I got thinking about this after the last Prof. Foxy post, and the stuff that went on there. There was a very transphobic comment relating to breasts. However, I noticed that a lot of the subsequent comments argued against that comment not with "This is transphobic" but "Breasts ARE great." I was dismayed not only with the point being missed, but also with the implications for women who don't experience their breasts as great.
I've noticed that there seems to be a trend within feminism regarding what is or is not an acceptable way to view your own body. I've always gotten this vibe from a lot of feminists: If you don't see every little nook and cranny of your body as amazing, then you're a self-hating loser who's just playing into the hands of the patriarchy.
I think that attitude is REALLY a bad one. There is much to be said for loving your body. But not everyone does. And it's not always because we're brainwashed.
As far as breasts go, I was a little perturbed to see that the prevailing attitude was not "I personally think my breasts are great" but "Breasts are great, full stop." Sorry, I have to disagree with that. I don't have a particularly negative relationship with mine, mind you, but they're far from the top of the list of body parts I relish on myself.
The other example I can think of that I've had personal experience with is periods. I'll be straight: I hate periods. And mine aren't crippling or causing me medical problems. I just hate them. I suppress them with hormonal birth control and just the second I am able, I am going to have an endometrial ablation to be rid of them forever.
But whenever I or anyone else espouses this attitude, we tend to be met with weirdness or downright hostility. We "aren't real women" or we're "rejecting our femininity," or other some such. Some people even advocate that we shouldn't even be able to make the choice to suppress periods.
Why do people have such strong reactions to other people's attitudes about their own bodies? Why is it anyone else's business, for one thing, and another, what is so wrong with having a negative relationship with part of your body?
I have a negative relationship with my wisdom teeth, for much the same reason as I dislike periods. They are both uncomfortable, distracting, and something I'd just rather not deal with, even though neither is causing me any real medical problems. But I have a hard time imagining anyone would be getting in my face if I decided to get my wisdom teeth removed.
I don't notice anyone advocating for EVERYONE to hate their breasts or stop their periods. But I see a lot of the opposite. This is ignoring and devaluing the very real experiences of people who have problems with parts of their bodies, for whatever reasons. So why is this such a common (and often emotional) reaction with some people?
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i didn't see the original comments you're referring to, but i just wanted to stop by and say you're right and thanks for pointing it out to everyone.
posts like this are what makes feministing educational and worthwhile
I agree with you that we need to be open and flexible to differing attitudes towards our bodies. I do think there's a significant difference between hating your period and hating your wisdom teeth, though. Hating your wisdom teeth is something that occurs outside of a gendered framework. You haven't been receiving implicit and explicit messages all your life that wisdom teeth are gross and taboo and make you disgusting and untouchable. This is not the case when it comes to your period, or your ladybits in general, for that matter. So I think this is not a great analogy.
However, I agree that the goal should not be to force everyone to love their period and breasts and everything about their body. I found the "breasts are great!" comments a bit off-putting too. The only thing I've always appreciated about my breasts is that they're neither flat nor gynormous, since I've always been athletic and thought having large breasts would be irritating. Having said that, I have a great appreciation for their functionality now that I've had the experience of breastfeeding. And in general the things I love most about my body are the really functional features. I love my broad muscular shoulders and strong thigh and ab muscles. I love how effortless it is for me to hike up a steep trail or take on a difficult crack climb. And I think that the positive body image movement loses its way when it emphasizes sexualized body parts or emphasizes our appearance rather than how our bodies enable us to move through the world and accomplish our goals. That's where positive body image comes from for men, so why keep constructing the female body as valuable only insofar as it's nice to look at? Not all that feminist, in my book. On the other hand, my approach can become very ableist, and I'm extremely wary about that.
But I do think we should try to be very aware of and critical of either very positive or very negative messages concerning the parts of the female body that are generally sexualized and/or stigmatized. Because I think it's very naive to assume that our attitudes toward our own bodies are uninformed by the culture we've developed in and are still immersed in. Nobody's impervious to the plethora of messages around them concerning the female body. So I agree that we should try to sort of reclaim the concept of periods and change the way female bodies are viewed in our culture.
Hi, I'm the original poster (I really wish it would use your given name and not your login name for these...)
I agree with what you're saying, for the most part. I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but your first paragraph still has undertones of "Oh, you've just been brainwashed by society, you don't REALLY believe that." Which for me, and I'm sure countless others, isn't true. And that also doesn't excuse hostile reactions to the subject (yours wasn't, by the way).
