Capstone update

First of all, I would like to thank those of you who have responded to my internet-wide call to give me your thoughts on "women and numbers". Your responses meant a lot to me and every single one was presented to my professor, who was impressed with the number of responses I received and the amount of thought that clearly went into them. Since some of you have asked, here's a little more information about my project. I'm in the process of putting my presentation together to give to my classmates tomorrow, and a refined version will be given to all my professors next Friday, so this seems like the perfect time to ramble out some thoughts about it. How it started Last quarter at my job, I was working on a store targeted mostly at young teenagers - think "Limited Too" generation. (I can't say much about it, because it's still very confidential information and this is the internet. Professionalism and whatnot.) I work in 3D animation, as some of you know, and I was seeking pictures of merchandise to use as reference images. I ended up at Limited Too's website, looking through their clothes, and realized that these clothes were definitely not the clothes of my youth - they were things my mother would have grounded me for. Padded push-up bras. "I left my brain in my locker" t-shirts. Low rise jeans. None of this is to say that I'm some sort of prude, or that I don't remember what it was like to be that age. Of course I do. But somehow it just got to me. I'm an adult woman, or close to it. The reason we wear padded push-up bras and low rise jeans is to make those parts of our body look more attractive, and whether we're doing it to feel good about ourselves or so that other people will notice it, these are not things that ten-year-olds need to be doing. If I had a daughter, I wouldn't keep her locked up in the closet until she was 18, but I would try to give her the sort of environment that allowed her to explore who she was as a person without feeling like she had to be pressured to be sexy before she was out of double digits. And she sure as hell wouldn't be wearing a t-shirt that said she left her brain in her locker. I started wondering where all of this comes from. I can remember a friend of mine in middle school who was the first one of us to buy anything at a junior's store instead of a kid's store. She had this little jumper that was from 5-7-9, and it was a size 5. For whatever reason, she thought that was important - it was a size 5 - and I still remember it over ten years later. I remember it because it might have been the first time I thought size was really important. When shopping for outfits to wear to an eighth grade dance, I remember my friend Claire not being able to find anything that would fit her because it was all too small. Me, I was trying on medium and large shirts. I wasn't a big girl when I was 13, but I wasn't tiny either. All of a sudden I was ashamed of my size, and it didn't have anything to do with Claire. She helped me look for shirts and cute things to wear and I don't remember her ever passing judgment on me for one second, but I was so unhappy to be looking at a totally different rack of clothes than she was. And to be honest, she was a tiny, tiny girl. She had a sort of metabolism that I will never see in my adult life that was totally natural for her. We were different body types - but I didn't really understand that at the time. I read heartbreaking stories that day at work. The killer was a teenage girl who said she wouldn't ever wear a size 6, because boys wouldn't like her anymore. A woman who bought a dress she hated just because she was so happy to fit into a size 2. These are not numbers that anyone sees. They. Do not. Matter. I got to thinking about one of my biggest pet peeves: beautiful, healthy girls that stuff themselves into pants two sizes too small because they're convinced they have to be that size, and therefore make themselves look much, much worse. But it's not entirely their fault - they really believe that a 10 is not pretty but a 6 is, and they're clinging to the days when they were a 6, and hey, they can fit into it, so what does it matter? The more I read, the more people I talked to, I began to realize that this isn't just about a dress size. It's about numbers. It's about people feeling "old" on their birthday as if a whole year just passed, as if they were more than a day younger yesterday. It's about tying your health to a number on a scale instead of how good you feel or what a doctor tells you. It's about uploading your picture to a website and basing your self-worth off of how people on the internet "rate" you. Where I am now Through a ridiculous amount of revising one or two sentences, I decided to focus on "women and numbers". I'm fascinated by the way women define themselves by numbers. I "am" a size 12, rather than "this dress is a size 12". We take on these numbers as a characteristic of ourselves. That's why it's so hard to let it go when we try on the 12 and all of a sudden it doesn't fit. We panic at the BMV and lie about our weight as if anyone other than bartenders (and perhaps the occasional police officer) will ever take one look at the license. We can tell dirty jokes at bars and tell embarrassing stories about ourselves, but people aren't allowed to ask how much money we make or how old we are. We're jealous of people who can fit into a size 2, even if we're a perfectly healthy, fit size 10. There are a couple things I want to make sure of in my approach. Number one, I want to make people laugh. Because honestly, the more I think about my own capstone topic, the more ridiculous I think it is. A woman actually spending money on a dress she hates just because the label says it's a size smaller than she's been able to wear in years? It's laughable! Who does that? People do it. She left the store that day feeling like a million bucks, like she finally did something right. She got to define herself as a size 2 that day, but nothing had changed since she woke up that morning. I want to make people laugh, and I want to make people feel comfortable. I don't mind talking about this, but I know a lot of people do. I'm creating a motion piece that will be somewhere between 3-5 minutes long. If there's a group of people sitting in a room, and they're all different sizes, ages, etc., I don't want someone to see it and think "I wonder what so-and-so is thinking?" just because they're bigger. I don't want that bigger person to think "Oh my god, I wonder if everyone is looking at me?" Priority number two is all about being comfortable with who you are and doing things for the right reasons. That's the whole point. I think we've lost focus of what's really important. I'm all for being healthy - I've been to the gym four days in a row this week, I drink my 8+ glasses of water every day. But I'm not going to the gym to fit into a different size dress. I couldn't care less what it says. I'm going because my knees hurt, because I hate being out of breath after three flights of stairs, because I know I'm unhealthy and I'm sick of having no energy. There is no fantasy in my mind that I'll ever be a size 2, because I just don't have the body type for it. But I can be healthy. I can be pretty, and confident, and I can feel good about myself. My job is a lot of fun and I'm proud of how I do it, no matter how much money I make. I can talk about all this for hours, of course, but I'm starting to lose focus here. Once again, thanks to everyone who gave me such great information. If you want more information, stay tuned here, or you can check me out for periodic updates on twitter. (You'll also have to sift through a lot of babble about my job, the gym, and food.)