Tag Archives: Body

An Open Letter to a Sixteen Year-old Girl: “Your Body is Never the Problem”

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Though I originally published this piece at Scarleteen, Healthy is the New Skinny reprints today my Letter to a Teenage Girl. Excerpt:

It’s important too to note that however much skin you are revealing, you are never responsible for another person’s inappropriate behavior. Save for the blind, we are all visual people. We notice each other. There is no right not to be seen. But there is a right not to be stared at with a penetrating gaze of the sort that makes you feel deeply uncomfortable. While it may seem that you get those leers more often when you’re showing more skin, you’ve probably noticed that you get those creepy stares at other times as well. And the key thing you need to know is that men can control their eyes — they really can — and women can control their judgment. Your body is not so powerful that it can drive others to distraction. (And yes, if we’re honest, sometimes we wish that our bodies were that powerful, particularly if it meant drawing the attention of someone to whom we are attracted!) If some men choose to be distracted by you, that is their choice, a decision for which they (not you) are solely responsible. No matter what anyone tells you, you need to remember that.

It is not inconsistent to want to be seen and not be stared at. You know the difference, I suspect, between an “appreciative look” (which can feel very validating) and the “penetrating stare” that leaves you feeling like crawling into a hole. While people are not required to give you the former, it’s not unreasonable to expect them to avoid giving you the latter. It’s also not unreasonable to want guys your age to be interested in you, and want the creepy old ones to leave you alone. Remember, it’s not hypocrisy or naïveté on your part to dress in a way that you hope will get you that positive attention you want without also bringing the negative attention you fear and loathe.

The enduring appeal of tattoos

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My column at Healthy is the New Skinny focuses this week on tattoos and piercings:My Body Belongs to Me. Excerpt:

An eyebrow or lip piercing that seems to “mar” a pretty face is a way for the owner of that face to say, “Hey, this belongs to me, not you.” That’s a powerful and appealing statement.

I’m not saying that teens only get tattoos as an act of rebellion; it’s obvious that there are as many reasons for getting tats or piercings as there are people who get them. But there’s no question that the desire to mark the body as one’s own (rather than one’s parents, or one’s peers, or the fashion industry’s) is a huge part of the appeal of permanent body modification. But tattoos or piercings aren’t for everyone. Without judging or criticizing those who do choose to tattoo or pierce, we need to work harder to give young women alternative strategies for taking public ownership of their bodies. Whether inked or not, every girl deserves the reminder that her body belongs to her alone.

Men, MILFs, and the Madonna-Whore Complex

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Eira and I are home from our trip to Israel (I’ll try to write something about that soon). We’re off to Montana on Sunday, so the summer travels aren’t entirely concluded.

I do have a quick piece up at Good Men Project today: The Real Meaning of MILFs. Excerpt:

Though we had planned to have a home birth, in the end my wife needed a Cesearean in the hospital. (Our daughter was wedged into a breach position, and few obstetricians will support a vaginal breach birth these days.) I was at my wife’s side during the procedure, holding her hand and whispering encouragement, while watching with great interest as the surgeons did their work—blood and viscera galore.

I got to see the amazing moment Heloise was pulled (butt first, of course) from my wife’s body. I was there when our daughter latched on for the first time to Eira’s breast. I was awed and humbled by what I saw. And though I wasn’t turned on by watching the birth and the 15 months of subsequent breastfeeding, witnessing my wife’s transition into motherhood did nothing to reduce my attraction to her. That doesn’t make me unusual or heroic.

Read the whole thing. For an older piece on a similar subject, here’s my 2005 blog post Men, Childbirth, Lust.

Status Updates, Thinspo, Fitspo and bragging about pizza: social media and self-esteem

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My Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at the impact of social media on young women’s body image; check out Status Updates and “Thinspo”. Excerpt:

How often do the people you know on Facebook “check in” at the gym? How often do they share how far they ran? Or how they’re doing on their diet, or on their “Insanity” workout plan? When I asked for stories on Facebook, dozens of young people wrote me to share their experiences reading their friends’ food-and-diet updates. Some wrote that seeing other people working out was “inspiring”, while others wrote it was “depressing” or “triggering”. One of my former students wrote “I can’t stand getting on Facebook in the morning and hearing about all the exercise my friends have already done before I’ve even brushed my teeth. It makes me feel like a failure.”

