Living With Your Body…For Life

“I hate my thighs – they’re too big!” 

Although it’s distressing to think of any person hating their body, it’s especially hard to hear statements like this coming from girls as young as six and seven years old. Of course, each era and fashion trend conceives an ideal body image, and women of all ages end up comparing their bodies to that type, but it seems that only in recent years have very young girls joined in on this unhealthy activity.  Sadly, most people who participate in comparing themselves find their bodies lacking, and although few go so far as to become obsessed, I think there are far too many women with a negative view of their bodies.

     Yesterday, my friend S and I ended up discussing the issues so many of us have with our body image.  We bemoaned the effects of the media, discussed young girls we know who are already comparing themselves to the "ideal," and even talked about the cultural differences that seem to support or deny these kind of comparisons.  S had recently attended a baby shower for an African-American couple we know, and spoke with awe about the gorgeous Black women she saw there. She was amazed at how comfortable they seemed in their own bodies and marveled that the women were unafraid to be seen eating in public.  (What kind of world do we live in where it’s unique to feel comfortable eating in front of others?)  I get what S was saying; I distinctly remember a time I went out with some female acquaintances and directly experienced the ways women pressure each other to feel ashamed of food and eating.

Is this a dinner?

      On that night, a group of women in a social group I’d joined got together for dinner after shopping together. There were about 10 of us, and when our waitress came up to take our orders, I was the first person she turned to.  I’d planned on eating dinner and was quite hungry, so I ordered an entrée (complete with protein, starch, and veggies) and added a trip to the restaurant's healthy and fabulous salad bar.  As the women to my left gave their requests to the waitress, I noticed that the amount of food each one ordered was smaller and smaller until we reached the last woman.  She ordered a cup of soup. For dinner. She gave us the beatific look of a saint among sinners, and many of the other women looked chagrined and even angry.  When the food arrived, there seemed to be a competition to see who was the least hungry (and, thus, most virtuous) as several of the women pushed nearly full plates away, saying they were "stuffed."  I was appalled, but I still had to fight hard to eat the amount of food my body actually wanted, because the urge to join them in starving was very intense.  Mind you, this was with a group of women I didn't know well nor particularly admired. Imagine if they'd been mentors or idols of mine! 

     I’ve fought with food and body issues for most of my life.  It’s scenes like the one above that drove me to eat tiny portions around others, then binge when I was alone and safe from judging stares.  I hate to think of what that environment is doing to the women I know, their daughters, and any future children I might have. 

     Yesterday afternoon, I came across the following quote in a comment Nancy A. made to a blog post by Claire:

I went to a Catholic school, nuns and all, and I had one crusty teacher who used to get on the girls' cases about body image. That wasn't the term used back then, but that's what she meant. Anyway, if she ever heard any of us complain about our bodies, you know, "I hate my elbows!" she used to march us up to the mirror on the back of the classroom door, make us look at our elbows, and apologize to them--because those were our elbows and we were going to have to live with them for life. Believe it or not, for a gawky 13-year-old, the idiotic words "I'm sorry, elbows" (and we had to say it out loud in front of her) is remarkably cathartic! It brings great inner peace. It lets go of the noun-clutter of objects and brings life back to just living.

I loved this idea!  Although I’m not sure that the logic used by Nancy’s teacher is the entire reason we need to make peace with the body we currently have, I do think that apologizing to your body is a great step towards learning to love it.  We all have different bodies, but there is something lovely about every single one. S mentioned that she wished she could do something to help women see that loveliness, and perhaps Nancy’s teacher’s technique is one of those ways.  Maybe, in addition to apologizing to our body, we need to have a conversation with it, view it with our own eyes without the “noun-clutter of objects” and see what we, personally, find beautiful about it.  

