kaberett | On hating one's body & love as praxis

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On hating one's body & love as praxis

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.

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(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.)

♥

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 :) )

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.

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.'")

*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.

Edited 2017-09-12 22:56 (UTC)

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

- 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. :(

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.

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."

Oh gosh, yes to this.

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.

*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).

Edited 2017-09-13 17:00 (UTC)

... see also pro-choice...

Misery: yeah, my body doesn't make me miserable very much, these days, and when it does it's in "normal" ways (I loathe and resent having colds), or I've got coping strategies (in particular for lungs, my "I am awful and useless and don't deserve to exist in the world" gets redirected into defensive rage and fury at people poisoning me), or I'm in no fit state to string a sentence together let alone actually talk to people, so it's not going to show up online much. I was distraught, for several years, about the bit where it's highly unlikely that I'll ever do serious hiking again -- and I get much more distressed and agitated and miserable about this every single time I interact with a pain clinic or a medic who's all "so why exactly do you use a wheelchair, you're too young for that" (BECAUSE IT MEANS I CAN ACTUALLY DO THINGS LIKE GO TO ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS AND ENJOY MYSELF INSTEAD OF WALLOWING FIVEEVA, FUCK. OFF.) -- plus a bunch of related, but I've... mostly made my peace with it, and I've mostly adjusted.

So in fact some of where I'm coming from is having non-trivial experience with being made miserable by or being scared of my body, and knowing how much happier I am over here. (It was kind of a Revelation when I was, temporarily, on a drug regime that meant I didn't hurt. I hadn't realised how afraid I was of being in pain until I... wasn't. And then the drugs stopped working, because of course they did, but luckily I managed to keep hold of "not being afraid of pain" and wow was that a significant improvement in my quality of life.) This does, of course, mean I'm a bit prone to doing the autistic evangelism thing of "but this approach is making you sad, I promise you don't actually want to do it, do this instead" + blank incomprehension at people struggling with that because of course I've forgotten the emotional specifics of the grieving process I went through to get here, in the visceral sense, so it's very easy (isn't it always) to default to "but if you just..." when there's no "just" or "easy" or "simple" about it.

(I think this also shows up in my approach to counselling -- a lot of the time, if I'm feeling agitated or angry or distressed, it's because My Model Was Wrong and things didn't happen within expected parameters and therefore I understand Nothing about the entire world and that's terrifying. A lot of my distress and almost all of my anger just... evaporates, once I've got a working model for What The Hell Just Happened. Similarly, now that I've wrapped my head around the complex version of "loving my body", I've got the working model of "my body is not an antagonist" and it's Completely Obvious to me that All Other Models Are Broken -- that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean -- and that therefore if I just EXPLAIN this one well enough...)

(... and on top of that, of course, there's the layered and contradictory thing of second-hand distress at, more than anything else, my body remembering how miserable hating myself like that was. I'm intellectually sort of indifferent to it? But I get a significant physical and apparently subconcious stress response to people talking about how much they hate their bodies, and talking this through is at least in part an attempt to gently persuade myself that people who are in that place aren't trying to tell me that I have to go back to hating my body.)

So. I think you are quite right about approaches, and I in fact have a post brewing (revisiting the antifa discussion) about our tendency as a species to reduce things to handy shorthand mnemonics that are actively counter-productive if they're not supplied with, as you say, all the footnotes, and about needing to try out both "extremes" in order to develop the skills to end up somewhere nuanced in the middle, but that is... not a job for tonight.

(Engaging with the permission-to-express-negativity is going in a different comment because I think it's a bit tangential and it might be easier to manage the conversation if etc etc etc!)

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, ahahaha, this is actually also one I have... sideways problems with? In that:

I didn't have any good models of conflict resolution (or... any, really)
I got a whole bunch of the Catholic "you shouldn't ask [G-d] for things", compounded by my father being terrible (telling us to stop wasting his time, which was worth £x/minute, etc etc)
we could have whatever feelings we liked as long as they were quiet, but if we ever e.g. went to our father with "sibling was hurting me" or whatever, we'd all get lined up and hit for disturbing him; positive interaction/emotion also wasn't okay if it was noisy (and dinner had to be on the table at 7pm sharp so the radio could go on for the thing that started at 7.02 and played for 15 minutes, during which we had to eat in absolute silence or ditto get yelled at)
as a result, the times that I tried to express negative feelings at school about e.g. being put on a team captained by my worst bullies, 8-year-old me thought that anything more detailed than "no, I don't want to" would get them hit... and of course then my teacher called me a brat for stamping my foot and being petulant or whatever
... and my mother, though I don't fault her for this, really struggled with my middle brother being violent and noisy and how poorly I coped with this, such that I kind of wasn't allowed to express negative emotions about that either
... and didn't really challenge my father when he blamed her (or me) for being the source of all the arguments/disruption/etc, such that I very much got taught that saying or doing anything at all meant anything "bad" that happened was My Fault
My Shitty Ex Dear Goodness
oh, right, and of course throughout I kept being told that I was just saying I was in pain for attention, and that everybody got cramps, and was carefully and deliberately concealing my mental illnesses from healthcare providers firstly because I totally didn't have any and secondly because if I did that would make it even harder to get the physical stuff taken seriously instead of being dismissed as psychosomatic

