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 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.