On hating one's body & love as praxis

[kaberett]

There is a tendency, in some of the circles I move in, to react strongly and negatively to exhortations to "love your body". Says Hel, inadvertently prompting me to finally get around to writing about this:

I think there is often an impetus to turn "it sucks that people are conditioned to feel negatively about their bodies and we should resist that conditioning" into "everyone has to feel positive about their bodies all the time".

Which is a very helpful translation for me to see, because I find it Really Rather Difficult to be around the Very Definite "it is absolutely okay for me to hate my body, it's preposterous to suggest that I wouldn't hate my body, it doesn't do me any good at all in any way ever" line of discussion. (Because of empathising with distress; because of wanting to Explain why this is an Incorrect Approach, and being well aware that's inappropriate and unhelpful; because. Because because because.)

But: oh. It's yet another mistranslation, yet another skewing (as of gratitude exercises to snide and condescending "count your blessings"), I think? When I talk about loving my body, I don't mean the superficial "I have to feel positive about my body all the time": that's not what love is. I mean it as compassion and kindness and working-in-good-faith, as recognition that my body is doing the best it can.

You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver. ... your body, your most personal of assistants,/in its own awkwardly earnest way/really wants to make sure
you get all your messages: Sensuum, jjhunter. There is a kind of love called maintenance: Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe.

It doesn't mean rotten, as my maternal line says, in exasperated understanding. It's doing its best. And being kind to it doing its best turns out to be pretty good practice for being kind to me doing my best, and working out what that might look like on any different way. Love not as a variable state, but a process (The Indelicates); love as a verb, not a noun; love as work. It is cruel to tell someone that you love them, if what you mean is that you're enamoured of the idea of a static and unchanging snapshot of them, filtered through your own perceptions; love should, surely, embrace messiness and uncertainty and wobbles and mistakes, should think I don't yet know how but I trust we can sort this out.

And so: I love my body.

Comments

[kaberett]

(Which is not all, of course, and is not quite right, because even though I struggle enormously with the idea that encouragement to reframe as Loving One's Body is inherently ableist and cissexist I also know that I am, in many respects, Not That Disabled. So. I don't know. Here's why I find the thing difficult, now, from where I am. That doesn't mean I'm right.)

THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

[recessional]

*ponders* I also think perhaps more importantly that your body doesn't continually cause you misery, either because of physicality or because of emotional stuff totally rooted in your body.

And "misery" here is chosen specifically, as opposed to pain, because they're not necessarily the same thing. I think your body probably causes you a lot more pain more often than mine does me? But that I have observed, I have not seen the state of your body directly being responsible for you being MISERABLE.

And I think it is inherently unfair/unsupportable to demand that people have warm-fuzzy positive feelings about something that is making them miserable.

Pragmatically, the solution to this may be to find ways to enable them not to be miserable, whatever those happen to be (less pain, more empowerment, etc), but for some these are really not available yet or likely to be in their lifetime: for someone who really, really wants, with all their heart, to do something that their body simply does not allow them to do . . . well sometimes that problem is not solvable, and that misery is hard to relieve, and at that point it becomes kinda out of line to demand that they find Positive Feelings about it.

And in this case I don't think it's "degree", as it were, of Disabled (or Dysphoric) that does it as such? But whether or not the body is at the core of that misery.

It's not cool to demand that people Feel Positive and Fluffy and Fuzzy-Warm Good about something that's making them miserable, which is more or less what the body-positivity movement often comes off as being/doing*. And which does get pushed at particular kinds of disabled people a lot, tangling up with other ways in which it's demanded they be Positive and Upbeat and Happy, and thus hits over into I GET TO FEEL AS FUCKING NEGATIVE AS I FUCKING LIKE GO TO HELL kind of thing.

Basically crosses over into "I get to have the emotions that I have, I get to feel the way I feel about things". Which has ways it connects to the "gratitude excercises" issue too: a lot of the people who have very negative reactions to the idea are those who have had Positivity Demanded of them at great length (which I tentatively get the sense is not something that happened to you so much? You more had abusive parental negativity shoved at you 24/7? I could be wrong!), who were NOT ALLOWED to have/express negative feelings or to be upset?

So then it becomes "this body you have that causes you misery all the time? You must LOVE it and feel GOOD about it and be POSITIVE about it because it is GOOD and POSITIVE and - " and at that point one wants to eat everything's face and then light it on fire.

