I, like most women, have a strange and complicated relationship with my body. I hardly talk about this with anyone -- my friends, parents, sister -- in part because I've convinced myself they'd never understand, and in part because it goes against every feminist urge of my being to admit that I, sometimes, fall victim to the cultural standards I champion breaking. It's not that I hate my body (most of the time); it's that I'm constantly torn between resenting the ways in which it defies the aesthetic cultural standards, and admiring it for the infinite resilliance it has shown throughout my short life. The line between my body and myself is thin and shaky -- even though I would love to assert that I'm an intellectual, and my body is the least interesting thing about me, I know I am irrevocably bound to the vessel in which I reside.
And though I have heard (from tumblr posts and ScarJo's Marvel interviews) that this internal turmoil is devastatingly common regardless of the way anyone's body actually looks, I've always found this hard to believe. If only I had prettier hair, or perhaps a smaller build, I often find myself thinking, then this dilemma would be cease to exist. But today I read My Body, a series of essays by Emily Ratajkowski (a supermodel) about her relationship with her sexuality and appearance. This woman, who possesses every beauty ideal known to Western culture, still finds herself burdened by the crippling doubt, sorrow, and anxiety that comes with... well, having a body. And I realized that it wasn't truly resentment or admiration I felt towards my body at all: it's guilt.
Guilt because no matter what, no matter how, no matter when, the truth is this -- are bodies exist in a perpetual dance with society, whoever they are. The way we treat our bodies are forever reactive, never autonomous. The features society abhorred ten years ago are now desirable, so we attempt to beat our confused bodies into submission with various forms of torture that have only gotten more bizarre through the years.
When I was younger, I refused to wax or shave my legs. My mother, who has always given me total control over what I did with my body and how, found this incredibly strange. She likened waxing/shaving to personal hygeine, like brushing your teeth. The difference, that my dear angry feminist younger self knew even then, was that clean-shaven legs are purely performative. It seems as though that which is hardest to obtain is deemed most desirable -- thinness, smoothness, no hair, no pores. Comformity.
And yet, despite the countless ways in which we punish the cluster of cells simply trying to maintain homeostasis, they never fail us; they protect us from disease, allow us to grow and birth whole new humans, and, despite it all, from crash diets to suicide attempts, just keep going. I suppose this isn't a particularly novel thesis, but I can't help but marvel at the collosally complex tendency the universe inside us has to tend to their wounded, reconcile their pasts, grieve their lost, and move on.
In recent years, though I suppose teenager-dom should have made me increasingly discontent with my physique, I've found solace in one universal truth: none of this is real. In my religion, there is this belief that the body is akin to a borrowed library book or a pair of clothes. While it is our responsibility to care for it, our relationship with this particular body is ephemeral, granted to us in this lifetime, taken from us in the next. This doesn't necesarily make it easier to absorb the centuries of systemic misogyny that lie behind each barbed insult or shallow expectation, and I imagine this is much harder to implement for the bodies who are marginalized in other ways, too. But perhaps, when my future daughter asks me why the world insists on beating women down, I'll have an answer that isn't as acidic as my enemies'. Given recent events (ahem Roe v. Wade ahem), she's sure going to need it.
So maybe I'll just leave you with this, one of the poems that led me through every pitfall and downturn in my life thus far:
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