Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Interpretation
The quote discusses how societal ideals can lead women to alter their self-image and ultimately dislike themselves.
Susan Griffin's quote highlights a societal issue where ordinary women feel pressured to modify their bodies according to unrealistic and pornographic standards. This can lead to a disconnection from their true selves and foster self-hatred as they construct a false identity based on external expectations rather than embracing their authentic selves.
In practice
In a speech about body positivity, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of self-acceptance.
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?...The thing man wanted to invent, but never did...If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.
Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
If you break your finger, that's on you, right? But if you get a chronic illness, if you get a serious illness or life-threatening illness, that's something I think we should all share the cost in because we all face the same unknowns and the same risks.
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