Diana Martinez is a senior from Mount Holyoke College and a woman’s history major and Spanish minor.  Her journey as an activist began when she joined her college’s feminist a capella group called The Nice Shoes, who sing empowering songs to promote human rights.  With the Shoes, her Mount Holyoke sisters, and strong influences from her sister and mother, she has learned how to effectively dialogue and raise awareness about the issues most important to her.  Diana says, “The SPARK Summit champions my beliefs about the perceptions of women, and I cannot think of a more effective, or FUN way to join the struggle for equality!”

The New Year: a time for setting goals, for turning over a new leaf and improving upon your life and well-being.  It’s interesting, however, that for women the most commonly referenced obstacle to overcome is body weight.  New Year’s resolutions are supposed to make you feel confident and hopeful about the coming year.  Why start it with a pessimistic image of yourself?  Resolutions are made so that one can improve oneself, but is losing weight really an improvement? 

 From my perspective, this kind of resolution can be more detrimental than helpful because it disguises a negative body obsession as a positive habit.  Of course, it is wise to have the goal of leading a healthy lifestyle by eating heartily and exercising regularly, but don’t we as strong, capable women have more fun, more challenging goals than just changing the way our bodies look?  Is there nothing more that is important to us?

 This New Year I encourage you all to try a new, different resolution.  One that is not so cliché or overdone; one that is less expected of women by society.  Let us all resolve only to say positive things about our own bodies, especially in the presence of young girls and fellow women.  SPARK partner and PBG sister org (http://www.poweredbygirl.org), About-face has a whole list of positive things we can do to spread empowerment (http://www.about-face.org/mc/empower/), but this goal was my favorite.  We do nothing but increase an atmosphere of obsession with body weight and type when we repeat our discontent with our bodies.  This habit is harmful because girls and young women are conditioned to believe the same thing is true of their own appearances.  If nothing more, they start to accept as normative behavior being obsessed and unsatisfied with their looks, and then continue to breed such negative attitudes toward female bodies. 

It is surprising how one negative comment about yourself can translate into an insult to others.  How many of us have been in a situation in which a friend who is thinner than we are complains that she is not thin enough?  Whenever I hear someone grumble such a remark, it makes me wonder what she thinks of my body, and whether it fits the standards of beauty she holds so strictly for herself. 

Another resolution to consider: keep negative comments about other women’s bodies to yourself.  Even if the criticized woman is not present, others are, and they may find such hurtful words justified, and may pass on the bad deed by continuing to say stereotypical things about other women.  If we truly want to stop the objectification of women, we need to treat others as if they are worth more than their body parts.  This includes women who do fit the mold of society’s ideals of beauty.   Many women in real life are criticized or complimented for being thin or having big breasts, as if they want to be objectified by men and other women. 

Patriarchy not only uses low self-esteem to keep women at the bottom of the power hierarchy, but also to raise jealousy and animosity between women in order to keep us apart.  Do not let the media’s limited ideals of beauty breed negativity towards others–this is exactly the point of patriarchy: to make women feel bad about themselves and one another and compete for power instead of collaborate.

The New Year is a time to celebrate life and meaningful relationships.  It is a time to truly reflect and to start new and exciting goals.  So let’s do something different as women, and instead of motivating ourselves by breeding negativity, let’s look upon others and ourselves as already accomplished.