personalities on that front.

  Both my dad and Michael’s are successful, smart, sweet, and mostly laid-back guys. Although they’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, neither is known for aggressive debating. If anything, they’re both conflict-averse peacekeepers. My dad and I have always been close, and I’d bonded with Doug over our shared love for books and thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. Having both dads around for the weekend promised to tone down any potential drama.

  Michael’s sister, Mandy, has a lot of exuberance and energy, but thankfully is no drama queen. Born exactly two years after Michael, to the day, the two of them act more like twins than regular siblings. They share a bond that I sometimes find intimidating. Michael had always described Mandy as his best friend; she would be his “Best MANdy” at our wedding.

  Michael’s sister is tall and thin, with thick curly blond hair and bright blue eyes. She managed to drink like a fish, swear like a sailor, tell completely inappropriate jokes (frequent topics: dead babies and bodily functions), and enthusiastically narrate epically gross stories from her veterinary school case assignments, yet still turn the head of pretty much any heterosexual man on the planet. I loved hanging out with Mandy, but if Michael was around, I couldn’t help noticing that he tended to stop acting like my fiancé and instead acted like Mandy’s twin. The two of them went together like two peas in a pod, and I was, well, I don’t know, some other food.