Although it’s more of a tactile than visual experience, I have to say that one part of my body I enjoy is my belly, which is much, much larger than I’d like it to be (because I’m comparing it with the way I’m “supposed” to look, mind you…otherwise, how would I know how large it’s meant to be?). Regardless of its size (or perhaps because of it?) my belly is extremely soft, not just because of the fat below the skin’s surface, but the skin itself: it's like a baby’s.  I have no idea why that is, but the contrast between the immensely appealing texture of my belly (and the calming sensation of having this “forbidden and ugly” part of my body touched in a loving way) causes great consternation in my soul.  I think it may be because an appreciative view is so at odds with the highly negative way I usually regard that part of my body. This experience makes me think it’s quite possible that one of the best ways to challenge our media-influenced views of beauty may be to honestly assess how we, ourselves, view our bodies.  What do we like, regardless of what society might say?

Beyonce and her incredible thighs...

Last night, after the conversation with S and reading this quote, I found myself flipping through channels and landing on the first installment of Oprah’s Surprise Special.  One of the performers was Beyoncé, who was wearing a modified tuxedo that ended at the top of her thighs.  Her toned and gorgeous legs were very much on display as she danced with incredibly energy and skill, while singing about the way women run the world.* In spite of the excitement and inspiration I felt as I listened to the words she was singing,  I realized that I was, subconsciously, comparing the width of her thighs to the size of the dancers’ thighs around her and to the ideal I, apparently, keep in my head for important times like this. What is that insanity and why is it in my head?  I had a crazy conversation with myself about Beyoncé’s thighs and whether they are too big.  How insane is that?  I worked hard on convincing myself that her legs are absolutely gorgeous and, obviously, very functional, but I can’t help the feeling I have that somewhere in my brain is the belief that she needs to be skinnier.

Sigh.  Obviously, it will take a lot of hard work to uncover and destroy the millions of messages I’ve taken in over the years about how women have to be in order to be beautiful and worthy.  I think the fight is worth it, though—if not for us, then for the girls who follow us: we all deserve to feel good about our bodies, even our thighs!

For more discussion of loving our bodies and the disturbing trend towards emaciation in our "role models," check out my post entitled "Sexy?".

*You can see Beyoncé’s performance in this video. It’s amazing!

"Handsome" in Pink?

When I was a teen, I spent one summer as a camp counselor at a local Jewish school.  If all the campers went home early, I was sometimes recruited to help out with the day care for preschoolers.  During one of these stints, a preschool teacher explained why one of the little three-year-old boys ran screaming away after a little girl offered him a pink toy.  Shaking her head, she said, “That’s Samuel. His favorite color was pink, but his father was so worried about what that might mean [insert meaningful look here] that he told Samuel that going near anything pink would make his penis fall off. Samuel’s been terrified of all things pink since then.”  We fell into a troubled silence as we contemplated the long-reaching effects of Samuel’s father’s fears, how he handled them, and what damage this had already done to Samuel, who was a loner and seemed quite anxious at all times. Granted, I’ve often seen this kind of fear in parents in my years of working with children, but never to this extreme, and although nearly twenty years have passed, I’ve never forgotten it.

Then last fall, I read an inspiring blog post by Nerdy Apple Bottom (NAB) that seemed to present the opposite side of this issue: her five year old son decided to dress as his favorite female character from Scooby Doo for Halloween and she fully supported it.  However, his choice to dress as “Daphne” didn’t go over as well with some of the mothers of his classmates.  The issue here is not a boy dressing as a female character: in fact, as NAB notes in her blog post, the whole point of Halloween is to dress up as something you are not; e.g. dressing as a ninja doesn’t mean your child is suddenly going to have martial arts skills, nor does anyone think that he/she will grow up to become an actual ninja. The problem isn’t even with how her son was received by his peers (high fives from some and no notice from others), but how his peers’ mothers reacted.  They tried to bully NAB and her son into following their rules about what is and isn’t acceptable.  They reasoned that this was the best thing to do because if their rules weren’t followed, the kids would make fun of NAB’s son.  Yet, that wasn’t actually happening. 