... and so on and so forth. A lot of what I'm able to do these days in terms of saying "I'm not happy or okay about this" can be traced directly to the point at which I finally got the endometriosis diagnosis and abruptly started standing up for myself a lot more. And all the subsequent counselling. So... yeah, I have a bunch of difficulty expressing negativity, but a lot of it is in the context of internalising "I shouldn't feel anything at all" throughout a childhood and adolescence of severe chronic untreated depression/trauma, which is not quite the same thing, and also in a context of honestly being more afraid of having/expressing positive feelings, such that some of what's going on when I flinch away from people defending their right to hate their bodies is... the above-mentioned automatic interpretation that they're telling me that I'm not allowed to love mine, and if I think I do I'm deluded, and... you can see where that one goes.

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.

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. >_>

I totally can yes.

And yeah I think that results in a sort of . . . thirty-degrees-off clash with people who are struggling with having been fed, often force-fed, the "YOU MUST BE POSITIVE, HAPPY AND UPBEAT, YOU MUST FEEL THIS WAY ALL THE TIME, AND IF YOU DON'T YOUR UNHAPPINESS IS YOUR OWN FAULT" so that anything at all that has the shape of "loving your body is good!" [where, it's worth noting, "love" IS MEANING the "have warm fuzzy positive feelings about it" meaning] means they think YOU'RE (or whoever is) telling them "you're not allowed to be unhappy about things that cause you pain or the situation you're in."

And since it's not a nice clear even 90-degrees clash, but a weird sideways 30degrees one, that's a bit harder, I think.

Hahah and ironically I'm going to braid the permission-to-express-negativity back in, because I think it is kind of an important element?

Because it's not even express, I think is an important thing here: for a lot of people who struggle with the idea of "body positivity", they weren't allowed to feel negative about things (or aren't being allowed to now, or whatever). So that for them, they have at the same time been stuck in the middle of experiencing their body as Something That Causes Them Misery, while also having often been forced not only to outwardly praise and tolerate things that cause them misery, but have been told if they don't INTERNALLY ALSO have Wonderful Warm Feelings towards these things, they are Bad.

And it may actually be that for this person, being allowed to actually Feel Things is a much bigger issue/impediment than whether or not they view specifically their body as an antagonist or an ally. So it's not even that they're on a metaphorically different spot in the journey of grieving/etc, but that their journey is actually a totally different one, with different Points of Importance.

Now I happen to actually agree with you that not actively engaging with one's body as an enemy is a better idea? But that's also part of why when talking about it I tend to foreground the "you are allowed to have these feelings, these feelings are a totally reasonable response and there is no MORAL imperative for you to change these feelings. That said you may have better practical effects from changing this approach slightly, if that's available."? Sometimes it still doesn't work, because their journey is that different, but sometimes it's better.

(And I mean: I picked that up because 95% of body-positivity creates exactly that hostility in me. Because I absolutely got the "you are not allowed to have these negative feelings" crap force-fed in many, many spheres and my slightly inconvenient protective adaptation became "my negative feelings are going to get so big and so scary that YOU CANNOT DENY THEM". Which ironically means that being encouraged to love my body increases my intense antipathy for it. >.>)

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.

Hell, anything, really. See me and my Complicated Disagreement with large chunks of the disability activism community on the right to end your life on your terms, even if this eventually requires external assistance. ("Complicated" here being an important part of that descriptor: I agree with many, many of their concerns! I EMPHATICALLY DISAGREE with their flat decision that as a result This Is Inherently Ablist And If You're For It You're Terrible. It's complicated.)]

It doesn't mean I think the short descriptors are totally useless? Just that like most philosophical terms (cuz that's what they are) they do need to be defined before the conversation can proceed, in a lot of cases.

Part of what's tricky here is that while I don't generally participate in those cultural rituals, I do know that some other people will find me sexually appealing, and in small ways do adorn myself with that in mind.

But I'm also thinking about the sort of ad campaign whose "all women are beautiful" really means "we are trying to sell shampoo or cosmetics to a larger group of not-too-old women, some of them heavier than the current cultural expectations." So, yes, you don't have to be white, under 30, or thin to be beautiful, and that's a valuable message, but if you still have to be or look pre-menopausal and within a certain weight range, it's not "all women are beautiful" or "all bodies are attractive," or even "any shape of body can be attractive if you wear nice clothes and make sure to brush your hair."

YOU WILL BE SHOCKED TO DISCOVER THAT I'M EMPHATICALLY WITH YOU ON THAT ONE.

I AM ASTONISHED TO FIND GAMBLING IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT I mean what. >.>

You are very welcome!

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On hating one's body & love as praxis

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