Meg DeJong - MissRepresentation Response

For me, one of the most eye-opening aspects of MissRepresentation was the statistics they showed. Two of the statistics that really stuck with me were that 53% of 13 year old girls and 78% of 17 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies. Additionally, 65% of girls and women have an eating disorder and the number of girls and women with depression doubled between 2000 and 2010. I believe these startling statistics are indicative of the fact that we teach girls, from a very young age, to derive their sense of worth from their bodies. Thinking back on when I was younger, I wish I could say that I was immune to the distorted body images that other girls developed, but I wasn’t. I remember being in third grade and sitting outside during recess with two of my best friends. Instead of running around or playing on the jungle gym, the three of us were holding out our arms, comparing whose was the fattest. We were only eight and nine, but already we were obsessed with our weight. One of my friends was the clear winner of the skinniest arm constant. It wasn’t fair though, I remember thinking, because she had just gotten a cast off her arm, obviously it was going to be skinnier. I silently hoped that maybe I would need a cast, and that way my arm would get skinnier. 
The saddest part is that the way I was feeling wasn’t the exception, it was the norm. I remember the way girls obsessed about their bodies as elementary school came to an end and middle school began. It seemed that no one was happy with the way they looked. By the time I was in seventh grade, I was not only the tallest girl in my class, but the tallest person overall. I would always stoop over to make myself look shorter and resented the fact that no boys were taller than me. The only advantage to my frequent growth spurts, I felt, was that I had become very skinny. I was so skinny, in fact, that there was one girl who would always joke that I was anorexic or bulimic. I should have been offended or set her straight because I didn’t actually have an eating disorder. However, I did the opposite. Not only did I never set the girl straight, but I secretly loved and took pride in the fact that she thought I was so skinny. 
     My parents never raised me to think that way about myself or my body. They always told me to be myself and never put pressure on me to look or dress a certain way. Nevertheless, by the time I was in third grade, I was already unhappy with the way I looked. I think this shows what a powerful role the media can play in shaping the way that young girls think about themselves. I loved Disney princesses and playing with Barbies, and I’m sure I derived lessons about the way I should look from being exposed to those images. The motto of MissRepresentation is that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Until we start showing strong, powerful women in the media, women who are valued and judged for their ideas and not their bodies, how can we expect girls to learn to value themselves as people and not objects?