Meredith

One of the most interesting threads on last year's forum linked to various size-positive pieces that were published in a variety of student-oriented publications.

As it is always encouraging to see students taking up the mantra of size celebration, I thought I'd commence a new thread on a similar theme.

The Yale Daily News published a section this weekend titled "The Body of the Issue," in which a number of students penned pieces relating to body image.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2...nd-doubletruck/

Some were predictable leftist screeds, but others were quite heartfelt. I was particularly taken with this confessional:


Consider the implications of the writer's comments. Prior to going to college, she had a positive body image. Her family and friends surrounded her in a pro-curvy environment.

Then, upon entering the new milieu of university, her self-image started to become warped by the anti-plus, curve-o-phobic, characteristically "modern" way of thinking of her new peers.

It has often been said that the modern university has become little more than an activist factory, a place where, far from cultivating a variety of opinions, students are indoctrinated with the politically fashionable beliefs of today's ideologue professors. The above writer's comments indicate how such thinking also seeps into students' minds through their contact with peers. It happens with body image, as it surely happens with beliefs of all kinds.

As a wonderful counter to the previous paragraph, consider the following item from the same piece:


This writer seems to be experiencing the same pressure that the previous author, "Anonymous," endured. However, in the case of the latter contributor, the vibrancy of her traditional culture is giving her a psychological foundation of defense, a way of traditional thinking that counters the modern, rootless ideology that afflicts her at Yale.

Two lessons can be drawn from this.

1. In order not to be poisoned by the tradition-hating, alien thinking that pervades the modern university, students need to have a solid grounding in an alternative belief system/value system/aesthetic vision, so that their innate ideals are not overwritten by the aggressive ideologies with which they will come into contact. This applies to body image in particular, and to values in general, aesthetic and otherwise.

2. Students from other cultures can draw on their own ethnic heritage to satisfy the above requirement. It is so necessary, therefore, for students of Northern European descent to also reconnect with their own cultural traditions, their own European heritage, so that they realize that their backgrounds also cherish values (aesthetic and otherwise) that run counter to modernist programming. Students from some cultures can hold on to "Latina curves" as a preferable alternative to modernist androgyny, but students from Germanic backgrounds can venerate "Rubens curves" in just the same way.

Rootless modernism is the real enemy, as well as the ideologies of guilt that have burgeoned with it. Cultural traditions and ethnic heritage are the answer, and students should embrace such timeless values as a bulwark against any alien indoctrination that they face in higher learning.