The Body is Not a Burden to Be Shed at the Door
/Emily Polson, Issue 07
Content Warnings: suicidal ideation, eating disorders, fat shaming
Every woman I know remembers the moment the outside world crept beneath her skin, making her body into a thing she was expected to hate.
Not all of them can pinpoint a moment when this sensation stopped. I could only see it in retrospect: that the day I stopped hating my body was the same day I stopped believing I was responsible for the way men responded to it. That was my catalyst to realizing I’d lost the boundary between my skin and the world. From there, I began to regain a lost ownership of something that had been mine all along. Something I had no inherent reason to be at war against.
This is the story of how the world infiltrated my body, and how, like sweating out a fever, I banished it again.
First Movement: My Body as a Burden
This story doesn’t begin with the male gaze, but once the seeds of body shame are planted, they grow toward whatever one’s cultural context tells them is the sun.
I am at the doctor’s office in first grade. The pediatrician shows me two growth charts: my body falls in the 99th percentile for height, but it is off the chart for weight. I look down at my chubby thighs, which seem wider than I remember when spread out on the exam room table. I stick to the sanitary paper cover and have to peel it away when I stand to leave.
The next time I play with my friends, I realize that yes, I am taller, but I am also fatter. I can pick them up, give them piggy-back rides across the yard. When they try to carry me—two of them together—they groan under my weight, can’t take a single step forward. I never ask them to try again.
As a Girl Scout Brownie, I attend an event on “healthy living” hosted in the elementary school cafeteria. A tall thin man with a stern voice monologues on the danger of diabetes, tells us the best way to avoid getting it is to stay slim and trim. At the break, I stare at my body in the bathroom mirror.
After this, I try to starve myself. Write in my diary that I am fat, and ugly, and bad. I promise to stop eating breakfast. Or lunch. Or both. I try, but I cave every time. I’m just so hungry, I think, and my self-loathing multiplies. I can’t even starve myself right. I tell my mom I want to go on a diet, but she tells me no, children should never diet because their bodies are growing; even if they get wider before they get taller, everything will even out eventually.
Over her shoulder, I watch my older sister succeed where I failed, start withering away. She stares at the chub of my midsection with judgmental eyes, so I keep trying to control myself like her, but I can’t hate my body into something I like again. Sitting at the kitchen table, I threaten suicide, hold a blunt butter knife to my chest and scream that I want to die. My brother, just three years older, sighs, then takes the useless weapon from my pudgy clenched hands and sits with me until I am calm.
Second Movement: My Body as a Temple, and an Instrument Therein
My mother is right. I spend my childhood in ballet class, and my height catches up to my weight. As I creep toward six-foot in my teenage years, people at church tell me I’ve really slimmed out. And while they praise my body, they also preach that it is not my own; it is a temple for worshipping the Lord. But if my body is a holy place, I wonder, then why do they also tell me it is a trigger for sin? Show a shoulder, too much leg, or an inch of midriff, and you invite a man’s lust (always a man’s, always your fault). One Sunday, a boy flicks the flutter sleeve on my blouse and asks my brother—with me standing right there, being examined, being judged—Don’t you think this is exposing something that shouldn’t be exposed?
Female leaders gather us young women in a separate room in the height of summer to lecture us about men and boys, virtue and purity. Do not let them touch you, they say. Do not let them take. Do not allow the house of the Lord to be so thusly violated. They preach that we are worthy because hath God loved us, but what I hear is that I am worthy because of what I keep to myself. Because I am not a chewed-up piece of gum.
My sweaty thighs stick to my plastic seat, and I tug down the edges of my plaid Bermuda shorts, wonder whether a guy would lust after me—fat, ugly, and dressed like this. I glance around the room, notice some girls my age wearing silver purity rings on their left fourth fingers. Their parents have told them their body is a promise to a future husband. Yet some of those same girls wear spaghetti straps, Abercrombie short-shorts, and string bikinis to the pool, gossip about the boys they like. A sense of disgust, of moral superiority, builds inside of me, because the church women have taught me to judge the world as they do: through a man’s eyes, a gaze they say is so naturally inclined to lascivious thoughts that even a child’s body can be guilty of provocation. My self-loathing manifests as self-righteousness on the road to self-preservation.
