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Gender: A Wider Lens

105 — From Rejecting the Body to Finding Female w/ Victoria Smith

Gender: A Wider Lens

Sasha Ayad and Stella O'Malley

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture

4.6 • 961 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Victoria Smith is a regular contributor to The Critic, writing on women’s issues, parenting, and mental health. Her work has also appeared in The New Statesman, The Independent, and UnHerd. Her book Hags looks at the demonisation of middle-aged women in politics and popular culture.

In this episode, Stella and Sasha chat with Victoria about the depths of body hatred and body loathing. Victoria shares her perceptions about experiences described in the context of gender dysphoria, seeming incredibly relatable to her experience of anorexia and disordered eating when she was younger. The conversation exposes the distress of the burden of acclimating to the maturing female form at a young age manifesting as dysphoric perceptions of reality — a coping mechanism for discomfort.

Another fascinating concept explored in the conversation is how with age, females continue to experience confusion and discomfort with their changing bodies and find themselves in a constant state of reconciling not just their own experiences in relation to their bodies, but society’s reactions to the changes in both their physical presentation as well as their attitudes, expressions, and contributions to society.

Victoria speaks charmingly about the sentiments behind her recently published book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women; and how society has always fostered a certain lack of respect for the wisdom and discernment women of a certain age contribute to culture and the symbolism behind it. There’s a sort of generational war between young women and older women that has always seemingly existed and yet the journey of experiencing womanhood has a way of bridging the gap between the two.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

So Stella, you know how oftentimes people recognize the overlap between eating disorders and gender dysphoria, you know?

0:07.0

And we tend to talk about it like, well, this kid has both an eating disorder and gender dysphoria. And today our guest is really

0:14.8

interesting because she struggled with really profound eating disorder when she was a

0:18.5

kid and she thinks they're actually not quite different at all. She has been thinking about this and writing about this and received some

0:26.5

pushback for her willingness to say you know what I think that some

0:31.0

gender dysphoria is exactly the same thing as my very intense

0:34.6

anorexia it's a body hatred it's trying to make myself smaller cutting off

0:39.2

parts of my body hyper fixation so that's what we talk about today do you want to tell us a little bit more

0:44.9

about our guests yeah yeah glass switch Victoria Smith is really thoughtful I met her I was

0:51.6

on a panel with her at the Women's Place kind of event in London there a few weeks ago and as soon as she started talking about body hatred and body loathing and being a woman and stopping your sexual body and I thought oh my God we've got to get her on.

1:07.0

Now she has a new book coming out called Hags, the demonization of middle-aged women and she has been a regular contributor to the critic,

1:18.1

to the new statesman. She's often written on women's issues and mental health.

1:21.9

So I think this is a really really interesting

1:24.4

interview. Yeah we talk about so many aspects of eating disorders the kinds of

1:30.4

treatments, force-feeding or not force feeding.

1:33.2

And then of course we talk a little bit about what Victoria describes as like this fear

1:37.9

of becoming your mother essentially and how that might be a contributor to a lot of fears young women have about growing up.

1:45.2

It was a fascinating conversation.

1:46.8

So I guess with that will introduce Victoria.

1:52.4

Hi, I'm Stella O'Malley, a psychotherapist in Ireland.

1:55.0

And I'm Sasha Ayyad, an adolescent therapist in the United States.

2:00.0

Through in-depth interviews, personal personal stories and psychological exploration,

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