On hating one's body & love as praxis
Sep. 12th, 2017 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThere 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:
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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-13 06:20 am (UTC)- 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. :(
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-13 08:17 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-13 04:59 pm (UTC)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).
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-13 06:00 pm (UTC)... see also pro-choice...
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 12:44 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 05:23 pm (UTC)I AM ASTONISHED TO FIND GAMBLING IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT I mean what. >.>
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 09:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-15 02:12 am (UTC)I am also firm in my belief that we are epically inadequate in the help we give those who are suffering and we need to fix that. But that fact does not in fact erode my belief in radical personal sovereignty and in fact just about my entire moral and ethical conception of the universe is based in that.
So it's something I'm pretty dug-heels-in stubborn about, and . . . yeah. End sermon to choir etc. But yeah.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 08:57 pm (UTC)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
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-14 11:04 pm (UTC)A bunch of stuff I just deleted but to do with PEOPLE USING WORDS WRONG might explain a decent chunk of my work-related anxiety; I think I seem to be defaulting to Deep Suspicion as to *why* the words are wrong, rather than Presumption of Innocence. So all my dealings with my office are shaded with 'Is this malice or incompetence? If malice, why? If incompetence, HOW ARE THEY ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH IT?', complete with feedback loop to the person presumed to be letting 'them' 'get away with it'.
(An actual conversation between me and someone more senior than me, with the word 'Manager' in their job title, after a string of emails relating to some changes in my contract when I requested a reduction in hours:
Manager: You can't just not sign your contract.
Me: ... And you can't just give me a pile of nonsense and expect me to sign it.
*Mutual stares of blank incomprehension*)
(I was working on the assumption that legally we were all going to remain bound by the terms of my previous contract until I signed a new one, and that it SHOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT for them to do things like define their terms and, oh, put the correct start date and job title on the paperwork BUT HEY).
... the Ongoing Thing in your second paragraph sounds like it will be a fascinating explanation of religion as practiced by some of my more annoying relatives.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-09-19 12:53 am (UTC)Tangential, but I just realized that 'PEOPLE USING WORDS WRONG' is part of what drives me to poetry, betimes; I wield language to carve an exactness of relationship with words' weight and sense, seeking such precision that I establish common definition, or redefinition as needed, for myself and everyone who reads or hears it.
Restoring language, expanding language, sharing language; sharing the tools to make language apt and fun and sing.