Though my body is a shameful thing to be hidden from men, in the ballet studio I strip down to nothing but a skintight black leotard and translucent pink tights. The standards are different here, where I am surrounded only by women, and I hate my body for other reasons. Here it is an instrument to play in the temple, albeit badly tuned. I am too tall. My spine grew with a touch of scoliosis, rendering it inflexible and uncooperative with many of my instructors’ corrections. I plow across sprung Marley floors in front of a wall of mirrors, and no matter how much I think skinny thoughts, try to stretch my girth so my stomach has a place to spread into, I still see the line where my tights dig into my waist.
The world has undermined my body from all directions, succeeded in making me feel bad about myself for the space I take up, my physical ability, and even the suggestion of sexuality. By fourteen, I am knocked to the knees of self-worth, no barrier left between my body and the world. People tell me, You’re so tall, you should model, or You’re so tall, you should be a Rockette, but I know that though I’m slimmer now, I’m still not slim. I slouch when I walk to hide my height. In every photo, my head is tilted a little to the left. Still, the stress of dancing fifteen hours a week delays puberty; I don’t get my period until high school, and at graduation, my breasts still don’t fill out my A-cup bras.
Third Movement: My Body as a Stumbling Block
I go to a Christian college thirteen hours south from my midwestern home, where my body has permission to fill space in a new way. On campus, I am often mistaken for another blonde girl who, like me, is tall but not thin. When we meet, she calls me by my surname and adopts me as her introverted twin. From her, I learn that liking your body is not about the mere presence of positivity; it is about eviscerating the validity of self-hatred. This girl loves herself, owns her height and several pairs of heels. We go shopping, and she feels no shame if her body doesn’t fit standard clothing sizes; she simply looks at her reflection and says, It’s too bad these clothes were not made to fit my body, and keeps browsing.
Her confidence feels like permission to stop believing the things I say to myself in the mirror. I think about my body less, and in turn, I give less brain space to what men think of it. My friend Natalie tells me I would look good with wing-tipped eyeliner. I try it and like it, think, I’m doing this for me. I walk to class armed with wing tips so sharp I could cut a man if I had to.
In literature class, we read the seventeenth-century French play Tartuffe; the title character tells the maid, Dorine, to cover her bosom because “The flesh is weak / And unclean thoughts are difficult to control.” She snaps back, critiques his inability to control himself, and retorts: “if I saw you naked as a beast, / Not all your hide would tempt me in the least.” I look around the classroom, make eye contact with every smirking woman, in solidarity.
I post the lines to Facebook, and while many of these women “like” it, it also provokes a comment war, and soon I’m arguing about modesty and rape culture with my father and my only male friend from college. It’s been 350 years, and the conversation hasn’t changed. Later, a conservative male classmate tags me and a dozen female peers in a note on Facebook, spouting a Tartuffe-like monologue about how women should dress modestly to avoid provoking men’s lust. Like Dorine, I snap back in an essay-length comment, and something inside of me breaks. The weight of responsibility heaped on me to control the urges of others has reached the point of absurdity. So I draw a line between my body and the thoughts of dogmatic men, and for the first time in my life, my skin is a waterproof jacket. Their opinions don’t dampen my self-worth, but fall slick to the ground, and now I stomp in every puddle I see as I make my way through the world. And if a man stumbles at the sight of me? He can help his own damn self back up.
Now I feel free to show my shoulders, wear shorts that fall above my fingertips. Do guys think my bare thighs are seductive or blubbery? Doesn’t matter either way. I stop slouching. Buy a polka-dot bikini online. Glance in the mirror and catch myself staring. I wear no ring on my left hand; my body is promised to no one. If these are to be the men I am surrounded by, I think, then I am content to die a spinster. My “twin” helps me shop for lacy underwear, which I purchase with no intention that anyone else will ever see it on my body. My right hand reaches between my legs, and I discover pleasure all on my own. It is an act of frustrated defiance, and yet—I push down any feeling that tells me it is wrong.
