Comment is Free?
by sequinnedmannequin
A few days ago the Guardian asked for readers to write a short piece about their views on body image for the People’s Panel, in light of the recent protest against dieting. Having much to say about any topic, but especially as I’ve been talking quite a lot here about issues relating to body image, I thought I’d give it a bash and bookmarked the page. Of course I promptly forgot all about it and only remembered at 11.30 on Monday night (deadline Tuesday) but nonetheless decided to cobble something together. By the time I’d finished, 100 words over the upper limit of 300 (it’s very hard to say anything of actual substance in 300 words when dealing with a complex topic), it was very much past my bed time and I wondered why I’d even bothered.
So it was a nice surprise when I got an email back on Wednesday saying one sentence was unclear but otherwise they were interested in running my little bit of comment. I clarified the sentence and today was emailed the link to the article (as far as I’m aware it just goes online, so not quite ‘in print’). Having never written anything for publication by someone else it didn’t really occur to me that they might butcher it at will – although I had thought it was unlikely they would choose it in the first place due to my ‘colourful’ style. Of course newspapers edit things and it’s really just me being a bit thoughtless, forgetting that I have the latitude here to express myself any way I damn well choose and that therefore the only barrier to not saying what I mean to say is my own inability to express it. I’m sure that taking some of the more loaded terms and ‘frilly’ bits out is sensible in terms of both trimming the word count and making the piece a bit more neutral, but the problem that presents for me is that I think it changes the tone quite dramatically. Maybe I’m wrong, and I’ll give you a chance to compare for yourself in a minute, but whereas in my original I tried to keep a level of self-deprecating humour in there that was intended to both be entertaining and to mitigate the potentially arrogant attitude of what I was saying, the edited version just makes me sound like an up-myself dick. It felt risky to enter the piece in the first place, being as I know that I am a) very sensitive to being misunderstood and b) fundamentally unable to tolerate criticism, so it’s even more scary knowing that what eventually appeared doesn’t quite accurately reflect my point of view.
Such is the way these things are, though, and it’s helpful in its own way as several people have suggested journalism as a career but I’m not sure I could really feel comfortable with knowing that someone was always going to edit and change what I’d written in a manner that potentially alters the angle of what I’m saying. Not that I was previously unaware that this is how journalism works, just this is my first experience of it – and it’s not even a piece I wrote for (as in on behalf of) the Guardian, it’s just a thing I wrote as an experience/opinion piece that the Guardian used in their feature. I expect I’m blowing it out of proportion, I guess I just feel strange that I can write something and it can have bits taken out, words substituted, and without my knowledge or consent it will be published under my name when it’s not really even what I wrote any more.
Knowing how ridiculously over-sensitive I am, I have to keep reminding myself not to read the comments. I know, I know, it’s Comment is Free and the whole point of the People’s Panel is to initiate debate, but I’m just not strong enough for it I’m afraid. That said, I would be interested in knowing what other people think about the differences, if there are any, between the original and the edited version (I mean differences in meaning and tone, obviously, rather than literal differences).
(As a side-note, I can completely understand the practical reasons why the edits were made and was aware as I wrote it that certain words in particular were perhaps controversial, so I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad to edit, or that there aren’t very good justifications for why it’s done, I’m just saying that it’s quite weird when it actually happens. And that in this case I feel that those aspects of the piece were integral to its perspective and therefore think it would have made more sense if they simply hadn’t used it… but then I’m probably too close to see either version clearly so perhaps it’s not so drastic really.)
So, here is the article that was published today on the Guardian website.
And, in the extended blog under here, you can find the original text:
I want to be one of those balanced, moderately pukeworthy women with a healthy attitude towards their healthy body. Sometimes, in a ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ type effort to diminish my neurotic tendencies, I even pretend to be such a human being. More often I squint at them with a mingling of envy and suspicion whilst scrutinising myself with all the myopic misanthropy of Sherlock Holmes à la Cumberbatch.
