Meet the Author: Finding My Way

• Women, regardless of age, banished because their husbands had died.
• Young girls having acid thrown in their faces for daring to want to be educated.
• Young women burning themselves to escape abusive marriages in hopes of dying and but upon survival, often being sent back to the same abusive marriage.
• Women and young girls committing suicide because they don’t fit the norm.
• Young girls (sometimes not yet teenagers) coerced into being raped repeatedly to be initiated into a gang. 
• Abercrombie CEO telling consumers he would not carry plus sizes because he only wanted to service “pretty people”.
•  A military rape victim being persecuted and drilled about her clothing, her actions, whether or not she had an orgasm, if so how many times, whether or not he had an orgasm, if so how many times, did she tell him to stop.

These are the all-encompassing sins we forgive every day.

The above events took place:

• In the last five years
• Half in America

In high school, I took a writing class forcing us to look at our chosen fields- mine was journalism. I learned that more often than not, women in journalism cannot go past a certain point in their career and rarely get paid the same as a man.

As a freshman in college, I took another writing course studying media related problems. I chose the effects of advertising on women. I found that, considering only, women seen in t.v. ads or in the more popular magazines there didn’t appear to be much variety in body type. As I grew older, I learned about other injustices world-wide.

I have frequently wandered why so few people are willing to help women that need some kind of an escape. I’m not referring to the ones who are perfectly happy in their lives. I’m referring to the women who burn themselves hoping to die because that’s salvation. The girls whose faces are permanently disfigured because they had the courage to go to school. The women who make less because they are women. The women who were told they weren’t pretty enough to shop at a store because they were too fat. The hopeful gang members who want to be a part of a selected group so badly they give their consent to be, for all intent and purpose, raped repeatedly for hours. The girls, teens and women committing suicide via starvation or more obvious means because they look in the mirror and get physically sick.  

These are the women who need help. Need an escape. Need someone to be a voice.

I long ago decided I did not care for inaction. Even as a young girl (as young as three and four), I always had a sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice (though I didn’t know the words for it at the time) and as I grew up, I began changing the wrong-doings around me that were doable for a young woman. Today, my sense of right and wrong is completely inescapable- it is me.

Upon deciding to switch my major to psychology, I started to learn why the earlier discussed women are ignored: dehumanization and a lack of either knowledge or capability. In other words: we have become a society that sees the plight of others as someone else’s problems or that the victim deserved what they got (dehumanization); those that are capable of doing something don’t necessarily know what the problems are and then you have people who want to help but either don’t know how or are otherwise incapable. Therefore, these women just become a part of life. They are just another face.

About six months ago, I found the cause that struck closest to my history and my life (previously having never even assumed there was a way to help these women). Given my history with anorexia, I opted to focus on the young women and women who develop eating disorders. Then it occurred to me one of the problems (which I had studied so many times and somehow overlooked) was the media. And I found my way to affect change: advocating for regulation on media perpetration of women. Each woman (each person) deserves the right to have the happy, safe and equal life they want. Not the life forced on them.

Thankfully, others see the same problems and are doing something about them. Women like Sandra Kim (founder of “Everyday Feminism”), Tess Munster (founder of “Eff your Body Standards”) and Jean Kilbourne (one of the top researchers and writers for media and body image) are a selected few who have created a path for the rest of us to follow in a modern society. Hopefully one day I will be included among these great women.

Some facts about me:

• I am a recovering anorexic which makes me always interested in everything food related.
• I have often abused food myself (which is part of my argument about obesity in kids). I would stuff my face when I was stressed and starve myself when that didn't help. When my life seemed completely out of control, I turned to either binge eating or starvation.
• Even as a child, I preferred healthy foods. 
• My family went through a few tough years where ramen noodles and hot dogs were a staple. If it wasn't that it was fried potatoes and hot dogs. Needless to say, the idea of getting healthy food into every single home is close to my heart.