Friday, June 21, 2013

On bodies :or: I do not have to love my body


Stop telling women that we should find ourselves beautiful and that we should love ourselves when you are standing right there, judging us on how our knees look in short skirts and how prominent our boobs are in a sweater and how much makeup we are or are not wearing.
Instead of us working harder on “love your body” and “find your inner beauty”, the rest of the world should be working harder on “stop telling women their bodies are a shameful place to live but that if they’re strong enough, they will learn to embrace that shame.”
This is my body. It’s not “beautiful”. I don’t “love it”. I don’t have to. I don’t have to have any strong feelings about my body. And whatever feelings I do have are not somehow invalid if they’re not glowing reviews.
— Elyse Mofo, “Don’t Tell Me to Love My Body” 

So the links don't work when I copied it over, so lemme just get those for you. Just in case you want them. THE WHOLE POSt HERE .

It's really good. And as someone who's not skinny, but not quite overweight, I have felt these things. I'm at the point were I love me, and I'm okay with myself, but I definitely don't love my body. I mean, it does what it's supposed to, it gets me places, keeps me mostly healthy and not sick, whatever.

And the part of I'm supposed to feel about my body because of how some else thinks I should feel about my body? Okay, I had this assignment for one of my classes this past semester. The project was to draw ourselves, and then draw ourselves walking. Not a big deal, right?

I couldn't figure out how to draw myself. If I drew myself too chubby, inevitablly some one would say to me, you're not fat! But if I drew myself too skinny, I would feel like I lied, and I was worried people would judge me for making myself too skinny. I ended up going on the skinny side. There are only so many times you can hear that you aren't fat, especially from skinny people before you want to just be like, YES I AM. Just trust me on this. I'm not obese, and I'm not terribly overweight, but I do have more fat than I would like.

Here's the video, if you would like to see it:

Walk Across from Abi Freeland on Vimeo.

I mean, it's not horribly off, but it is still skinnier than me. Oh, but I am really proud of that shirt. I mostly figured out how to do that by myself, and oh my glob, so many proud feelings. 


I also have some thoughts on nudity and how society handles it, which I keep meaning to type up and get out there, so keep your eyes peeled for that sometime in the next few weeks.

Pick up time!! yay! It's been too long.








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