Rejecting 'Body Image' – Reclaiming Intrinsic Beauty Part 2

‘Body image’ – as it exists in Western Industrial Culture – is not an innate human concern. It is one that is implanted in us. One culturally produced image at a time, we are taught and told what a body of merit and value looks, sounds and behaves like. We are even told what a body of value and merit prioritizes. These teachings are some of the most foundational in our obedience to a culture that cannot afford our female-identified, Earth-betrothed, truth-seeing and speaking autonomy.

Last week Alyssa shared with us her experience growing up as a small but mighty gymnast, wonderfully unaware of the external expectations regarding the cultural construct of ‘body image’. It wasn’t until she stopped doing gymnastics, and her body grew and re-shaped itself, (and she stepped outside the tight community of her gymnast peers and coaches) that she entered the world of self-consciousness, self-judgment and the external measurements of her value and worth.

I had a very different experience from Alyssa. I came into my early childhood deeply aware of the expectations my culture had of me to look and act a certain way. As a tall, large-framed girl I did not fit into the narrow parameters offered to girls and women. In ways so painful to remember, in my search for direction and guidance, like so many young girls, I found things like Seventeen Magazine, with their petite teen models extolling the benefits of low-fat cottage cheese and carrot stick diets and daily squats and sit-ups for flat abs and round buttocks. Then there was the endless array of new colors and flavors of lip gloss to make our smiles ‘just pop!’ And just the right mascara to thicken, lengthen, and darken. The messaging was clear and overt: there are only a few things to be concerned with and they all center solely on physical appearance and conformity. And there, within the privacy of my suburban bedroom, occurred repeated small, but nonetheless significant, deaths.

Yet for some reason, I wasn’t left to become a shell of myself as so many of us are. Through some miracle I heard about an experimental early college called Simon’s Rock. At 16, after dropping out of high school at the beginning of the 10th grade, off I went to start my college career. There I met Lenore. Lenore was my first boyfriend’s mother, and the woman who quickly became my first healthy female role model. First of all, she was a ‘feminist’ and as far as I was aware, I had never actually met a real-live feminist before. She didn’t shave her legs or her armpits. And she was smart, joyful, bright and curious. She was also relentlessly, intelligently critical of mainstream culture. She questioned everything, but she did it with an open mind. I had never been exposed to someone who was intelligently critical as opposed to merely judgemental and dismissive. The permission this gave me, to question and decide for myself, was immeasurable in my rewilding.

I remember an exchange we had early on in our relationship. Without a hint of judgment, just pure curiosity, she asked, “why do you wear eye make-up?” I answered reflexively, as if reading the cover of Seventeen Magazine or quoting my mother: “It makes me feel good.” She responded, “Why does wearing make-up make you feel good?” I opened my mouth to answer but, really, I was already floundering. No one had ever asked me anything like these questions before and I realized anything that would come out of my mouth in response to her second question wouldn’t be the truth. The truth would have been, “Actually I do it because I’ve done it for years now, and I don’t really think about it. It’s just what women do.” Except that, now that I’d met Lenore, I knew it wasn’t just what all women do. This was an unforgettable moment in the unraveling of my obedience. Did I really need to wear stuff that smudged and stung my eyes in order to be, or feel, beautiful? Who decided that? What if I didn’t obey? What would I risk losing? What would I actually lose? 

At the Verdant Collective we focus on all that is wildly well in and around us. If we come from this angle then we might even ask a different question entirely: if I disenfranchise what is not well, and I do it within intimate women’s community, what will generate in its place?

Lenore was a lifelong activist, a mathematician, a gardener, a cook, a mother, a wife and a passionate ally and advocate for women. Getting to know Lenore meant getting to participate in women’s culture as it can and does exist, in protected pockets, within the mainstream world. She passionately tended to the women in her communities and I would regularly arrive at the house after classes to find her visiting with one or more women whether they were fellow faculty members, partners of faculty, or staff. After knowing Lenore for only a few months she invited me and several other female students to train as rape crisis volunteer responders and counselors so we could establish a local Rape Crisis Center. This was the second measurable experience of reweaving wellness. Reorienting my value and worth, by tending to well-women’s culture, made it almost impossible to look at myself the same way or use the same superficial metrics I had been taught. What did my appearance have to do with my capacity to be of value to those I cared most about?  

This may not seem like it has anything to do with body image. But as it turns out, it has everything to do with it. Dominant Culture does not actually care about our body image. It cares about maintaining the leverage it has over us when we are consumed by ours. If we tend to our wellness by nurturing our genuine, constructive belonging to each other and the larger world, we create an inhospitable environment for the absurd and deadly introjects that tell us what our bodies ought to look like. I remember, during that first year at Simon’s Rock, becoming aware of all the introjects I had absorbed in my first 16 years; all the shoulds and shouldn’ts, all the expectations and practices I assumed were simply the way things are, simply because they were what everyone around me was doing and believing. The more I was offered the chance to see them and choose for myself, the more they just fell away as I realized they had nothing to do with me. 

Though Alyssa’s early experience was quite different from mine (as I imagine was yours from both of ours), the thread running through all our stories is likely the one that illustrates the power of culture/community to tell us who and what we are, when we are isolated and alienated from our own inner knowing and curiosity. Whether we are in a community that expects allegiance and obedience, requiring us to adopt its centralized mono-cropped concept of beauty, worth, and value, or we are in a community that doesn’t place any value at all on our physical appearance, but rather encourages us to participate, learn, grow and develop according to our own utterly unique nature, that community has the power to instill in us a guidance system that will either domesticate us or feed our innate wildness.

In crafting our new course – ‘Rejecting Body Image, Claiming Intrinsic Beauty’, starting on May 7th, we are excited to create a community that will coax us to identify, and then step out of, our indoctrinations and domesticity. We are excited to identify some of the ways many of us have been affected by Industrial Culture’s fabricated construct of ‘body image’ and to do spontaneous, self-designed, communal ceremonies to mark beginnings and endings. And even more, we are eager to explore and raucously celebrate the unique and beautiful selves waiting patiently at the center of our wellness. Please join us for 8 weeks of healing and laughter, stories, practices, experiments, reclamation and revolution!