Although the reaction of the other mothers is appalling, I found it more worrisome that NAB’s son, even at his young age, was already aware that other kids might make fun of his choice, and was concerned about wearing the costume, even though he really, really wanted to.  What kind of world do we live in where a five year old preschooler has to worry about being made fun of by his peers?  I realize it’s part of human nature to make fun of those who deviate from our norms, but it’s not something our society should accept, promote, or ignore: it’s our job as adults to help kids learn how to interact in a civilized, polite way with others, and that includes telling them that making fun of others is simply not allowed, period. I learned this lesson long before preschool, but it was certainly reinforced there.  Worst of all is that this boy was attending a preschool associated with a Christian church.  If this preschool is teaching the values that Christ promoted, how would making fun of others be allowed?

The J.Crew ad that set off "Toemageddon 2011"

          As you can probably tell, I have some strong views about letting kids—especially boys—express themselves in whatever way works for them.  Watching this video on the Daily Show brought those views into play, yet again.  Jon Stewart noted that a recent advertisement for J. Crew, which featured an employee of the company, Jenna Lyons, and her son, Beckett, playing, had led to "Toemageddon 2011" on the major news networks. The issue? Jenna’s son likes pink, and in the ad, she has painted his toenails in his favorite color.  All of a sudden, everyone was discussing whether this could make her son become gay or transgendered, whether the ad was "blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children," and even suggesting that encouraging children to participate in activities outside heteronormative gender roles could lead to adults who have no interest in having or nurturing children.

As I watched Stewart’s segment, I couldn’t help but wonder why people feel so threatened by any challenge to the gender roles they cling to?  We have an undeniable need to separate the world into black and white dichotomies—it’s something I find myself falling into often—but that doesn’t mean that doing so serves us well. In fact, I can’t think of any time that dividing the world into two categories has ever been beneficial, although I could easily be overlooking something.  Overall, however, I think we’re able to function better as a society when we embrace and get to know our “gray areas” as they actually are.  Is it not better for us, as a society, that girls wear clothes that allow them to move and do not endanger their health, as the clothes of the past did?  Nonetheless, people of even seventy years ago would probably be appalled to see women wearing pants. I think, instead of giving in to our urge to compartmentalize the world, we must fight our instincts: we must admit that not everything fits into a category, and we must see how that can benefit us, rather that assume if it doesn’t fit, it’s either a threat or not worth our time.  I explored this issue at length in my blog post, Binary Categories, so I won’t say more about it here.

Instead, I’d like to focus on why we think it’s possible for the application of nail polish in a color we consider “girly” (even though it used to be considered a masculine color until the 1940s…) to make a boy gay or transgendered.  You cannot make someone gay or transgendered. Nor can you make a gay person straight or convince a trans person to happily live as the sex they weren’t meant to be. A gay person’s attractions are just as naturally occurring as a straight person’s: one never knows from where they arrive, and they are utterly outside of our control.  A dear friend of mine, S—who has a gay mother and sister—shared a story with me about her early dating life that illuminates this fact.  S had brought another female date home when her mother drew her aside to tell her that she should really stop trying. She knew S wasn’t gay, and told her that she would love her no matter what.  S was trying, very hard, to make herself gay, but it didn’t work.  She’s happily married to a man now.  Research shows the adopted children of gay parents are no more likely to be gay than those raised by straight parents.  You simply cannot “nurture” someone into being gay. 

Transgenderism is, likewise, not something you can be made to feel. Transgendered people truly suffer, feeling that they are trapped in a body that does not reflect their gender. A recent survey found that 41% of transgendered people in the United States have attempted to commit suicide. This is “more than 25 times the rate of the general population, which is 1.6 percent. And among trans people ages 18-44, the suicide attempt rate was 45 percent.”  Other studies I have read show that trans people who receive hormone therapy have a lower rate of suicide attempts, though it’s still greater than the general population.  After sex-reassignment surgery, the rate of suicide attempts for transgendered persons drops to the same as the general population. Those facts convinced me of the great need for support of our trans community.  Obviously, running ads in which a boy’s toenails are painted pink doesn’t do that, nor could it possibly be the intention of J. Crew.  While some pundits may consider a boy who follows heteronormative gender rules in all ways except for pink nail polish to be “transgendered,” they couldn’t be more wrong.  In addition to support, we obviously need to do a lot of education in order to help our fellow Americans understand the plight of our trans friends and neighbors.

