This, MY Body

(I wrote this back in 2007 in my old DirtyStinkySlipper Friendster blog.  I lost most of my entries there but found this one just now, floating around one of my old hard drives.  Even though I wrote this five years ago, I believe it still rings true now.)

Differently Weighted.  Gravitationally Challenged.  Horizontally Challenged.  Horizontally Gifted.  People or Person of Mass.  Person of Substance.  These are politically correct terms for that something which you’re not supposed to be or do not want to be: according to  the world’s current definition of what kind of woman is beautiful, what is acceptable, being FAT, or being a Person of Substance (my most favorite of those politically correct terms for FAT) is definitely not one of them.  And since I can’t seem to fit in any of my favorite jeans right now, is the world going to tell me that I am no longer acceptable, that I am the total opposite of the standard (or should I say commercialized) definition of beautiful?

I was a skinny kid (some politically correct terms: skeletally prominent, metabolic underachiever).  In high school and college, I was no longer skinny, just your small to medium kind of girl.  After college, weight stayed the same.  I started getting bigger when I reached the age of 29.  One factor was I did not have any exercise anymore since Ritchie (my boyfriend) and I, our daily routine would be wake up – work –eat – work – eat – work – eat – sleep.  We didn’t need to drive or walk to work, no physical exertion at all except during coverages.  I was happiest with my weight when I was 31.  I did not eat meat for almost 8 months, went to the gym regularly and played badminton a lot.  Not eating meat was really not because of a diet plan, it was because of a different reason altogether.  But that merits another blog.  Anyway, going back to our topic, since Ritchie and I were always swamped with work, I stopped going to the gym, stopped playing badminton and went back to eating meat because I couldn’t afford to plan my own meals anymore, I had to eat whatever was served to me.  I know I was getting bigger, but it really did not matter to me most of the time.  One thing is I really hate depriving myself of anything that I feel is my right to do or have or can afford, and I hate depriving my self of good food.  Heck I love to eat.  Sometimes though, admittedly,  I do have those moments of negativity,  especially when you keep getting the “wow, you’ve gained a lot of weight” comments with the over-exerted smiles and condescending tones but you know exactly what’s going on in their minds:  oh she’s letting herself waste away, she’s losing it, or plain and simple, She Looks BAD.  One time, an old client, excited and really happy to see Ritchie and me again, exclaimed real loud in front of all her friends (they were I think eight in the group) “Oh my, wow, you’re pregnant!”  I was at first surprised, then getting over the initial shock, laughed and said “Oh goodness, I’m not, I just like looking like I’m pregnant” and then, thankfully, they all laughed with me.  After that however, there was an awkward silence.  At that particular moment, I remember feeling not at all offended but more of … embarrassed because I didn’t really honestly know what to say.  I knew she thought that she might have offended me and wanted to say something but feared that she might offend me more, and I on the other hand did not know what to say also because if I say it’s okay, I’m not offended, it’ll just make it sound like I’m being defensive and was in fact really offended.  Crazy I know.  

One thing I know about myself right now is this:  I do not want to obsess about my weight.  Sometimes though,  we really can’t help it if other people obsess for us.  Like my mom and dad.  I don’t blame them for worrying about my weight for me, I’m sure they love me and I love them back dearly.  And I know that they are worrying about my weight for health reasons, and not for aesthetic ones.  What really angers and saddens me is the fact that up to now, in this age of “progress and forward thinking”, there are still women who are  starving themselves to death or doing all things detrimental to their health just so they remain or become thin or thinner.  It saddens me that the old patriarchal “standards” of beauty are still perpetuated by TV and print advertisements,  certain magazine articles, some movies --  what’s even more upsetting is that some of the instigators of these stereotypes are women themselves.  They keep telling us that what we look like is not okay, that the shape or color or “smoothness” they are promoting is what we should always attempt to be in order to be “beautiful” and alluring to the male species.   I remember really hating this ad where there was a photographer taking pictures of two sisters:  one had smooth, white, porcelain skin, while  the other had darker skin which is actually the common natural skin color of people living in the tropics, what we in the Philippines call kayumanggi or morena.  The photographer would look at the two women and would smile happily at the sister with porcelain skin, and would have this perplexed-not-so-nice expression whenever he looks at the morena one.  Now we all know how the commercial ends: both of the sisters are porcelain-skinned with the photographer looking really happy at the girl who used to be dark-complexioned, and even cements his approval with the statement “Now you’re beautiful”.  As you may have guessed, the commercial is promoting a whitening product.  A lot of this kind of commercials still exists; wherein our minds are conditioned to think that being black or brown is ugly and we should strive to be white, that having a different kind of body type other than thin is bad.  I applaud efforts to change this kind of thinking,  like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.  Yes sure, it’s still not that edgy and as life changing as we dream it to be (it was criticized by some for choosing unrepresentative "real" women—ninety-six year old, described by one marketer as: "the old lady equivalent of a super-model"; a heavily freckled, but enviably cute, twenty-two year old, and so on.) but it’s a START. 

