What keeps women from gaining 50 % possession of positions like CEO, professor, writer, politician, general, engineer, and physicist? What keeps women from debunking stereotypes that limit women’s behavior to sex, domestic upkeep, and motherhood?

We get tired from fighting “fat”  and “ugly” all the time. We get distracted by our love-handles and our outdated purses. We get sold on hours of waxing and primping and throwing money down the shopping drain.

Our lack of progress in society seems to be directly related to the time and money we feel obligated to invest in our physical appearance. Women are not stupid, shallow, weak, or unmotivated. Rather, we are hyper-motivated, incredibly deep, and brilliantly creative. But at root, we have been socialized to misdirect our motivation towards the futile and empty pursuit of  ”standardized beauty”. (Which just happens to be embodied  by impossible and limiting standards like being born blonde, caucasian, well endowed,  curve-less, with no appetite. Not to mention that you have to be born into wealth in order to even barely scrape by on keeping up with designer fashion)

And the worst part is, despite all of our energy and focus on these goals…..most of us are incredibly unsatisfied with our image/bodies/beauty. For all of the gazillions of hours that we are investing in our beauty status, we are not making gains on our confidence.

Here are some frighteningly-enlightening and disturbing statistics I found on http://www.endfattalk.com/stats.html about how our current culture of beauty obsession is affecting our-selves as women.

• “81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 51% of 9 and 10 year old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet” (Mellin LM, Irwin CE & Scully S, 1992)
• “More than 2/3 of women ages 18-25 would rather be mean or stupid than be fat and over 50% would rather be hit by a truck” (Martin, 2007)
• “Fashion models are thinner than 98% of women.” (Smolak, 1996)
• “As many as 10 million women are suffering from anorexia or bulimia. That’s more than are suffering from breast cancer.” (National Eating Disorder Association)
• “63% of women in Brazil have considered having cosmetic surgery to enhance their appearance” (Dove, Beyond Stereotypes: Rebuilding the Foundation of Beauty Beliefs)
• “Half of all women in Japan have avoided going to the doctor because they feel badly about their looks and more than half have avoided going on a job interview for the same reason” (Dove, Beyond Stereotypes: Rebuilding the Foundation of Beauty Beliefs)
• “31% of Spanish girls dieting to lose weight are not overweight.” (López-Guimerà, Fauquet, Portell, Sánchez-Carracedo, & Raich, 2008)
• “After three years of Western television, the rate of purging in Fijian girls, went from 0%-11%. And now 74% of Fijian girls report feeling too big or too fat.” (Becker, Burwell, Herzog, Hamburg, & Gilman, 2002)

Rather than putting our energy towards dreams, and ambitions, we aspire to be thin. And what really ends up being thin is our confidence, our sense of self, and often, our portfolios.

What if we committed even half of the time we allot for body obsession and exchanged it to pursue progress and creativity. Shit would change. I tell you what.

So I say to this powerful, and demeaning distraction (the fear of the fat), to this charge to be impossibly empty, and boring, and trophy, I say to this insideous fear driven obession….I hope that we can all (men and women alike)….stand together in unison, exposing the destruction of this cycle and yell at the top of our lungs….

WHAT THE FAT IS GOING ON HERE?