Fourth Movement: My Body as a Vehicle
My body has given up on maintaining a ballerina’s physique, so instead of dragging it to technique class three times a week, I take it across the ocean to a semester abroad. Belfast is the first pedestrian city I have lived in, and with my best friend, we walk everywhere: to class, to church, to the café, to the coast where we hike up a mountain, to the student center where I take salsa classes and flirt with a man named Paul who flirted with me first. In accepting that my body is useless for art now, I free myself up to believe that it is good for so many other things.
I take that body back across the ocean to graduate, then cross it again—this time alone—to teach English in a small Basque village where the bus to the city only runs three times a day. I am so isolated that, for a while, I almost live as if there are no consequences. I eat and drink my fill of bread and wine; I stay up after midnight to talk with friends in America who have just gotten off work, though I feel tied down to no one; I get properly drunk on nights out with teachers twelve years my senior and almost kiss strangers in clubs, but always blush and turn away before it happens. My teenage host siblings start scandalous rumors about me and their young, attractive Basque teacher, and I try on the idea that—if I wanted to—I could be a person about whom such things were true.
But I take care of my body, too. When I was a dancer, I was warned against running because it would make my quadriceps overpower my turnout muscles. Now twice a week, I trudge down to my host family’s garage to use the treadmill, where I think about the metaphorical resonance of the fact that I am running nowhere. Still, I strengthen my thighs so I can take my body other places: to Italy, to Iceland, to Andalucía. I ride in overnight buses and cramped budget airlines, stay in hostel dorms with 29 strangers, and wander miles of cityscapes alone. I can do this, I tell myself, because my body is young and tough and resilient and mine. What matters is what it can do, not what it looks like while doing it. I am living without a witness. I have shaved my legs for the last time. When I hit new records on my phone’s pedometer, I thank the beautiful sack of flesh and muscle that carries me through the world.
Fifth Movement: My Body as a Vessel
I’m twenty-four and living in New York, dipping my toes into dating for lots of first times, including a first kiss outside the West 4th St. subway entrance. Half a dozen dates later, I bring this boy home to kiss in the privacy of my bedroom. As I lie on my back, my thick thighs flatten onto the bedspread and my shirt bunches above my belly button. He kneels over me, hungry eyes drinking in all six feet of my body, and I tell myself, This is good, this is okay. His hands begin to trace my silhouette, but when he grazes my bare stomach, I writhe away and giggle, ticklish. Sorry, I say, I know that’s deeply unsexy. He leans in to kiss me, caresses my shoulder, my hair, my face, then pulls back to look me in the eyes and ask whether I’m being self-deprecating as a joke, or if I seriously don’t know how pretty I am.
Oh, I think, he thinks I’m self-conscious about my body. But the way I look is not the primary psychological issue at play here. It’s the fact that my body doesn’t quite trust his body, that my stomach flinches at the tender compliments of his hands. That I still feel shame for my own desire to be touched. That my body still reacts as if it can only be taken from, because I haven’t yet internalized the belief that it can give and receive.
I start working with a counselor who recommends a book called Boundaries. At first, I’m wary of the number of biblical references, but instead of more shame, I find a paradigm shift in its pages. It explains that boundaries are where we draw borders, delegate responsibility, define ourselves. This is me. That is you. This responsibility is mine. That one is yours. I use this framework to interrogate my past, to understand what happened the day I snapped back: If a man lusts after my body, feels guilt or envy or anger at what he cannot have, cannot possess, cannot take? That is his. My counselor helps me rethink my present: If I feel self-hatred in my gut over my desire, a pressing sense of shame borne from years of internalizing what the church told me is bad? This is mine now. I will treat it with gentleness, like a bruised piece of flesh or once-broken bone. It will heal, as long as I don’t push too hard before I’m ready.
The boy becomes my boyfriend, and I draw new boundaries in place of the ones dictated for me in my childhood. Together we take small steps forward with our bodies. We sometimes have to step back.
I memorize a line of poetry from Ocean Vuong: “The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s going.” I treat mine like a vehicle to carry me there. It is an instrument I tune and play. A vessel to give and receive pleasure. A foundational block for building the life I want, not a burden to be shed at the door. It is even a temple, of which I have been named rector; I get to choose what I worship, choose what I fear.
***
I started loving my body when I drew the borders around it, flush to the skin. The line says, this is where I begin, everything inside is me, is mine. This is where I can invite you in.