Are all women masochists?

I was listening to RAYE’s latest album - My 21st Century Blues (10/10 highly recommend) - when a lyric in the song titled Body Dysmorphia caught my attention; “I wanna cut pieces off, looking at the mirror, want to take a pair of scissors, sadly, dear, I wanna cut pieces off.”

My immediate reaction upon hearing this was one of shock. Not because I found the lyrics in and of themselves particularly shocking. I didn’t at all. What I found shocking was the familiarity of the sentence. The fact that I have used those exact words time and time again when discussing how I feel towards my body.

Given that the image of a young girl grabbing her legs shouting “I want to rip it all off”, or pulling at her skin saying “I want to slice my thighs up with a knife”, is giving the love child of Saw V and American Horror Story, I kind of assumed my willingness to theoretically inflict pain on myself was the result of having an eating disorder, and therefore having a slightly fucked up way of perceiving my body. But the more I think about it, the more I realise how mightily incorrect that assumption is.

Mental illness or not, so many women and girls share this dark and desperate urge to (literally) snip, chop and carve their bodies into the shapes they wished they were. It’s terrifyingly common for women to feel so unbearably uncomfortable in their own skin, that self-butchery is perceived as a desirable course of action, as opposed to the scene from a cult body horror classic that it is. Perhaps the reason it’s so easy for women and girls to access the desire to violently attack themselves, is the fact that we are brought up to believe that pain and womanhood go hand in hand…

The pain of childbirth, the pain of periods, the pain of miscarriage, the pain of sex (because all too many men don’t understand the female body), the mental and sometimes physical pain of contraception, the pain of being the designated emotional crutch, the pain of being sexually exploited and assaulted, the pain of violence from their male partners (in the year ending March 2020, women made up 82% of the victims of domestic abuse-related prosecutions) and in some ways the most oppressive pain we feel obligated to inflict upon ourselves for the benefit of others, that age-old saying: beauty is pain.

We’re actively encouraged to damage our insides in the name of weight loss (because duh, fat is the devil), whether that be through restrictive diets, detoxes, pills, or even injections. Plastic surgeons make a healthy living from penetrating women’s stomachs with glorified vacuum cleaners, drawing black dotted lines all over their bodies, chopping them up and putting them back together again like fleshy jigsaw puzzles. So, in fact, dodging the doctors and hacking away at our bodies ourselves is money-savvy, seeing as it’s only a mere hop, skip and jump away from the widely accepted methods of ‘appearance enhancement’. But there we go, beauty is pain ladies.

Women are often expected to wear high heels in their place of work, sentencing them to nerve damage in their feet and brutal blisters that cover their toes, because beauty is pain.

Body hair on women is obviously unappealing, so we pay someone to rip hardened wax off our fannies and bikini lines, leaving them hairless (if only for a few days), but scarlet red, raw and bruised. Beauty. Is. Pain.

In the Middle Ages women would attach leeches to their faces, so they would suck their blood and give them a paler complexion, which represented innocence and purity (because girls on the precipice of puberty are obviously sexy as fuck). Beauty is pain.

In the Victorian era, women wore (literally) bone crushing corsets, consistently breaking their ribs in their efforts to boast the smallest waist possible. Beauty is pain.

Up until the early 20th century, girls in China bound their feet, breaking multiple bones in the process, because small feet were attractive and increased their chances of finding a husband. The more a girl fell over as she walked, the fitter she was in the eyes of her suitor, because men like their wives tottering and hobbling three steps at a time. VULNERABLE WOMEN NEED STRONG MEN YES. BEAUTY. IS. PAAAAAAIN.

On the face of it, these centuries-long behaviours, rules and rituals, paired with the violent urges against our bodies, seem masochistic; that women have an innate desire to inflict pain on themselves. Why are these silly women so darn hard on themselves huh?!

Well, shoot me if you feel so inclined to do so, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s been made very hard for us to adopt a laissez-faire attitude towards our appearance, because the stakes have been raised so mightily high. It’s fucking survival. No way would RAYE have experienced the need to cut the flesh off of her legs with scissors had she not felt it near-essential, which is precisely what women are socialised to assume; that being sexually appealing in the eyes of men is essential by any means necessary - even if that comes at the expense of their bodies’ health. Any pain caused along the way is worth it for the all-important end result, because the pain of feeling unattractive (and therefore unworthy) feels far too great to bear.

Now, of course there are a multitude of factors that drive women to self-hatred and self-punishment, and I am by no means suggesting that the biggest struggle facing 21st century women is whether they have a flat stomach or not. However, given that the female body is home to so much pain and trauma - as a result of what has been done to it, or occurred within it - alongside the constant “your body isn’t good enough and that’s why you’re miserable” messaging women are drip-fed throughout their lives, it’s no wonder that they’re hyper-aware of how their bodies are perceived and valued.

Jesus our bodies have gone through the fucking ringer. They are sensitive and they are bruised and they have trust issues (@ me lol)…I mean if anything, our bodies are probably terrified of us psychos going around talking about how much we want to cut them up, sew them back together and take their food away. Must be a nightmare to live with us 24/7.

But I guess the bullies are always the bullied right? Taking their trauma out on those they feel they can control. So, given the amount of trauma most women have racked up in their lifetimes, it’s not all that surprising we feel the need to terrorise our bodies.

I’d love to end this on a more uplifting note. But I guess the long and short of it is, stop bullying women please, so that we can stop bullying our bodies. Danke shun.