Several wrote of a common phenomenon: the girls who seemed most likely to update about the delicious, fattening foods that they’d eaten or were planning to eat were the girls whose bodies were already close to the idea. “Amber” wrote: “It seems like only skinny and pretty girls get to talk about the burgers and Pizookies they’ve eaten. It’s like they’re showing off that they can pig out and get away with it. They get all these comments that say things like ‘You’re so lucky to be able to eat like that and still look great.’ It’s like they’re fishing for compliments in a weird roundabout way. Amber, who has struggled with bulimia and describes herself as a size 14, remarks, “I’m not angry at the girls who write about food all the time. But it definitely bothers me, as I don’t think I could write about what I’ve eaten and get away with it.”

Others I heard from talked about the way in which positive reinforcement on photos or status updates could be triggering. “Mandy” said that when she lost a lot of weight and put up new, flattering photos, she got a huge outpouring of compliments. “Everytime someone told me how great I looked, it made me more fearful of gaining the weight back. Instead of making me feel good, the compliments pushed me to diet more to make sure I stayed skinny.” Mandy, like most young people, carefully chose flattering photos for Facebook. She got the praise she wanted, but instead of providing reassurance it just pushed her to more unhealthy dieting.

Read the whole thing.

And check out a similar take from Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out”.

“Let Me Show You What I Like”: Sex, Perfection, Reassurance

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My latest is up at Sir Richard’s Condom Company. Revisiting some of what I wrote about in my old “bowflex boy” posts, the piece talks about body image, making love with the lights on, and how to reassure an insecure lover that you think his (or her) body’s hot.

Mama, you’ll want to give this one a miss.

Excerpt:

I got an email from a woman named Clara*, who has a great new guy in her life. Things are awesome, including in the bedroom – except for one thing. Reggie, Clara’s boyfriend, only wants to get naked when the lights are off. Clara writes:

“It took me until I was 25 or so to get over my own anxieties so that I could be comfortable having sex in daylight. When I was a teen, even in my first serious relationship, I always wanted to keep some clothes on or do it in the darkness. I was so embarrassed about my body, thinking I was too fat and too pale. I thought a guy wouldn’t want me if he could actually see all of me.So I finally get to the place where I can accept my body. And I end up falling for a dude who feels the same way I used to feel. Do other straight men have this problem? How can I help him see that I want to see him?”

The first part of Clara’s question is easy to answer. Statistics show that poor body image is on the rise among young heterosexual men. Our stereotype is that young women and gay men are the ones most likely to be concerned with appearance. While that’s still true, the pressure on all guys to be toned and hard (with, of course, a six-pack) is growing rapidly, thanks to a media that increasingly features images of male perfection.

The insecurity that these images foster does often manifest in the bedroom. A student in my interdisciplinary “Beauty and the Body” course told me last year that he has a hard time believing a woman can be attracted to any body type other than the slender, lightly muscled ideal he sees on the cover of men’s fitness magazines. As a result, he’s scared to be naked with a girlfriend – just like Clara’s Reggie. As with any body image issue, there’s no magic quick fix. Talking about it openly and offering a partner reassurance is important. But as they say, talk is cheap. Putting actions to your words can help, I told Clara. And I shared with her something a friend of mine did to help me with a very similar issue.

Read the whole thing.

Why must models be so tall?

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The Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at a century-old question: Why Do Models Have to Be So Tall? Excerpt:

The modern modeling industry as we know it goes back just about 100 years. One of the first fashion designers to recognize the power of the model was the great French innovator, Paul Poiret, inventor of the “sheath dress.” In 1913, when he was at the height of his fame, Poiret toured America to showcase his designs. He brought with him five models, each of whom was strikingly tall and very slender. Most Americans had never seen anything like these women.

Poiret preferred tall models because they were easier to see from the back of the room at a fashion show. He also preferred them because their longer bodies allowed him to showcase his work more effectively – there was simply more material to display. Poiret liked his models with broad shoulders, narrow hips and small busts for the same reason; he was the first designer to want the “hanger effect” where the buyer’s eye wouldn’t be distracted by the model’s curves.

While many of us complain that the standard model body is unrealistic and nearly impossible to attain, it’s worth remembering that Poiret had another, surprising motivation for his preference for tall models. Late 19th-century European fashion had been very concealing, but it had also emphasized the bust and the hips. For Poiret, that meant focusing on women as mother figures. Poiret wanted his models to symbolize independence and freedom. And what could be more liberating than a body type that seemed almost masculine: tall, a nearly flat chest, broad shoulders, and narrow hips?

