When women stop hating their bodies…
How would you finish that sentence? The vision that stretches forth at the end of that sentence is one of the things that wakes me up in the morning. I can’t quite see all the details but I just know it will be an epic shift. The chained-up potential we’d collectively unlock would be enormous. We’d do BIG THINGS.
Thinking about it reminds me of a Women’s Studies course I took at Cornell one year with my dear friend Joanne. Our professor, Sandra Bem, was asserting that we’d never really know what the world would be like with true gender equality until we experienced it – until fully half of our doctors were women, half of our Senators, half of our professors, half of our CEOs, half of our airplane pilots and so on. Her lesson was a powerful one for an auditorium of 20 year old women, and it gives me pause even today. The notion of true gender equality is one of those things with an impact so far-reaching that it will be difficult to fully grasp until it actually occurs.
Yet while we can’t just flip a switch and make it so, we can do our part to move the world a bit closer to the vision – by taking a job in a field dominated by men, by educating and inspiring our young girls, by cheering one another on instead of competing viciously for some tiny slice of the pie. No, we can’t fully imagine the end state, perhaps, but we can see the path. And we can walk our piece of it.
So too with body hatred. I’m ready for the day when women stop hating their bodies and step into their potential. The question is, are you?