Verified by 
What does oppression look like to you?
I've been thinking and writing a lot lately about the oppression of women and girls on a global level. I've also been reading a thought-provoking book called Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It's an amazing and sometimes heart-breaking look at the struggles faced by women and girls around the globe - struggles that you and I are likely fortunate enough not to even have to think about in an average day.
But we should think about them. As women, we can lift each other up - the money we give, the letters we write to political leaders and the awareness we create are all part of creating a world where someday, the oppression and abuse of girls and women won't be considered just "the way things have always been."
Oppression can take many forms - including those we impose not only on each other, but on ourselves, too. My dictionary defines oppression as "something that oppresses, especially in being an unjust or excessive exercise of power." It also calls oppression "a sense of being weighed down in body or mind."
A sense of being weighed down...the feeling that something has power over us. I wonder how many women and girls can apply that definition to their own body image - to how they feel about their physical selves and the power or "weight" that they give to those feelings.
Please know that I'm not remotely calling being abused or oppressed by other people, your government or other outside forces the same as feeling bad about your body. They're not even close to being the same. But there is a common thread - the feeling that we are controlled by something that has power over us. And for too many women and girls, that's how living with self-loathing can feel. Whether it's the girl who won't raise her hand in class because she doesn't want her classmates to look and see how "ugly" she is or the woman who won't step forward and express her opinion because she's ashamed of how she looks, self-hatred can indeed feel oppressive.
We, as women, can fight oppression on the body image front, too. We can eliminate "fat talk" from our vocabulary and refuse the time-honored tradition of female bonding over body hatred because that's "the way things have always been." We can set a powerful example for our daughters by treating our bodies well - feeding them with healthy food, caring for them with healthy movement and speaking kindly about them to ourselves and others. And we can support each other by holding back our judgmental comments about other women and choosing instead to honor the women we see with kind words - or at least dignified silence.
The world is full of forces that want to keep women from becoming who they were meant to be by telling them they're not worthy and they're not enough as they are.
Let's not join those forces.