I agree that we need, as a society, to build more positive and less sexist attitudes about female bodies. And I really like your ideas about value in functionality. I try to utilize that attitude myself. (Although that attitude about my body is precisely what leads me to hate periods, which inhibit my ability to function well). Function does seem to be lacking in how we view women, in favor of form.
Sure, and I never intended to say that it's something you don't believe, so I'm sorry if it came off that way. My point is just that in cases where our culture is saturated with negative messages, we have to be especially thoughtful about how this influences us. And even in cases where your attitude or belief is profoundly shaped by your culture, I don't think that's a case where you don't really believe it. Of course you believe it. My question concerns why you believe it.
And I think it's an important feminist pursuit to really be very critical of our cutlure and the influence it has on our views and attitudes toward ourselves as well as others. Simply saying "any attitude a woman has toward her body is perfectly OK and not open to scrutiny" is not helpful in that it fosters a continuation of the same old crap we've been indoctrinated with all our lives.
I can assure you that I have thought critically about this.
As far as everyone else goes, I don't know everyone else's story. I do think that every belief should be open to scrutiny, and should be subjected to critique often. But again, that is a problem with our culture (bad attitudes to begin with + no value placed on critical thinking), not with individual women.
Yes, I agree that the issue isn't with individual women, and my concern is to address it as a systemic issue.
What annoyed me about the original comments though was that boobs were always assumed to be great because of some sort of function. I am physcially incapable of breastfeeding and get no particular pleasure from people touching them. To me they are nothing more than excess skin.
As a feminist I try to steer away from emphasising signifiers of being female-bodied. If people like a part of their body then that's great but it should be because of somthing that they as individuals like about it rather liking it simply because we're "supposed" to as "women"
Right. I guess my main point got sort of lost along the way somewhere. I'm simply trying to say that in cases where our culture assigns a lot of positive or negative meaning and value to a particular female body part or process, then we should be very critical of our own attitudes toward those body parts, because there's almost no chance that our attitudes toward our bodies are not deeply influenced by our culture. So I still think that it's a veery different thing to hate your period or your breasts or whatever than to hate your wisdom teeth. In this case I think the cultural context is very important.
But as I noted in my earler comment, I didn't think the "I love my boobs" comments were appropriate either. It would be great if women could move away from loving or accepting their bodies based on appearance and how attractive they are to hetero males and find a new framework for valuing themselves. That's all I'm saying.
Great post.
I think the reason it may be such an emotional reaction for a lot of people is because many people have had really poor opinions of their body that could have contributed to or resulted from eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, etc. I know for myself, the only way I could accept my body during my recovery was to accept it as a whole thing that housed who I am. When I split myself into parts--my arms or my stomach, etc--was when I would run into problems. Accepting my body as a whole where each part had a function was the only way I could be happy with it.
I think that could account for some of the comments. Shaming other people's views on their bodies is definitely not the way to go, but I do think it is important to recognize that in some cases, the dislike or ambivalence to body parts could come from a place of disordered thought. I wouldn't assume thats where everyone is coming from, but it could explain the hostility of reactions.
Because there's no middle ground when it comes to oppressed peoples. When you grow up learning that you're either a prude or a slut etc., it's hard to get out of that dichotomous thinking. It becomes "you either love your body or hate your body."
I also think that when a woman is at all critical of her body, other women might see it as a step towards hating your body. It's not an unfounded concern. Women don't wake up one day hating their bodies after years of loving them. It's gradual. It takes years of being told that no matter how we look, we're ugly, before we start to think of our bodies negatively.
But why do we have to love them? Too often the emphasis on loving your body comes within the framework of sexualisation. It comes with the subtext that you will love your body because you recognise its desirability.
I don't like being in an obviously gendered body. I am not trans but I get sick of the focus on body parts which deem me "female". Why do I have to love my boobs in order for people to believe that I have high self-esteem? They get in my way and serve no purpose but if I am to be a confident woman I am supposed to love them when they do absolutely nothing for me and only get a reaction in men. How is that empowering?
I disagree that loving your body has something to do with seeing your body as sexually desirable. As an asexual woman (I don't like that term, but "asexual" is the best I can do right now), it doesn't make a difference to me whether or not my body is sexually desirable. I'm still someone who enjoys my body and likes to look at it. It's not perfect (because there's no such thing as a woman's body being perfect), but it's mine. I used to dislike some parts, but I learned to like them.
