Prom Week
I hadn’t seen her eat solid food for a week.
My friend, Sandra, sat with me during first lunch every A-day of my junior year. As I returned from the lunch line with my food, I watched Sandra pull her juice of the day — Carrot, 135 calories, for glowing skin; Celery, 50 calories, for a flat tummy; Citrus Pineapple, 105 calories, for immunity. On this day it was celery juice. Chatter hounded the lunch room while I, previously in deep conversation with the four other girls we sat with, watched Sandra sip her venomously green concoction with a reticence that worried me. “Do you want some?”, I’d ask every time, my eyes signaling for her to have some of my french fries. I was met with the same answer every time: “No, thank you” — paired with a subtle reminder that it’s Prom Week.
It wasn’t just Sandra, though. By seventh period, I had listened to a plethora of girls tell me all about their rapid weight-loss schemes — from keto to sugar-free diets and fasting. It was after learning this I realized that the Pre-Prom hysteria spread wider than my own lunch table.
Back in the lunchroom, I started to pick up on the growing flock of girls that had migrated to the salad bar. Caesar and Mediterranean bowls — with way less dressing and olive oil and way more lettuce — flooded the scene. I found that half of the female student population was picking at their dry green leaves. I felt a certain inferiority grow inside of me. Do I not have the discipline and self control for a salad? Do I need to eat this bag of chips when Prom is a week away? Soon enough, the salad bar stopped being a salad bar. It became a status symbol, a way to display one’s self-control and determination to others.
But to me, roaming around the salad in an attempt to reach express model-like meant more than adhering to diet culture. It had racial implications I couldn’t ignore. Growing up with West African genes, I have always been hyper aware of my naturally wider hips— traits passed on from my Guinean grandmother, and her own mother and soforth. In my home country, wide hips and fleshy bodies were the feminine ideal — they signaled fertility, femininity, and even health. But within the confines of my American high school, however, narrow hips and thin legs were the blueprint, the ideal. I grew deeply insecure with the idea that I would likely never achieve the Western European thinness that I coveted so much. It was mortifying to be seen eating actual food during lunch. The sole action of eating was lamentable. So I tried the salad bar, I drank the juices, and I sat empty handed at lunch. Nothing worked; all that it made me was tired and irritated and remarkably unhappy. Being constantly at odds with my own body was never a reality I thought I’d reach. That was “stupid stuff from movies”, I used to think. Yet somehow it happened to me. Until I realized my bone structure cannot be altered by a diet — a fact I was forced to accept.
Of course, there are multiple factors that explain why we as women feel a duty to look a certain way, or weigh a certain amount. Chiefly, men! The desires and demands of men have been prioritized since the dawn of time. Centuries of systematic oppression have made girls and women feel obliged to cater to such needs. From media representations that favor white and thin to the beauty industry that makes billions of dollars off of over women’s insecurities, our society has conditioned entire generations of girls to change, constantly warping themselves into popularized stereotypes of the female ideal. When it comes to boys, the pressure is lesser. The most any man at my school had to do for Prom Week was get a haircut and call it a day! But I can’t give them 100% of the blame, because as girls we have been taught to normalize male mediocrity while increasing pressures on our own gender. Girl-on-girl competition is another major issue, as one can assume in a private high school. Many of us fear the remarks from our own peers rather than from the boys. Most of the boys rarely notice what a girl eats for lunch, but we do. We see when a girl switches from a sandwich to a salad, or when she eats nothing at all.
All told, Prom Week will come again, as it does every year. With that, the question arises, can we be freed from our own bonds? The way I see it, it seems that we’ve become addicted to it. Addicted to the pressure, to the judgement, to the diet.
