A good friend of mine made a lovely post today on her blog, partly inspired by the “Beautiful Imperfect” post. I’m very honoured! And she gave me permission to quote from it, as I am just about to do…
However, one part of it knocked me sideways slightly. She talks of her resistance to “loving her body” in the sense in which she feels she’s always been told to:
The sensual, almost autoerotic, physical self-love that some people radiate is alien and unsettling to me; I’ve never felt that way and can’t imagine wanting to; telling me to ‘love my body’ in that sense feels like another way of telling me to grow up.
It had, I admit, never even occured to me that my Beautiful Imperfect post could be taken in that sense of “loving my body”. But of course, I’ve come across that ideal of self-love before. I also experience it – my friend is somewhat asexual, and I am not. And I have been known to thoroughly enjoy the physical self-love, the wearing of good clothes and attracting admiring glances from my loved ones and friends. Feeling “sexy”, feeling “gorgeous”, all of that.
I don’t think it counts as loving my body. Not really. It’s part of *liking* it, perhaps, for some of us, including me. But part of my realisation – part of the “Beautiful Imperfect” concept, as I see it – is that what a body looks like, and its sexual side, are pretty much the least important parts of what it is and what makes it beautiful and wonderful and useful. What matters is what a body can DO. And this my friend captures perfectly, looking back to her childhood:
I ran around in it with a sense of careless ownership – MY arms, MY legs, MY tummy, MY sensations. I didn’t feel pretty, not because I felt ugly but because I was just busy being alive and didn’t think about it. I might have paused occasionally to admire the way my nose turned up, my freckles or the way my hair looked underwater, but for the most part my body and my face were just there to do things with. I looked in mirrors to pull faces or to play with symmetry. I twisted around trying to see what my back looked like or to lick my elbow. I felt at home in my body…
Isn’t that great? And don’t we all remember that time, before the narrow demands of conformity and self-consciousness got in the way? *That* is the kind of loving my body I want. That is what my friend also describes her yearning for:
…[T]o ‘love my body’ in the sense of being at home, careless monarch of my five-and-a-half feet of the world – letting my arm touch the side of my breast without feeling revulsion at something not my own – loving the feeling of my muscles working – revelling in physical sensations, rather than shrinking from them because they force me to feel my size and shape – I want that often to the point of tears and can sometimes achieve it.
That’s what I mean when I say I want to love my body. I think that’s what the bloggers on FWD mean as well.
But isn’t it interesting that it clearly isn’t what a lot of people think when they hear the phrase “love your body”? Because this friend of mine isn’t someone who’s unusually affected by the popular media, by conventions of what femininity is meant to be. Far from it, actually.
But think of all of those adverts that use “love your body” in precisely the painful, shallow way that makes my friend so uncomfortable. “Love the skin you’re in”, “you’re worth it”, all of that. Love your body, and show you love it by spending hours making it looks like we say it should. Love your body, and show you do by starving it, by wearing shoes that make you uncomfortable and make it hard to run away. Love your body, and buy what we’re trying to sell you.
It’s “love” used as a toy in the selling of self-hatred. And that sucks. Because love is a powerful, wonderful, beautiful thing, and those bastards don’t deserve to take the word from us.
I want to reclaim it. I want the phrase “love your body” to mean not just “you look great the way you are” but also “who cares what you look like? Your body is awesome, and made for so many interesting things!” I don’t mind fancying myself, it’s quite fun. But loving myself is just so much more, and so much harder, and so much more important.
Love your bodies, dear readers. Love them in the way my friend did, the way I did, the way I suspect you did too, when we were all children, and before the silly media circus got its claws into us. Let’s all be easy and comfy and adventurous in them, whatever they look like, and whatever our disabilities or lack thereof. These are our homes, our shelters, our companions.
And aren’t they fucking amazing? š
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