Now I think there are actually a LOT of other options other than either WARM FUZZY SUNSHINE FEELINGS ALL THE TIME or "of course I loathe my body and it is awful horrific and I hate it how dare you suggest otherwise."

But I think even broaching them, it's important to start with "you know what? you are absolutely ALLOWED to hate your body. And it is an absolutely reasonable thing to have hugely negative feelings towards something that causes you to be miserable." And from THERE you can move on to "so it is significantly possible that it will lessen misery if we approach it like this: your body is not actually a malignant force out to get you, and it doesn't MEAN to be terrible, and while it's frustrating and unhappy-makiing that it does X or won't do X or whatever, it's probable that you will get better results in Being Less Miserable if however you feel, you approach treating it with some basic kind of compassion and care, and here are some ways to do that."


*and note: they usually do this because they're fighting back at a culture that is telling them that their body is not ALLOWED to make them Positive, Happy, Feel Warm Fuzzy Feelings! And when one's perspective is that this is ALL AROUND ALL THE TIME, it can be hard to remember that other people are experiencing the other direction.

[alexseanchai]

♥

More thoughts later maybe

(Also this is exactly the sort of thing that I hope to see in that dialogue, whenever you have time/brain :) )

[kaberett]

(braaaaaaaaaaaaaains :-( )

[redsixwing]

This entry is good stuff. (Yes, this is why it's hard; yes, this is why it's worth trying anyway. Because that soft animal no more deserves cruelty than a sweet-hearted pet that made a mess in its earnest effort to do its best.)

Wild Geese is such a Thing, for me.

If I can think of my body less as obnoxious meatsuit that can't or won't do or be what I want, and more as a creature deserving of attention and care, that has its own needs and desires (and as any creature, sometimes is in conflict with itself) - it helps, I think.

Sorry for the self-referential sentence spaghetti up there, it has been a Day.

[kaberett]

<3

I am very glad it has resonance for you.

[recessional]

Basically: for MOST of the discourse, when people say "love your body" they really are talking about "love" as what I call "the warm fuzzy fluffy feeling."

They mean "always say positive things, always feel positively about it, always be happy with it, even be DEFIANTLY happy with it, and FEELING otherwise is in fact Failing."

To the point where this is also what's enforced, socially.

And like: no. I do not have very many fuzzy warm positive feelings about my body. In fact I mostly have resentful hissing negative feelings about my body. And my brain.

Mostly people don't mean "love" as the doing-word which is only related to the warm-fuzzies in that the warm-fuzzies make the actions easier.

(See also "love doesn't mean not WANTING to throw your screaming toddler out the window, love means NOT DOING IT and in fact sucking up that feeling and instead figuring out wtf is up with the screaming toddler and what needs to be done to bring an end to the screaming and to initiate changes in behavioural patterns that eliminate 'scream until my caregiver wants to chuck me out the window' as a reaction to things like 'being told it is time for nap.'")

[kaberett]

people are USING WORDS WRONG, M, and it is BAD. >:(

[sonia]

Thanks for the links to Sensuum and Atlas! Yes, love as an action, as a way of being-toward.

[kaberett]

You are very welcome!

[vass]

- this is a good post and I'm glad you wrote it.

- It's yet another mistranslation, yet another skewing (as of gratitude exercises to snide and condescending "count your blessings"), I think?

(yes, I think this is the same species of problem as gratitude exercises->"count your blessings," and is also in the same species as "there are brainhacks you can use to turn your pain level down a notch or two"->"just ignore your pain".)

Something I'd like to poke at there (looking at your reaction to other people's reaction, and M's reaction to your post) is whose mistranslation it is, who is skewing it.

- this is one of those discussions that's distributed across space and time and not always in dialogue with each other/part of the same conversation, and more like people recurrently independently rediscovering the same insights (love/care for your body! you don't have to love your body! positivity helps! forced positivity hurts! and so on) and because of that people can think they're having the same conversation as someone else when they're not (and that's been happening with this specific topic since before Tumblr even existed)

- BUT ALSO there are some forces within society and governments and the health industry who are very strongly and deliberately trying to skew the narrative and translation toward the individual effort/wellness as moral virtue/positivity = happy thoughts = shut up about your problems = you are now Well = you are now moral (elseif it didn't work it's your fault for not trying hard enough = you are now immoral) version. Because (As You Know, Alex-Bob) if people with chronic conditions that are difficult or impossible to cure or treat stop asking for help, that's obviously very convenient for a whole lot of forces (not least Just World Fallacy carriers who'd rather not be reminded that non-temporary pain and disability even still exist in this year 2017.) And the gaslighting is very strong with them.

