Parents for the most part believe sincerely that they make decisions that are in their children’s best interests, and not their own. And when you look at the horrifying things that parents have done to children “for their own good” - meant, sincerely, for their own good, you don’t really need any further evidence that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Sorry, Emily, but I must dispute that. My observations are that parents tend to take their childrens’ best interests highest priority when making decisions about them, not their own. I’d have to see some evidence to the contrary.

I don’t think that anyone is trying to say that most of the time the parents are not trying to instill in their daughter the values that they think are correct and in their child’s best interests. The issue is that whatever anyone else says, a young person must learn to make their own decisions and decide what is really right for them, and while that decision can, probably should and often does weight a parents’ opinion more heavily than a horny 16 year old’s opinion…the fact remains that at the end of the day it is healthier for it to be HER decision.

Many parents, when they get involved in monitoring their daughter’s sexual behavior, are doing this not because they are thinking about what is best for the daughter, but because they fear the consequences for themselves of a daughter’s sexual behavior. That is, they fear the gossip directed at them (the concern that they will be seen as bad parents if their daughter is sexually active), the consequences to themselves if she gets pregnant, and so on.

Daughters can easily detect if and when parental concerns are coming from these places, and thus view the advice/monitoring with scorn and a sense of having been abandoned.

I don’t know what your particular situation is, but in the general case of considering WLS, there was a news series on one of the network broadcast TV stations about how WLS was not the panacea that many would think it to be. Apparently there are many cases of complications from it that required it to be reversed, or that introduced medical complications.

Under what circumstances does it EVER help to hate your body? Answer: never.

I dunno. In “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Wormtail cuts off his own arm, but his master Voldermort gives him a magical silvery new one. I think Wormtail’s gonna grow to hate this part of his body before long, and rightly so. See, I’m guessing that Voldermorts gonna —

Or am I on the wrong thread again?

looking at myself and my body through the anti-fat matrix I’ve been taught by society. Is it even possible to clear all that dross away, and if I could what will be left behind?

I managed to clear all that dross away. It was a slow process, and took me about three years to get rid of almost all of it.

If you’re wondering what is left when you clear it away, well there’s an awful lot of interesting differences. The major thing for me was being happy with my body, and that is SUCH a huge positive thing! To look in the mirror and smile, rather than grimace (or avoid mirrors); to look at a beautiful tummy which is all soft and squishy and beautifully strokable and huggable and with lots of play value; to appreciate how strong and powerful my legs are that they carry me about the place; this is so fabulous to have this liking and interest about my body, rather than a loathing.

It also changes how the rest of the world is viewed, too. Fat people are no longer objects of loathing or pity, but people for whom their body shape is irrelevant, or sometimes you are curious about their bodies. Fat people aren’t depicted in the media, so I might sometimes think things like “Hey, her body shape is a little like mine! She’s got a spare tyre shape too! That top looks good on her, I wonder if that style would flatter me too?….”

There’s also an increasing awareness of just how it seems like almost everyone else is caught up in the weightloss religion. Calorie counts get slipped into everyday conversation, along with various other attachments of moral judgements to food and exercise behaviours, and it becomes more and more mind boggling how pervasive this brainwashing is, and how very very much more it means to everyone than simply trying to look after their health.

So other people’s pro-weightloss behaviours are a downside, but the liking your own body is a HUGE plus side, and why everyone isn’t taught to like their own body is a mystery to me. Under what circumstances does it EVER help to hate your body? Answer: never.

Parents ask me all the time at work if such and such book is thematicaly appropriate for their child’s age. They tend to stop asking this with regard to boys about the time they hit middle school - and when they do ask their concerns center around violence - but middle school and high school is when parents seem most worried about what girls are reading, and it’s almost always sex they are worried about.

Parents also complain all the time that the teen section is mostly for girls. It doesn’t seem to occur to most of them that this is partly because adults tend to feel more confortable with teen boys reading “adult” books than they do with teen girls reading “adult” books.

I can understand parents being worried about their kids getting involved in the opposite sex before they are ready, but we tend to be concerned about girls to the point that we deny them their sexuality. Society already tends to act as if female sexuality is synonymous with looking sexy; by not making it clear to girls the difference between the two, and by actively working to supress their sexual urges rather than simply caution them about how they act on them, we put girls in a situation that is more complicated and dangerous than simply parental expectations versus peer pressure.

If girls are taught that their sexuality revolves around pleasing others, rather than pleasing themselves, and if they are taught to abstain from sex simply because “good girls don’t (except with their husband)” rather than being taught to honestly weigh the gains and risks involved, then we often end up teaching them that their sexuality, that their body, is not their own to make decisions about. This places them in increasingly more dangerous situations as they grow older and they look to their peers more and more often for approval.

I use the term “false consciousness” used to refer to a person being socialized/browbeaten/brainwashed into believing or espousing or valuing things that are contrary to her “authentic” self. Admittedly I use the term sparingly, because I’m skeptical of most efforts to distinguish between the effects of nature and nurture.

