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 17th 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.