The most destructive aspect of my negativity is the way it makes me look at others. One week Hot Female of the Moment appears on the cover of Glossy magazine and I am seized with the fervent desire to sell my limbs in exchange for hers; the next she’s in the ‘SPOTTED!!!’ section for me to gawk over her photoshopped cellulite and feel… pleased? Vindicated? It’s too easy to get a quick-fix boost the way girls learn to from the second some little bitch at nursery waltzes in with shinier hair: build myself up by tearing her down. The jealous desire to rip another woman’s head off because I think she’s more attractive than me does a disservice to us both; I, evil she-witch, lose any (self-)respect I may have had, whilst her beauty – or my perception of it – becomes a millstone around her neck. I’ve been on both sides of the dagger here and neither are a walk in the park on a warm day with a sugar-free, 99.9% fat-free ice cream.
Happening to adhere to cultural beauty norms might seem like tremendous luck, but self-image is more complex than simply a matter of ‘hot or not’. Feeling alienated from other women is a barrier to friendship, and being perceived as a threat makes me want to hide in a cupboard with a kitten and never come out. It’s unsurprising that self-image is so unstable when it’s largely built on how I compare to others and how they respond to me. It’s easy to equate the ideal body with happiness, forgetting that every form has its own challenges and that self-confidence is its own ‘type,’ subject to the same critical gaze as any physical characteristic, and it’s hard to know how to repair the damage. If the government wants to act, though, a radical revision of advertising that capitalises on insecurity and the expansion of industries that have a vested interest in maintaining low self-esteem in its customers would be a start.
Well congratulations on getting on comment is free anyway, although you are probably best avoiding the comments since these are never particularly insightful whether it’s The Sun or The Guardian.
As you say, it’s a blander more homogenised piece which is a bit of a shame since who wants all comment pieces to be identikit? Can see why they removed the bit about the bitch with shiny hair and also amusing to see them get rid of the Cumberbatch bit, particularly when in the Guardian proper such shoe-ins would go down perfectly.
Got to agree that the edited piece makes you sound a bit more pretentious, i’m not sure it’s just the humour missing but also the cultural references and the self-doubt about your own feelings: “photoshopped cellulite and feel… pleased? Vindicated?”.
Thanks for the compare and contrast! I remember Giles Coren’s outburst (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/25/pressandpublishing.thetimes) and the importance of just one word to a piece so I think every writer has to put up with this to an extent.
Thanks for the input. It’s actually that rephrase of the bit you’ve quote that irked me most because it changes my point, which was about doubting not only my feelings but doubting what people are even supposed to feel when looking at those kinds of images. Part of me does feel a little gleeful seeing visual evidence of the fact that celebrities are in fact not perfect, but most of me is hugely confused by how this kind of morbid picking-over of other people’s flaws is apparently a whole industry. On the one hand we’re all human and trashy magazines exposing the more ‘real’ side of celebrity could be interpreted as a levelling technique to make us feel less inferior. But it’s not framed that way, so I can only conclude that somehow I’m supposed to look at celebrity imperfections and go ‘HA HA, aren’t so bloody flawless now, are you? Ha!’, which is just so depressingly unhelpful that I could weep.
I suppose the point is that, contrary to how the Guardian have made it sound, I DON’T feel pleased when I see these images – I feel ashamed. Ashamed that I do feel a bit of spiteful pleasure, a bit vindicated, and ashamed that this is how our culture operates, encouraging a destructive gaze that in one blink deifies and in another villifies; that we build people up one day only to tear them down the next. The doubt in itself is an essential part of this because feeling guilty for looking, feeling conflicted, is part of the odious nature of this kind of scopophilia. We are encouraged to look, to feel momentarily better about ourselves because the images of perfection we daily compare ourselves to aren’t so perfect after all, but we also know that this is a poor basis for feeling better and we feel mean because we have bought our transient ‘ha!’ feeling at the expense of someone else Therefore not only is our attention brought to our insecurity by the very fact that we felt a thrill of pleasure but we are aware that this thrill was predicated on our denigration of another person. It’s destructive not only for body image but for our very self and, as far as I can tell, is enormously counter-productive. The fact that no-one seems to question why on earth whole sections of magazines are devoted to this, or what they’re trying to achieve, just highlights how naturalised this way of thinking and looking is. (By ‘we’ and ‘our’ I obviously don’t mean everyone everyone but the ‘ideal’ viewer.)
I don’t think your message was changed drastically, but that may be because i know you so i understand what you are trying to say and how you would have said it…
I feel aggrieved any time somone changes the words I have (carefully) chosen, even if just in a work report, but fact that they published it means that they thought that there was a story worth telling so think you may have to glow a little in the limelight!!