Read the whole thing.

I also ought to recommend a really wonderful source on early 20th century fashion and its relationship to feminism and body image, Nancy Troy’s magisterial Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, now regrettably out of print.

Love Hurts, Beauty Hurts: waxing, pain, and the pursuit of perfection

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My Thursday short column is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: Bare Down There: Waxing, Beauty, and Pain. It’s a brief look at teens and bikini waxing, and the growing popularity of the Brazilian wax among very young girls (including, as the article notes, among those who have not yet hit puberty and begun to grow pubic hair.)

Lots has been written about pubic hair and what its removal means. Count me among those troubled by what seems the almost pedophilic fetishization of hairless vulvas in pornography. (To put it simply, I find it sexually and aesthetically unappealing as well as politically problematic.)

But the larger point is that waxing, like so many other beauty rituals, hurts. (That’s true whatever’s being waxed, whether it’s the pubis or the lip or the space between the eyebrows.) As older sisters and mothers and the media instruct young women about how they should best pursue beauty, they teach girls that pain is not only a rite of passage into womanhood, but a necessary (and continuous) aspect of maintaining femininity.

Pain happens on a spectrum, from the merely itchy (pantyhose) to the permanently body-altering (major cosmetic surgery.) High heels, piercings, and hair dye all exact both a financial and a physical price. “Beauty hurts”, older women say to younger women. And it’s not just beauty, but love that hurts: think of what we expect girls to go through with first intercourse — or with childbirth.

For much of history — and in many other parts of the world — this pain has been and remains mandatory. Girls have their genitals mutilated against their will in Mali and suffer fistulas from giving birth too soon and too young in Afghanistan. There’s nothing quite comparable in America, where we at least claim to give girls and women a choice to avoid these agonies. We don’t cut off little girls’ clitorises, we generally don’t force 15 year-olds into marriages, and we certainly don’t mandate Brazilian waxes for high schoolers.

But as most women and some men know, the cost of saying “no” to pain is very high. If a teen girl wants to feel confident at the beach in her bikini, making sure she’s bare down there (or damn near) is a price she must pay. Young women are raised to fear ridicule and social exclusion far more than physical pain. Watch what most young women do when they trip and fall: they leap back up, more worried about what others have seen than about any injury they’ve sustained.

The law doesn’t mandate you wax your vulva or straighten your hair or put on hose and heels. The state doesn’t force you to give up carbs and dessert to fit into a bikini. But the fact that certain behaviors aren’t genuinely compulsory doesn’t mean that they can’t feel obligatory. And for so many women, the pain that comes with meeting those obligations is less than the social cost of refusing to pursue beauty.

Any solution to this problem of pain has to meet girls where they are. Parents can refuse to let their daughters get waxed or get their ears pierced, but in most cases that only delays the inevitable. The solution, whatever it is, depends on opening up a conversation with our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, our friends and lovers. And in that conversation, we need to look at the ways we consciously and unconsciously valorize physical and emotional pain as the price of beauty and true womanhood.

Weinergate, penis pics, and the longing to be hot

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In response to Anthony Weiner’s press conference yesterday in which he admitted using the internet to send semi-nude pictures of himself to young women, Irin Carmon suggests at Jezebel that this latest scandal is — like many others before it — rooted in male narcissism.

All over the Internet, men are photographing their own bodies and sending the shots to women who are maybe not their wives and girlfriends. It’s a risk for most any non-professional, but it’s one that predictably costs male politicians like Anthony Weiner — and the men before him — so much more. So why do they do it?

“Hottttt.” That’s the Facebook comment on a video of Weiner speech that launched Meagan Broussard’s Internet flirtation with the Congressman, complete with cockshots clothed and maybe less so. “You’re so hot,” was Rielle Hunter’s opening line to John Edwards; eventually, he thought it was a good idea to make a sex tape with her.

In the Venn diagram of narcissism, the overlap of men in political office and men whose sexual narcissism verges on self destruction is increasingly visible. If you want to blame the Internet for anything, blame it for manifesting — and giving an outlet to — what surely must have always been present: Men (and they are still overwhelmingly men) who not only want your votes but for you to adore their waxed pecs. And they think they can get away with it.

Carmon isn’t entirely off base. But she misses the key point, though it’s one she hints at. “Hot” has such extraordinary power in these men’s lives not because they are all narcissists (though some may meet the clinical definition of that term) but because they so rarely hear the word. Powerful men who risk everything to send pictures of their penises or pecs to strange women aren’t filled with cocky self-regard. They’re filled with a desperate hunger for a very specific kind of validation.