- so, like, you have a good practice that is beneficial and important to you, and you see someone else's reaction to the vicious, harmful, fucked up Smile Or Die version they're getting peddled to them (or being required to undergo at the hands of their social services or healthcare professionals or employers under pain of losing access to income or healthcare or job, and/or they're being given this instead of, not as well as any other form of mental health care or chronic pain care) and you say "that's a distorted, skewed mistranslation of what it means to love one's body!"

- and it is (modulo how loving one's body can mean different things to different people, obvs), EXCEPT that without a lot of clarification, that's going to come across to the people complaining about what they're being subjected to, as though you said "YOU are distorting/misunderstanding/confused about/etc what it means to love one's body!" and they're not. They didn't make up a straw version of the concept to hate. You're talking about different things. And it's not those people's fault (not that I think that you're blaming them, just that they're already copping a lot of blame and getting instructed to take a lot of things that are not their doing onto them) that the distorted version is out there. (It's not your fault either! You are on the same end of that firehose of bullshit as the people criticising "love your body". But they might not realise that.)

- I would suggest that some other phrase might help, like "care for your body" or "be kind to your body" except that the wellness industrial complex is coopting terminology as fast as we can come up with it. If we talk about sensory seeking, they'll put actual attempts to communicate nonverbally down to sensory seeking, not purposeful communication. If we talk about agency and self-determination, they'll cut the number of hours of aid people get and call THAT agency and self-determination. They'll twist anything into privatisation and service cuts and bootstraps. So I don't think changing the way you talk about the concept would even help. :(

[ewt]

I think this explains the mistranslation well.

I've seen a similar dynamic, I think, with CBT. People it helps love it, people it doesn't help (or who have not even had proper CBT but something sortof based on it but without proper support or whatever) and are offered nothing else can end up coming to believe that all talking therapies are unhelpful for them.

[recessional]

*points up* These are good more-words to what I meant.

I think the closest one can get to changing the way one talks about it in a helpful way is just being willing to put the qualifiers and modifiers in. It's like sex-positivity in that way, to me: when I do use the term, because it is useful, it COMES with the footnote "and this is what I mean by this, including positivity about the right to NOT have sex/etc", because people also took THAT one to turn it into really gross acephobic misogynist "this means you think all sex is unequivocally good" crap - I think it is something that just cannot be short-handed safely except within very specific audiences where you know you're all on the same page (and so is everyone else who can see it).

[kaberett]

Thank you, these are excellent words and I am grateful for them. <3

In particular, they do a very good job of shaking loose that part of my fear and agitation around this topic is precisely that I'm having the autism of BUT PEOPLE ARE USING WORDS WRONG >:( (or they're saying Obviously Incorrect things, and I default hard to People Are Saying The Things They Mean To, which is a deeply unhelpful way to approach communication on fraught topics and puts all the work on them).

As I mentioned upthread, I think a thing it might be useful for me to reflect on here is Exactly How Badly I get on with pain clinics and the approaches they take, and how much of that is because fundamentally I am not their target audience, and what it takes to translate what they're saying into something complex and nuanced enough that I'm willing to engage with it. And this Ongoing Thing I have that I'm going to try to write up, about how we As A Species are really good at coming up with a fundamentally valid and useful concept, and then reducing it down to a shorthand mnemonic, and then propagating the mnemonic without all the context required to understand it because that's easier, without thinking about what the effects of doing so might be. Which, yep, I will absolutely cop to being guilty of in this instance and probably also others!

Which is how, in fact, I think changing the way I talk about this is useful: if I hit the blank incomprehension of "but you're using words wrong" (or the agitation/fear that signal that that's the style of miscommunication that's happening, even if I can't articulate it well enough to identify it in the moment), stopping and taking a deep breath and checking in about terminology and contexts and so on is probably a good idea? Defining one's terms at the top of the page, and all that.

