In both the comments on my original post and in her own forum post here, Ami Angelwings brought up another heartbreaking conclusion that can be drawn from the interest of girls in images that suggest their own deaths:
A dead girl's corpse is perfect. It's not going to get old, or get fat, or eat too much, or sleep with too many people, or the wrong people, or cheat, or be gossipy, or sinful, or talk back, or the million other things society demonizes about women and our passions, desires and appetites. We're just beautiful and nothing more, just like a woman should be. To be the perfect woman, you have to be dead.
She shares her experience as someone who has recovered from anorexia, but who used to struggle not only to reach a certain beauty ideal, but who rarely forgot that, once reached, that sense of perfection would only have to be maintained. Certainly that exact experience isn’t universal to all girls, but do you think it’s something that teenage girls in particular might be able to relate to?
Yay! I was quoted :3
I'll add the bit I added on in the forum too that she alludes to :3
To elaborate on what I said at the beginning, even tho I haven't been suicidal since transition, sometimes, during an esp bad ED day or week (this was esp true 2 years ago when I was running 4 hours every day and eating almost nothing), I'd think that it'd just be easier to leave a pretty corpse, because otherwise, it'll never end... my body will always require food, my body will always gain weight if I eat too much, or indulge in too much tasty food, or stop exercising, my metabolism will slow down as I age, the whole reality of an ALIVE BODY will never go away... and that means my exercising and restricting and denying myself any happiness when it comes to food will never end... it'll go on forever... (keep in mind this is my ED thoughts... I'm just articulating the mindset)... there's no end goal... there's no "finish line" where I can say "I did it! I kept up my exercise compulsion and not eating all this time and now it's over!"... a premature death would at least mean that I reached some sort of finish line having kept this up the whole time... that there'd be a point to it....
And that's btw, not me saying this is necessarily the reason, or the ONLY reason that there's a fascination in some mediums with dead girl's bodies, or why some girls are fascinated by planning their own death, or that depression and mental illness isn't a real thing or a big deal or nething like that.
As I said above (and as the author in the original post stated about her and her friends fantasies as teens), this is not necessarily the same as actual suicidal thoughts, or suicide, but about just "wishing" or fantasizing about one's death and controlling that death. If we're talking about what's so appealing about dying young and leaving a pretty corpse, I think for some women, the idea of an end "finish line" to diets, freaking out about aging, worrying about being fat, exercising, etc etc, is there... :\
I think for some women, the idea of an end "finish line" to diets, freaking out about aging, worrying about being fat, exercising, etc etc,
ReplyDeleteThis part of our culture (the part that forces women into an endless race to be thin, pretty, and young their whole lives) needs to go. It's such a horrible, messed up thing to do to people. Here, this is the only way you're okay or have any value as a person, never mind that it's something that you're going to lose (everyone gets old) or something that many people can never achieve (being thin and/or being pretty*). So fucked up.
*Which is not at all the same thing as being attractive to someone.
(And livejournal STILL won't verify me. ARGH!)