This little guy enjoys getting his nails painted!

Our world has enough stress in it as it is, and our children grow up so much faster these days.  Can’t we reduce the pressure on them and let our kids play in whatever ways—and with whatever colors—make them happy?* 

 

*Like, for instance, the way this mother has…

Binary Categories

"[When we try to subject people to binary categories]...we call into question the very ground beneath their feet. Gay or straight? Men or women? Male or female? Transgendered or intersex? We know the reality of the situation.....that every time you draw a line, it slices through someone's tender flesh."

-Raven Kaldera

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to take all the evil people and put them over there, then we wouldn't have to deal with them. And all of us good people would stay right here. The problem is that the line separating good and evil cuts right through the human heart."

-Alexander Solzenitzen

When I read the first quote (posted in March on Facebook by a woman I respect greatly, Robyn Ochs), I immediately thought of the second, which has been my friend Lianne's signature quote on our diet board for what feels like years. I think "the line separating" us into one thing (gay, female, etc.) from another (straight, male, etc.)--if it even exists--is just like the line separating good and evil. It "cuts right through the human heart." It's a lesson I learned early on in my journey into myself.

As I learned more about the T (Transgendered) and I (Intersex) members of our LGBTI & Q community, I discovered that I'm not the only one who feels safer when everyone can be categorized into a little, labeled box. In some sense, all of us are a bit "OCD"--we want everything to be black and white. We feel more comfortable believing that everything is binary and there are only two options. You are either one or you are the other. Period. No grey. You are either a man or a woman. You cannot be both, and there is certainly no "other" category. Or so we want to believe...

Of course, human beings are no more easily categorized as "gay" or "straight" than they are "good" or "evil." It takes time to come to understand that--to realize that whether we're comfortable admitting it or not, we all lie at some point on a spectrum, and that point can move (sometimes more than once) during our lifetimes. I believe our sexuality is fluid. To some extent, I believe our gender is, too (though our sex is not, at least not without help...). But it is certainly on a spectrum. There are those that take femininity to the max (I'm thinking RuPaul here, personally. ;) ). There are those that take masculinity just as far, and then there are those of us in the "middle." The tomboys, the metrosexuals, the butches, the femmes, the genderqueer, the slightly masculine women, the slightly feminine men. (For more info, check out these interesting charts comparing the western gender spectrum and the gender spectrum present in some other cultures. You might also find this article from the NY Times interesting.)

Though the concept of gender being on a spectrum like sexuality was new to me, that wasn't too hard for me to accept. I have super sporty girlfriends who are very masculine in appearance and personality, and I certainly knew my share of guys "in touch with their feminine side" in drama class. What was a bit difficult for me was the idea that one's gender doesn't, in fact, have anything to do with your sexuality. When I think about it, it does make tons of sense--while there were a couple of gay men in my drama classes (some of whom didn't come out until well after HS), most of the guys who were "in touch with their feminine sides" exclusively dated women at the time, and are now married to women. I can't tell you what they believe their sexuality to be, but I figure they lie more towards the heterosexual side of the spectrum in spite of being somewhat "feminine" in their gender expression. I've now come to embrace the reality that those who express a gender outside the norm are not any more likely to have a sexual interest in the same sex as those whose gender is inside the norm.

It's sometimes a lot to take in--the concept that things aren't black and white. I have a really hard time with it in my life in spite of the things I've learned. Some of my friends have personal interests that are anathema to me, yet I adore them, which is a big challenge for me. My affection for them forces me to learn to accept these friends as they are and admit that I can love someone who does things I think are bad. It stretches my soul and my capacity to love, and I think that's a good thing.

I think it's beneficial for all of us. But if you don't feel ready to do some soul stretching, please keep in mind that your desire to keep things in binary categories just might "slice someone's tender flesh," and act accordingly.