I also don't think one has to love their body. There are a lot of times when your body works against you. I just think it's dangerous to hate your body. That's not to say that one has to change their body to love it, or that one has to learn to live with the body they have. I think it's important to go about changing or accepting your body in a healthy way.
I agree that its dangerous to hate your body. I just prefer taking the focus away from our bodies rather than focusing on loving them. Women's bodies are always under such scrutiny in society that I think removing the emphasis is better than trying to work within an already misogynstic paradigm.
I believe it is natural for people to dislike certain parts of their body, for whatever reason. It happens to everyone and that doesn't make you a bad person or a bad feminist. I can TOTALLY understand your hatred of periods - it's really hard to love something that can be so freaking annoying sometimes ;)
However, the way *some* people act upon the negative relationships with their body parts does seem anti-feminist to me. For example, I know a few female friends of mine that are downright hypocritical when it comes to the feminist mindset and body image. They proclaim, "All body types can be beautiful!" yet call themselves fat and obsess about weight so much it is RIDICULOUS. It seems like in those types of situations they are playing into the media hype about all women needing to be super skinny in order to be attractive, and I can't wrap my head around how that jives with their feminist advocacy at all.
It all depends on the situation, really. I know we all have problems with accepting our bodies at times, but it's all about working to overcome that and finding some positivity in the things we've been known to hate.
I think there's a very big point everyone has so far missed: There is a big difference between disliking your body or some part of your body, and disliking *yourself* because of your body. That is, there is a BIG difference between thinking "I hate my breasts, they are so small (or whatever)" vs "I hate myself because my breasts are so small."
The difference is that in one case you are basing your self -esteem or sense of self-worth on your body, in the other you are not. I would argue that to base your sense of self-worth on your body is still unhealthy even if you then come to feel that your body is beautiful no matter what.
You are not your body. You can be beautiful in an ugly body, or ugly in a beautiful one. Parts of your body can be very annoying, or cause you discomfort or ridicule - and I don't think that the desire to escape ridicule is entirely without credibility. Your body should work FOR you. Not the other way around. If there is something you don't like that you can easily change without risk to yourself (or at a risk you feel is acceptable), then there is no reason not to do it. There are many things wrong with our society - but society is everywhere, it guides every decision we make. Feminism is a part of "society." If we were to refrain from doing things because there was some "societal" pressure one way or the other, we would never be able to do anything at all.
As a trans woman, I have spent most of my life disliking most of my body. I've managed to get by by recognizing that my body is not *me*, by changing what I can, and by learning to live with the rest.
Excellent point. There is a big distinction there.
Yeah, I'm always annoyed when people try to shame me into enjoying my period. Why should I embrace something that causes physical pain, raises my body temp a few degrees, and occasionally ruins my underwear?
Because of the beauty standards that exist there is a tendency for women to view their bodies negatively. Feminists push the idea of "love your body" to counter this trend. But ultimately, ever person is going to have a unique relationship with their own body, everyone is different and everybody is different. You can't TELL someone what sort of relationship they have, or should have.
For everything in life, you ultimately have to either accept it or fix it. The problem is when you do neither and it becomes a source of angst. When it comes to one's body, fixing it usually involves a lot of dieting and exercising, or even surgery. Usually it is better just to accept your body. That's not the same as liking or loving it, but accepting it is often necessary.
I liked Zyfron's comment, though as a trans woman she undoubtedly knows how hard the "fix it" route can be; on the other hand she probably chose that route because she realized that accepting her male body would be even harder. There was also a woman who had tuberous breasts and was going to get breast surgery and posted about it on feministing. I personally plan on working on upper body strength which is admittedly for the sake of male attractiveness. So there are examples where the 'fix it' route is better.
Ultimately, you just have to stop and think about it, what would it take to 'fix it' versus just accepting things the way they are?
To tell all women that they must love their bodies is simply a push to the other extreme, away from the societal and media mantra that all women must hate their bodies. I feel the same way when reading statements like that about breasts. Yes, some people love theirs, and that's great. However, mine are about three times too large for my frame and cause me back problems, permanent shoulder grooves and numbness of my upper extremities. I do NOT love mine, and I do not think I'm rejecting my femininity for seeking a breast reduction or for vocalizing my dissatisfaction with this aspect of my body.
Ahhhh, the almighty titties. Here's a question for Mr. Freud...why do men love them so freaking much?