In a piece I wrote for the Good Men Project in March, I suggested:

So many straight men have no experience of being wanted. So many straight men have no experience of sensing a gaze of outright longing. Even many men who are wise in the world and in relationships, who know that their wives or girlfriends love them, do not know what it is to be admired for their bodies and their looks. They may know what it is to be relied upon, they may know what it is to bring another to ecstasy with their touch, but they don’t know what it is to be found not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but worthy of longing.

I’ll bet Anthony Weiner doesn’t doubt his own intellectual or political abilities. Like many men who are good at what they do (and Weiner has been one of the most able members of the Democratic caucus for years), he exudes a confidence that borders on arrogance. I don’t think that’s feigned. But like so many men sliding towards middle age, there’s an unmet hunger for sexual validation. Men like Weiner know women may be attracted to their power or their status, but they want more — they long for validation that their bodies aren’t gross and disgusting. They want to be “hot.” Continue reading →

SlutWalk and Jack Kevorkian: the symmetry of bodily sovereignty

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SlutWalk LA is now less than 24 hours away. Though Facebook is notoriously unreliable in this regard, we have more than 4000 RSVPs. (I’m guessing we’ll get half that, but would like to be pleasantly surprised with something much bigger.) The weather appears to be cooperating (some morning clouds likely, then highs in the low 70s with sunshine during our rally and march.) I’ve touched base with the City of West Hollywood again, done a brief radio interview, and done something else I hardly ever do: write out my speech. I tend to wing it in most settings, liking the adrenaline rush of extemporaneity and panic. (Once an addict, always an addict, eh?) But to ensure that I’m brief and to the point, I typed up a three-minute piece. I’ll post it here after the event.

This morning, I saw the news of Jack Kevorkian’s death. Though his penchant for self-promotion and risk-taking seemed at times to do more harm than good to the movement for death with dignity, on the balance I was and am a fan. I honor his passing and his tremendous work to give dying people the best and most peaceful transition possible.

In several obits, including this one in the LA Times, one can find a famous quote from Derek Humphry of the Hemlock Society: “If we are free people at all, then we must be free to choose the manner of our death.” Jack Kevorkian believed in that definition and struggled hard to make it possible. I’m grateful for that.

Thinking of what Humphry said, it strikes me that there’s a parallel with SlutWalk. We’re fighting for the freedom of women to choose the manner of their dress, to choose how they present themselves in public, and to do so in confidence that they will be safe. We’re marching for the right to be sovereign over one’s body, a right to which Jack Kevorkian dedicated his life. We’re marching for sexual justice, which is rooted in the sacred principle of personal autonomy.

In the end, our bodies belong to us and us alone. They do not belong to our spouses or our children, to our parents or our presidents. We can use our bodies to love and serve others, of course. We can give hugs and orgasms, invite others to find refuge and comfort and ecstasy in our embraces. But in the end, our bodies are always ours. Sexual justice is about giving all of us the right to say “yes” to pleasure without shame or fear; it’s also about giving all of us the right to say “no” in the certainty that that no will be respected regardless of who we are, whom we’ve touched, what we’re wearing.

And just as we should always be free to choose who touches us, we should also be free, within the obvious limits imposed by our own human frailty, to choose how and when we give up our bodies to death. Women’s bodies don’t belong to men, whether those men are their husbands or the leering strangers on the streetcorner. That’s a basic principle of SlutWalk. In the same way, our bodies don’t belong to our families or to our communities. When we are terminally ill, there’s no point in dutifully prolonging the body’s pain out of a sense of obligation to those who will grieve our inevitable death.

I am faithful to my wife. I am sexual with her alone. My arms are always open for my daughter. In different ways, they each have a kind of moral and emotional claim on my body, one I honor as best I can. But my body has never ceased to be mine. The fact that I direct all my sexuality towards my wife doesn’t mean my flesh is her property, or hers mine. Our bodies are gifts we share, but never give away.

Many rely on my body, a few love it. But it is mine, and yours is yours. And if our dying is slow and painful, our bodies are ours to relinquish just as they were once ours to delight in.

That principle of bodily sovereignty is clearest around sex and death. For me, at least, there is some parallel between our work in the streets of West Hollywood (and in the streets of many other cities around the world) tomorrow, and the work of the brave, impetuous, exasperating, and lion-hearted Jack Kevorkian.