So yes, I am at my heaviest weight now.  But this is for certain:  I want to be healthier because  I want to possess a body that will allow me to be as physically active and adventurous as I want to be.   I will try to achieve that by continuing to still eat the way I want to eat but this time, I will try to eat more of the “healthier” food and less of the “unhealthy” ones.  I will try to exercise again and engage in sweat-inducing sports.  But if after doing all these “healthier” options and my body still persist on adding more bulk, my spirit will not be crushed.  I will refuse to let myself be dragged down into the path of negativity, self-hate, self-pity.  There is so much more to life, so much more to love, so much more to explore, and my body is my biggest ally.  I will never make it my enemy. 

Here’s an excerpt from Eve Ensler’s Preface to her play The Good Body.  Read and be enlightened.

THE GOOD BODY

BY

EVE ENSLER

P r e f a c e

In the midst of a war in Iraq, in a time of escalating global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing as fast as the ozone layer, when one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?

Maybe because my stomach is one thing I feel I have control over, or maybe because I have hoped that my stomach is something I could get control over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy my attention, I see how other women’s stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or skin have come to occupy their attention, so that we have very little left for the war in Iraq—or much else, for that matter. When a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the United States was recently asked about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the majority of these women said they would lose weight. Maybe I identify with these women because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat, then I would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved. Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty, and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed rage. Like a toxic dump, it is where the explosive trajectories collide—the Judeo- Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet, be less; the consumer-state imperative to be better, which is based on the assumption that you are born wrong and bad, and that being better always involves spending money, lots of money. Maybe because, as the world rapidly divides into fundamentalist camps, reductive sound bites, and polarizing platitudes, an exploration of my stomach and the life therein has the potential to shatter these dangerous constraints….

The Good Body began with me and my particular obsession with my “imperfect” stomach. I have charted this self-hatred, recorded it, tried to follow it back to its source. Here, unlike the women in The Vagina Monologues, I am my own victim, my own perpetrator. Of course, the tools of my selfvictimization have been made readily available. The pattern of the perfect body has been programmed into me since birth. But whatever the cultural influences and pressures, my preoccupation with my flab, my constant dieting, exercising, worrying, is selfimposed. I pick up the magazines. I buy into the ideal. I believe that blond, flat girls have the secret. What is far more frightening than narcissism is the zeal for self-mutilation that is spreading, infecting the world.

I have been to more than forty countries in the last six years. I have seen the rampant and insidious poisoning: skin-lightening creams sell as fast as tooth paste in Africa and Asia; the mothers of eight-year-olds in America remove their daughters’ ribs so they will not have to worry about dieting; five-year-olds in Manhattan do strict asanas so they won’t embarrass their parents in public by being chubby; girls vomit and starve themselves in China and Fiji and everywhere; Korean women remove Asia from their eyelids . . . the list goes on and on.

I have been in a dialogue with my stomach for the past three years. I have entered my belly—the dark wet underworld—to get at the secrets there. I have talked with women in surgical centers in Beverly Hills; on the sensual beaches of Rio de Janeiro; in the gyms of Mumbai, New York, Moscow; in the hectic and crowded beauty salons of Istanbul, South Africa, and Rome. Except for a rare few, the women I met loathed at least one part of their body. There was almost always one part that they longed to change, that they had a medicine cabinet full of products devoted to transforming or hiding or reducing or straightening or lightening. Just about every woman believed that if she could just get that part right, everything else would work out. Of course, it is an endless heartbreaking campaign.Some of the monologues in The Good Body are based on well-known women like Helen Gurley Brown and Isabella Rossellini. Those monologues, which grew out of a series of conversations with each of these fascinating women, are not recorded interviews, but interpretations of the lives they offered me. Some of the other characters are based on real lives, real stories. Many are invented….

This play is my prayer, my attempt to analyze the mechanisms of our imprisonment, to break free so that we may spend more time running the world than running away from it; so that we may be consumed by the sorrow of the world rather than consuming to avoid that sorrow and suffering. This play is an expression of my hope, my desire, that we will all refuse to be Barbie, that we will say no to the loss of the particular, whether it be to a voluptuous woman in a silk sari, or a woman with defining lines of character in her face, or a distinguishing nose, or olivetoned skin, or wild curly hair.

I am stepping off the capitalist treadmill. I am going to take a deep breath and find a way to survive not being flat or perfect. I am inviting you to join me, to stop trying to be anything, anyone other than who you are. I was moved by women in Africa who lived close to the earth and didn’t understand what it meant to not love their body. I was lifted by older women in India who celebrated their roundness. I was inspired by Marion Woodman, a great Jungian analyst, who gave me confidence to trust what I know. She has said that “instead of transcending ourselves, we must move into ourselves.” Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken.