All Bodies Are Good Bodies

I’ve long been intrigued by maps.  I took a class in historical cartography in graduate school and loved every minute of it.  (I considered focusing my studies on medieval maps, but ended up moving in a different direction with it.)  Maps have many layers of meaning, and ancient maps are coded with many different symbols and signs that provide a window into the worldview of the time they were produced.

One of my favorite quotes is about maps.  I’ve shared it here before, in an entirely different context, but I’ll do so again, because it is so beautiful.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

‘I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”

~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Recently, I’ve been thinking more about the concept of the body as a map.  I just finished reading an interesting, if slightly dense, book on corporeal feminism and philosophy called Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz.  Some of the book is a bit dated, and I do feel that Grosz’ discussion veers off into unhelpful territories at times, but there have been some real gems in terms of thinking about the female form, at least from a philosophical point of view.

I’ve alluded to this a few times in the past couple of months, but I’m just going to come out and say it plain.  I’m profoundly uncomfortable in my body right now.  It’s a very weird place to be, because, paradoxically, I was in a more body positive place when I was heavier.

I’ve always been a pretty harsh critic of the image in the mirror (it is worse right now).  I’ve written pretty extensively about my struggles with weight, with body changes, the way I feel in my body.  I would say I even had a good sense of humor about my body’s quirks.  I suppose I thought it would get better if I lost weight.  I’m down 30 pounds and it isn’t that much better.  I mean, yes, I feel better physically, and yes, it is super nice to fit into smaller sizes and to be able to grade my slopers down.  But my body is still unpredictable and fluctuates a lot within my cycles (3-5 pounds every couple of weeks, depending on where I am) and my waistbands still feel tight at the end of the day because of gastroparesis.  I’m constantly frustrated by my body’s unwillingness to do anything “normally.”

I want to lose more weight, but I’m less motivated to work on the last 15 pounds because I know it will take another level of asceticism with my food life that I’m having a hard time contemplating.  Losing 15 pounds won’t change the basic shape of my body, or alter its composition or quirks or proportion.  I also think it won’t fix what ails me inside.

To be clear, this is about me.  (Because I’m narcissistic that way).  I am quite body positive about everyone around me.  I celebrate what My Body Model is trying to do with its message of body positivity and size inclusivity.  I love that Gretchen Hirch, Sarai at Colette, Closet Case Patterns, Sonya Philip, and other indie pattern sellers are trying to change the visual cultural ideal by using images of women of all shapes, sizes, and ages on their patterns and in their books and magazines.  I appreciate that Gertie slopes from a larger size and the proportions of her patterns are close to my own proportions.  I adore Gwendoline Christie, who is 6’3” and wore 6” heels to publicize a movie with her much shorter male co-stars.  I’ve already written about my girl crush on Tilda Swinton, who is probably my body positivity model.  Swinton: ‘A body is a body, and everyone has one.’

All bodies are good bodies.  (Rinse, repeat.  I need to frame this to remind myself). 

I think perhaps a lot of my own discomfort has to do with the gap between visual cultural ideals and my own body (I re-read this post while putting this one together, and it still holds up.  Much of what I’m noodling through here is just rehashing it from a different mental place). 

When the gap between my body and the cultural visual ideal was very wide (i.e. I was very fat), there was nothing for me to aspire to.  I knew that the visual cultural ideal was so far out of reach, why even bother about it?  I was talking about this with a friend with many children and she commented that it was kind of like being pregnant—you just can’t be bothered with living up to some unreasonable standard when your body is housing another human. 

Now that the gap is narrower, and I find I’m much more focused on the narrowness of that gap.  Because I’m human and I’m aware of the society in which I move and live.  I do try to be careful about my visual diet—I try to avoid shows and movies that are populated with Beautiful People, style magazines, and pictures of tall, thin people wearing clothing that will never look like that on me, no matter how much I weigh.  But still.  The visual ideal still lives in my head.

I had a sudden realization that what our culture really idolizes, and even fetishizes to a certain extent, is the idea of the body as a tabula rasa.  (Somehow, it always ends up back with Descartes, blast him).  The idea is that a person is born whole, pure, a blank canvas upon which to write; a disembodied mind carried around in a body that has little use beyond the decorative.  Setting aside the basic problems with this theory, let’s talk about the body as a blank canvas.  I remember when each of my children received their first scars—a mark on previously unblemished skin.  The scraped knees and elbows, the stitched chins and foreheads, the messiness of childhood, marked up on their bodies for the rest of their time on earth.  I felt a bit sad about it at the time, but now I’m coming to realize that it was silly to feel that way.  The marks upon our bodies show our lives.  It is unfortunate that our culture wants our bodies to remain unmarked, blank, unlived in, at least visually.  (One could extend this metaphor to the pictures with which we saturate our screens and magazines—homes are staged to look like no one lives there, stock photos of empty landscapes that appear uninhabited).  I don’t know about you, but as much as I find those types of images swoon-worthy, when I turn back to my real life, in my real body, in my real home, with six people inhabiting the space, the cognitive dissonance is enough to undo me.

Volatile Bodies has me thinking about the ways in which our intellectual framework for the physical body undermines a healthy view of it.  Starting from Descartes onward (as I said, it’s always down to Decartes), the thinking Western world has divorced the body from the mind, and placed the body on some lower inferior level, rather than seeing the body, mind, and spirit as an inextricably intertwined thing.  That it is all on the same level. 

I can try to change my own thinking about this, come at it from a more Eastern point of view, or even a pre-modern Western point of view, but I still have to live in this culture, in this time, with opposing messages and ideals.  It is impossible to ignore them.

