Bodies 4: Seeing Clearly (Is the Rain Gone?)

I've been thinking a lot about self-image, body image, stuff like that lately. The state of relationships to food and health and similar stuff.

I'm in a funny state about a lot of this stuff; I missed the adolescent indoctrination period into proper body image, partly by having the luck to mostly fall within the norms of the socially acceptable and thus not getting policed on it, partly by being a completely fucking oblivious nerd. When I was about twenty, I was introduced to the real world, and it stung.

What I first ran into was backlash. People who felt that the best way to support the heavier/curvier women they preferred was to proclaim them the only real women, capable of handling the affection of a real man without breaking. Women in particular who directed insults, hostility, and hatred at people with different body types, snide comments about what they were or were not eating, generalised cattiness. People who blew off people with my narrow build and slight breasts as only likely to be attractive to closeted gay men.

(The fact that I have a crazy ex who was, as far as I can tell, a closeted gay man, who was notably more attracted to me than his other partner at the time, who has a much more earth-mothery and thus overtly feminine build, and treated her even worse than he treated me, complete with, as I understand it, some level of insults to her attractiveness? Not helpful on that last one's front.)

I spent a little while -- when I wasn't busy cringeing -- familiarising myself with the size acceptance movement, sensitising myself to the issues around weight, developing a nice little head of annoyance about the way weight and health issues are treated. Expanding my awareness a little. Starting to actually pay attention to the cultural chaff that I had sort of ducked much of my life.

Large parts of it are still Bulletins From Outer Space for me, observing the way utterly ordinary-sized people go through the little ritual dance of the "mustn't have cookie, it's shameful" thing before eating, or who feel the need to reduce their weight. And so rarely talk about it in terms of body performance or needs -- not even a "When I weighed ten pounds less I felt better/more energetic/etc." The ritual declarations of hatred for people who aren't engaging in this process. I wind up uncomfortable in these discussions, the rattling off of Weight Watchers stuff, the obligatory offerings of shame, the ... sheer alienation of it all to me, this standard-feminine social ritual that I can't comprehend.

Mostly can't comprehend.

One of those times I was sort of torn and bleeding from being on the edges of one of these things, I had a terrifying moment, looking in the mirror, and going, "I see someone perfectly ordinary in size. And all these ordinary-sized people I know are desperately needing to diet, are concerned about their calorie intake, are doing all these things. What am I not seeing? Do I need to fix something? Do I need to change?" All of that social shame-programming and neuroticism that I missed suddenly manifesting, kicking in, chasing some illusory ideal that goes straight down the road to completely delusional body-image.

My hips finally finished broadening out in my mid-twenties, ish. And occasionally I'm struck with this sense that my body isn't the shape I expect it -- not the wrong shape, but broader, not the narrower sexless form that I had for so long. And I remember my parents telling me that they hit a point where they could gain weight at around thirty, and my breadth of hip is comparable, I think, to my mother's, a sensible place for it to be. It's all bone structure -- with it came a shifting about of flesh that means I'm inadequately padded in a couple of places, especially if I drop a pound or two -- and I recognise that with the rational mind.

The irrational mind looks at me in sweats and tee in the mirrors at the studio where I study tai chi and goes off on this railing panic about my goddamn size. Even when I know -- rationally -- that I could do with gaining a few pounds, at least if I could gain it in my ass. The shame machine is there, trying to make me crazy, hooking into the whole cultural edifice I missed out on having as an active part of my psyche and trying to connect it up to the driving horribleness of personal inadequacy. The irrational mind is convinced that this late-developing hips thing is some sort of crisis. The irrational mind cups a hand over the curve of my belly and says, "This thing didn't used to be round like this, right?"

And I sit here with the delusionality trying to take hold, trying to make me obsess, trying to get more focus than the fleeting and rationally dismissable bits of, "But! But!" that I can blow off by pointing out the pointy bits of discernable bone and other reasonable countermeasures, and I don't damn well know what to do about it. On the one hand, because I haven't been wrestling with this shit all my life, I'm fresh and have a much more developed rational facility for shooting the crazy little voices down and such; on the other hand, I spend a lot of time going "Where the hell did this come from? Makes no sense!" And getting even more uncomfortable around the ritual declarations of bad cookie or the discussions of diets or the evaluation of the caloric counts of various dishes, because rather than simply being outside my comprehension, it hits all those insidious buttons that in my head are the heads of that well-larded slope into complete fucking delusionality.

I can't say there's nothing wrong with my body, but what's wrong with my body has not a damn thing to do with my weight. And I can generally take the rational mind and point that out to myself, firm-like, and not get on the train to crazy about it.

But at the same time ... please don't talk to me about your diet.



Associated recommended reading: The Fantasy of Being Thin.