anthurium

I’ve been reading Eve Ensler’s “The Good Body.” For those of you who aren’t aware, Eve Ensler wrote the Vagina Monologues. She’s one of my she-roes.

Here’s an excerpt:

“When I was a little girl people used to ask me, What do you want to be when you grow up? Good, I would say. I want to be good. Becoming good was harder than becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lifeguard. There are tests to pass to become those things–you have to learn dissection or conquer gravity or practice treading water.

Becoming good was not like that. It was abstract. It felt completely out of reach. It became the only thing that mattered to me. If I could be good, everything would be all right. I would fit in. I would be popular. I would skip death and go straight to heaven. If you asked me now what this means, to be good, I still don’t know exactly. When I was growing up in the fifties, ‘good’ was simply what girls were supposed to be…

In recent years, good girls climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. They wear lipstick if they’re lesbians; they wear lipstick if they’re not. They don’t eat too much. They don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin.

I could never be good. This feeling of badness lives in every part of my being. Call it anxiety or despair. Call it guilt or shame. It occupies me everywhere. The older, seemingly clearer and wiser I get, the more devious, globalized, and terrorist the badness becomes. I think for many of us — well, maybe for all of us — there is one particular part of our body where the badness manifests itself, our thighs, our butt, our beats, our hair, our nose, our little toe. You know what I’m talking about?…

Everywhere, the women I meet generally hate one particular part of their bodies. They spend most of their lives fixing it, shrinking it…It’s as if they’ve been given their own little country called their body, which they get to tyrannize, clean up, or control while they lose sight of the world.”

Eve goes on to explain that, “What I can’t believe is that someone like me, a radical feminist for nearly thirty years, could spend this much time thinking about my stomach.”

Reading that made me feel much better about the discrepancy between my beliefs and feelings about my body. For me, and probably many other millennial and gen-X women “perfect” is a better adjective that describes what I aspire to be than “good.” The idea remains the same; our culture has merely upped the ante for what is expected of women. We’re supposed to be “one of the guys,” and be feminine as well, and to maintain our appearances without appearing to put effort into doing so or complaining about it. We’re supposed to aspire to corporate domination and also be perfect mothers. We’re supposed to be sexualized, but not “skanky.” The impossibility of reconciling these dualistic expectations leads to guilt and shame. It is easier to embed our guilt and shame in our bodies than to examine the real source.

(To be certain, there are similar paradoxes embedded in the concept of masculinity. However, I will steer clear of discussion on them, since I am only equipped to understand them on an intellectual, rather than emotional or experiential level.)

Perfectionism robs me of joy by polarizing my attitude. If I perceive my efforts in all-or-nothing terms, I’m less likely to celebrate my successes or learn from my mistakes. Shades of gray, rather than black and white, define the contours of reality.

Perfectionism is deeply intertwined with my sense of disembodiment or discomfort with my body at the emotional level. This project is helping me see other women of size as beautiful, but for some reason, it’s taking longer for me to be able to apply these perceptions to my own body. Asinine and ass-backward, I know, for I have the same mix of attributes and talents and attitudes as any other human on the planet. There’s no reason I should judge myself with any less compassion or love than I would apply to any other person, simply because I happen to be embodied in this particular vessel. True change generally happens incrementally, so I suppose that in time, my attitude about my body will continue to evolve if I keep working on it.

Trackback URL