Another point Grosz makes that I hadn’t focused on previously is that women’s bodies, rightly or wrongly, are culturally judged by their fluids, whereas male bodies are more culturally neutral (both from a purely corporeal aspect as well as a fluid standpoint).  To my mind, this makes for a lot of body shaming on the basis of things women have almost no control over, and shouldn’t be considered any more or less dirty than a man’s, but there it is.  It also reminded me of Mary Roach’s excellent book Bonk, which explores the connection of science and sexuality, and, in particular, sexuality in different cultural contexts.  She notes the differences in fluid preferences among different cultures, and the (sometimes bizarre) lengths that women go in order to conform to those standards.  She mentions that in places value “dryness,” women will pack sawdust or newspaper in their parts to achieve this, for example.  Can I just say this: all bodies produce fluid.  It is the normal and healthy way of things. 

All bodies are good bodies.

On the one hand, this whole thing is rather absurd: body image, our cultural obsession with a particular type of slenderness (starvation chic, shall we say).  For most of human history, people have struggled to have enough to eat.  It was only recently that slenderness became a visual cultural ideal.  In earlier ages, fatness was celebrated, envied, because it meant you had a surplus of food and could afford to eat more than you needed.  Recently, I read an interesting article on the depiction of mothers in 17^th century Dutch paintings, and I was struck by how robust all the women are.

On the other hand, I see what our culture celebrates as normal and ideal in the female form, and I see all the ways I don’t measure up.  All the ways I cannot possibly measure up.  Gertie points out in her croquis book that the fashion industry standard is to use croquis that are nine heads tall (croquis are proportioned using the head as a unit of measurement).  The average woman is seven heads tall.  Just let that one sink in for a moment.  The visual cultural ideal that is being put out by the fashion industry is one that is physically unattainable for probably 98% of the female population.  Add to that the unrealistic way that our cultural standard bearers present themselves after major body-altering events like childbirth; is it any wonder that almost no one feels comfortable with their physical selves?  (And yes, I’m aware that celebrities are under an enormous amount of pressure to look “normal” again immediately after having a baby.  It’s just not right, for anyone). 

I read a mostly forgettable book a few weeks ago by Emily Bleeker called When I’m Gone.  One of the main female characters is described (in what I’m sure the author meant as a body positive thing) as a woman who prefers to eat cookies for dessert and sitting on the couch after dinner instead of fitting into a size 2.  It is clear the author wanted to make her character “relatable” by making her not skinny.  She goes on to describe the character as a size 10.  Well whoopdie doo.  Congratulations, you are still below the average size of American women.  Was that supposed to make me feel better?  Or like the character more?

I couldn’t help but think: this is what “fat” is to you, lady?  What if she were a size 12 or 14, or 16?  Or bigger?  Would she still be worth writing about?  Would her husband have laughed at her indulgence or would he have shamed her for it?  (In the book, her husband likes her fluff.  I have a hard time understanding how any woman who wears a size 10 can have that much fluff, if I’m being honest)

So what to do?

I can work harder on my visual diet—continue to be aware of what I’m putting in front of my eyes, about the images that provide a visual reference point for “normal.”  I can steer myself toward older images of women—those robust carriers of many children, those workers of the fields, milkers of cows, and generally hard-working women whose bodies reflect the lives they lived.  #lifegoals

I can seek out more body positive models.  It isn’t enough to avoid that which is bad for me; I should actively go toward that which is healthy and good.  For the ready-to wear that I thrift or buy new, I should stop shopping with clothing companies that don’t slope for my body type.  I’ve done enough thrifting over the years to know which brands tend to fit me well and which don’t (although be open to change—Target used to be a rank disaster for me, but they’ve changed their clothing game in the last two or three years and are using radically different slopers now).  I should stop torturing myself with brands and pattern companies that don’t slope for my body type (I’m looking at you, Boden and almost anything curated by Modcloth).  There is a whole other post I could write about the way that clothing companies make their clothing blocks and how that affects everything from the number size on the garment to the overall fit and feel of them.  Maybe I’ll get to that someday.

It is worth trying to think about the body in positive terms, so when I’m tempted to start parsing various things about my body that I don’t like, I put my hands over it, and remind myself of what that part has done.  “This belly has housed five humans.”  “These arms have carried four children.” “These breasts have nourished four babies.”  “These legs are strong and capable.”

The thing I’ve arrived at is two fold.  Number one is that I need to work on acceptance.  Acceptance that this body of mine is a map that has a lot of history marked on it.  That the stretch marks, the loose skin, gray hairs, scars, coffee-stained teeth, freckles, etc. are part of where I’ve been and who I am. 

Number two is to surround myself with other women who understand these struggles, and also women who have arrived at a place of body acceptance.  I’ve talked with so many women about these issues in the last few weeks, all at different places in this corporeal journey, and it was so helpful to hash it through with them.  The women who have learned to love their bodies gave me hope for the future.  The women struggling with post-partum changes, with peri-menopause, or just general life shifts that affect their bodies, commiserated with me, offered their thoughts and were generally so supportive of my own issues.

I suspect we all have someone or something in our lives that mocks our attempts at acceptance and contentment.  Maybe it is a relative or a friend, or a garment we loved to wear when our bodies were different.  Maybe it is just the magazines in the grocery check out line or the leggy skinny models on clothing websites.  Often these negative influences are not things we can excise from our lives.  My suggestion (and I make it as much to myself as anyone) is to dress to please yourself.  Wear clothes that fit now and feel good.  Don’t hang on to things for “someday.”  Don’t shame yourself with clothing that makes you feel terrible. 

All bodies are good bodies.

My great hope is that one day, perhaps some day soon, I can look at my body in the mirror, see all the contours of this map of mine, to see the marks of my history, of my tastes and experience, of my particular self, and be content.