So. Yes. Mistranslation definitely on my end also, and even if I do in fact have The Answer then like with all other teaching it is on me to work it into a shape that other people can handle.

Thank you again. <3

[silveradept]

That love hopefully can be better than the intense frustration that has to come with having a creature that has those kinds of needs. You get used to it, eventually, and figure out how to work with it, but the learning curve seems sharp and unforgiving.

[kaberett]

♥

[sfred]

<3

[kaberett]

♥

[redbird]

It feels like there's a range of stuff grouped under "body positivity," from "believe your body is wonderful" to "find things you like about your body" to "don't hate yourself because your body is imperfect." And even if someone wants all those things, I suspect different approaches work for each.

"This is a good body because it has me in it" is body-positive, but says nothing about most of the things we judge bodies on: it's an approach that works for any or no gender, any age, any set of physical skills, disability, age, race, weight...

That's a very different approach than "it doesn't matter what race you are or how much you weigh, you can make yourself attractive," which can wind up back with women expected to be pretty, and make some effort toward that, as rent for living in the world.

I suspect (though I may not be best-situated to analyze this) that the "love your body" messages women/female-presenting people get are significantly different from the ones that male-presenting people get. Logically, if loving my body includes doing nice things for it, that includes the flu shot that means I'm less likely to suffer fever and muscle aches, at least as much as it includes adornments like makeup, tattoos, or pretty clothing.

[recessional]

That's a very different approach than "it doesn't matter what race you are or how much you weigh, you can make yourself attractive," which can wind up back with women expected to be pretty, and make some effort toward that, as rent for living in the world.

It can, but (largely on behalf of very dear friends, because the entire ~*thing*~ doesn't work for me) I also tend to push back at this because the flipside it can also present the utterly radical idea "you are still allowed to participate in these cultural rituals that you love and find joy in, and it is still meaningfully, importantly possible that other people will find you sexually appealing in non-dehumanizing, desired-by-you ways and you are allowed to adorn yourself in that expectation/idea."

And "this is a good body because it has me in it" falls very flat for someone who can't rely on a sense of self-worth, or for whom embodiment is (even just currently) fairly unadulterated suffering.

I very much agree with your first paragraph tho.

[kaberett]

Mmm, which I think clarifies for me that a lot of the problem here can actually be usefully described as access clash -- things that work for one person being poison to another.

Thank you for giving me more to chew over!

[niqaeli]

A lot of what you write resonates with me, and I find the discussion in comments really interesting and worthwhile and I am entirely too dead and behind on everything to actually dig into.

I personally have this really, really strong dissonance that I carry, where I consider embodiment (that is, existing physically) vital and important and necessary to the human experience and spiritually important, but also embodiment is endlessly frustrating and infuriating and I would like to just Not Have To, so much of the time, because the work of loving my body in the verb-sense of doing things to care for it is so frequently exhausting.

So often I find myself sympathetic to all concerned when stuff like this comes up and also very tired and would just like to take a nap, except actually what I'd like is to take a break from reality and existing and not just a break from conscious thought. >_>

[kaberett]

... yeah. <3

I mean. You will observe that I have in fact tagged this post "my least favourite hobbies: embodiment". Which is a tad unhelpful of me, but is also, I feel, Accurate.

There has been a bunch more discussion should you wish to skim it, and I wish you luck for feeling less utterly overwhelm, though GIVEN EVERYTHING THAT'S GOING ON etc etc etc. <3

[(Anonymous)]

v interesting discussion, thank you. For me, Hopkins' poem that begins "My own heart" (you surely know it, but if not do Google!) has been really importantly helpful, even if I disagree with his conclusion.
sidheag, on phone

I'm glad I saved this to read later

[jesse_the_k]

...because so many interesting ideas have sprouted here.

Thank you for the original essay, and I would love to know who pain clinics are for, having recently dodged one and accepted another. The second was gratifying, even though it didn't actually do anything for my pain.

Also "it doesn't mean rotten" is a lovely turn of phrase.

[azurelunatic]

The "that which reliably causes you misery doesn't have to be Your Friend" concept is Very Helpful to my relationship with my ex-uterus. NO JOY WAS BROUGHT BY THAT THING, LET ME TELL YOU. (I suspect but cannot prove that my utter loathing and "get it out get it out get it out" was pretty well in line with when it started to Go All Wrong.)