But when someone’s predisposition conflicts with socialization, the role of predisposition becomes apparent. For example, homosexuals emerge even from homophobic societies, so it would be difficult to conclude that homosexuality was a product of socialization (although some people will try). Sexual attraction appears to be “authentic,” arising at least to some extent beyond the reach of socialization.

I don’t understand atheistic sensibilities to be akin to sexual attraction. I hear Amp trying to overcome a learned bias against fat. But I don’t understand Amp to be trying to get in touch with his repressed, authentic predisposition to affirmatively admire fat; at most, I hear Amp seeking to free an authentic predisposition toward compassion and generosity of spirit, and to direct that disposition toward himself.

I would expect a liberated lesbian to realize that her attraction to men is a kind of self-deception. I don’t expect a liberated Amp to come to realize that the beauty he saw in slender people was self-deception. I merely expect him come to recognize the beauty of fat people, too.

Saying no because society says you should is not really a no; it doesn’t reflect an acceptance of parents or cultural values you refer to RonF. It reflects a desire to please others- and girls are pushed from the time they are born to try to please others. (Well I think we all are, but the pressure on girls is more destructive because girls are pushed to put the desire to please other above themselves. In many cases, a girl’s (and ultimately a woman’s) desire to please others becomes integrally entwined with her self-esteem.)

It is a miserable experience to be in a situation where you are pulled between two extremes- yes and no- and you have no sense of what is really right for you. If young women are not given the opportunity to reach those decisions on their own- validating their own agency- then ultimately they will make bad decisions which are emotionally destructive and potentially life-destructive.

Give a young woman the opportunity to understand the situation, the consequences and let her reach the choice on her own…8 times out of 10 I bet she will make a responsible decision.

And, by the way, I think this is just as true about young men. Young men are socialized to believe that they should be seeking sex at every turn. Young men are sent the message that sex=manhood, and that manhood is the pinnacle of their existence. They are socialized into problematic roles as well. They are socialized not to spend time in self reflection, and so I would say that young men also could do to learn not to put young women into situations where a girl is force to choose between yes and no.

On the other hand, if a child is raised to believe that their own desire counts for something, then even if every other reason in the world is stripped away, their answer will hold.

I would NEVER have slept with my first boyfriend if I had believed I had a right to say “No” and make it stick just because I didn’t want to.

A lot of the private mental work I do is an attempted aesthetic retraining; trying to judge myself in a manner that’s authentic to myself, rather than looking at myself and my body through the matrix I’ve been taught by society.”

And now it applies to just about everyone in society. I’m going to come at this from a slightly different angle.

Every person is influenced by how they think others see them. Comedies and tragedies have used the device of people acting on misconceptions of how they are perceived by others since the Greeks. Maybe this is what Robert Burns was talking about when he said, “O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.” By knowing what people see, instead of guessing, it might make it easier to tell what was part of that matrix and what’s not - to match your self-image to what’s really you and throw out external constructs.

It would take a strong will, though, to deal with that and come out the other side with a good self-image.

Interesting viewpoint. Thanks.

It seems to me that in many cases here, people view current cultural norms as having developed to provide a means by which one group in our society maintains dominance and control over another. Others view them as having developed as a solution by which we can all best live together and have a sound society. To my mind, there are examples of both in our culture, both past and present; at my wife’s grandmother’s funeral, I found myself considering the fact that when the woman was first old enough to vote, she couldn’t!

But that doesn’t mean that all cultural norms are like that. Nor does it mean that an attempt to control people in such a fashion as to keep them from behaving in a certain fashion is always wrong. Just because someone decides that something is “right for them” doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely right, or that it’s right for society as a whole. Fortunately, as long as we have the First Amendment, we can debate these things and reach a decision.

I was going to say, “a consensus”, but then the debate over abortion is a prime example of where a decision was made absent a consensus.

In this case, a decision by the young lady to not have sex with the young gentleman involved may well please her parents; but that doesn’t mean that’s the reason why she made the decision. It may be because she had decided that this was her best course of action; that the young man was being selfish and didn’t have proper concern for her own well-being; that she holds the precepts of her religion dear; or other reasons.

And if she did make her decision on the basis of what pleases her parents, maybe that’s best, too. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of parents who stay involved in their kids’ lives enough for the kids to consider their opinions have a pretty good idea what’s best for their children, and that their advice is worth following. I really don’t see what’s wrong with parental supervision and pressure having a strong influence on their minor childrens’ behavior.

Ron,

I think this—what it means when parents and culture prescribe “the right thing to do,” and whether people who go along with it without first finding their true “no” are just trying to “please” their parents and culture—is one of the fundamental points of dispute between the mindsets commenting on this blog. That doesn’t affect whether you’re right or not, but I did want to call it out for your attention.

Rebecca