14valentines: day one - body image
The only reason I have an entry at all for today is that my ballroom coach told us to "write an essay reflecting on your body."
Assigning essays of any description is not-- really-- a part of his job. He's a P.E. teacher. The whole thing, in fact, is coming on the heels of a debacle involving his attempt to charge us with "telling your dance partner if you find them sexually attractive, and why or why not," the premise being that we can't dance real, good Latin with them unless we "build chemistry."
Needless to say, the idea went over poorly.
Spurred largely by the misgivings of my classmates and conversations I had with them outside of dance, I wrote an email to the president of our ballroom team, citing among other things my history of eating disorders/body image issues as one of the reasons why I thought it was a bad, bad idea to have an entire class sit and judge each other's bodies for attractiveness. My coach took this critique, and listened to me say that I didn't think that basing one's feelings of sexiness on a purely relational definition was in any way healthy, and decided that the problem was that oh no! Some girls on team have a beef with calories! We'd better fix them up real quick so we can get back to the business of sexy.
This entailed a) the aforementioned assignment, b) two generic, pat lectures on body image and eating disorders given by a female student, featuring the assertions that "[dance coach] never meant to make people think he wanted you to look like Barbies" and "dance did not give you your eating disorder," and ultimately c) Merc weeping outside the ballroom because of how poorly handled and hurtful the whole thing was, and finally writing the piece that appears here.
I know I don't "get it." I'm not with the program. I don't love my body in all its allegedly miraculous wonder, and I'm not ready to. But I don't think that makes me unusual, freakish, an aberration of any kind-- I think it makes me very normal, in some ways. And I don't like this whole "quick fix" idea that seems to be saying that if we girls only thought and reflected and tried a little bit, and maybe called a handy hotline (now available on the ballroom website), we could save ourselves a lot of anguish.
More than anything else, I resent my coach's implication that I am slowing down his program or somehow need to be fixed by opening up the atrophied channels of body love.
... So this is what I turned in to him.
a(nother) naming of parts
The hair really grows. The joints barely squeak. The skin is pretty rough-especially the feet, which peel and crack like old wallpaper and are only tough like a steak is when you broil it too much. I’ll amend: The skin is soft and dry and has broken in too many places, old scars blossoming like bulls-eyes up and down the legs, old scars written in Braille: you don’t want to. I have heard that the muscles work all right, stretched taut over bones hard and white and-maybe-brittler already than they ought to be, the muscles caked in a layer of lumpen, incurious fat. You wouldn’t know it (so I’m told) unless you went looking, but I have palpated and pinched and found its resting-places like tumors or funhouse-mirror distortions-the fat lives here too.
Ten fingernails, bitten down, French-manicure white on the tips, with zero discolored spots for how many boys are thinking of me. Ten toenails with requisite toes, longish, tufted lightly with hair. The hair is worth a mention. It sprouts everywhere like grass or dandelion fluff; it is distinguished by context and texture from the nails and teeth, those things most likely to draw blood. The teeth have had work, but there are still around thirty; they’ll bite into most of the usual things without too much trouble. A fresh coat of paint and you could even get past that weather-worn eggshell tint, evidence of somewhat irregular maintenance.
Sharp clavicles soup-ladle into the hollow of neck; skin stretches over spine and the backs of the ribs like a canvas with only five words; blood-pink and melanin-pale and mottled with the ghosts of mosquito bites. There may be a number of troubling protrusions and apertures, bits and pieces of questionable functionality: Never fear. They are strictly vestigial. No doubt future models won’t bother with them at all.
But the legs, now, the legs are an innovation, a modern wonder, proceeding as they do from that curious lilt of the pelvis that permits them to swing in a more or less upright fashion. Ignore that they are razor-scarred, terminating in those inelegant protuberances of meat and bone the feet-the legs are sinew and joint, they are modernity, sleek and functional as an Ikea lamp-they enable the inattentive observer to believe in purpose, or at least in direction. Unlike the trunk, hopelessly stolid, with its intermittent leaking and birdcages of sultry human tissue, hemmed in by breastbone and rib-bone and the southward ballooning of skin-no, the legs are what you want.
(I heard once that they meant to put something into the vacuity of cranial cavity-to my knowledge, the embellishment has not yet been made.)
Assigning essays of any description is not-- really-- a part of his job. He's a P.E. teacher. The whole thing, in fact, is coming on the heels of a debacle involving his attempt to charge us with "telling your dance partner if you find them sexually attractive, and why or why not," the premise being that we can't dance real, good Latin with them unless we "build chemistry."
Needless to say, the idea went over poorly.
Spurred largely by the misgivings of my classmates and conversations I had with them outside of dance, I wrote an email to the president of our ballroom team, citing among other things my history of eating disorders/body image issues as one of the reasons why I thought it was a bad, bad idea to have an entire class sit and judge each other's bodies for attractiveness. My coach took this critique, and listened to me say that I didn't think that basing one's feelings of sexiness on a purely relational definition was in any way healthy, and decided that the problem was that oh no! Some girls on team have a beef with calories! We'd better fix them up real quick so we can get back to the business of sexy.
This entailed a) the aforementioned assignment, b) two generic, pat lectures on body image and eating disorders given by a female student, featuring the assertions that "[dance coach] never meant to make people think he wanted you to look like Barbies" and "dance did not give you your eating disorder," and ultimately c) Merc weeping outside the ballroom because of how poorly handled and hurtful the whole thing was, and finally writing the piece that appears here.
I know I don't "get it." I'm not with the program. I don't love my body in all its allegedly miraculous wonder, and I'm not ready to. But I don't think that makes me unusual, freakish, an aberration of any kind-- I think it makes me very normal, in some ways. And I don't like this whole "quick fix" idea that seems to be saying that if we girls only thought and reflected and tried a little bit, and maybe called a handy hotline (now available on the ballroom website), we could save ourselves a lot of anguish.
More than anything else, I resent my coach's implication that I am slowing down his program or somehow need to be fixed by opening up the atrophied channels of body love.
... So this is what I turned in to him.
a(nother) naming of parts
The hair really grows. The joints barely squeak. The skin is pretty rough-especially the feet, which peel and crack like old wallpaper and are only tough like a steak is when you broil it too much. I’ll amend: The skin is soft and dry and has broken in too many places, old scars blossoming like bulls-eyes up and down the legs, old scars written in Braille: you don’t want to. I have heard that the muscles work all right, stretched taut over bones hard and white and-maybe-brittler already than they ought to be, the muscles caked in a layer of lumpen, incurious fat. You wouldn’t know it (so I’m told) unless you went looking, but I have palpated and pinched and found its resting-places like tumors or funhouse-mirror distortions-the fat lives here too.
Ten fingernails, bitten down, French-manicure white on the tips, with zero discolored spots for how many boys are thinking of me. Ten toenails with requisite toes, longish, tufted lightly with hair. The hair is worth a mention. It sprouts everywhere like grass or dandelion fluff; it is distinguished by context and texture from the nails and teeth, those things most likely to draw blood. The teeth have had work, but there are still around thirty; they’ll bite into most of the usual things without too much trouble. A fresh coat of paint and you could even get past that weather-worn eggshell tint, evidence of somewhat irregular maintenance.
Sharp clavicles soup-ladle into the hollow of neck; skin stretches over spine and the backs of the ribs like a canvas with only five words; blood-pink and melanin-pale and mottled with the ghosts of mosquito bites. There may be a number of troubling protrusions and apertures, bits and pieces of questionable functionality: Never fear. They are strictly vestigial. No doubt future models won’t bother with them at all.
But the legs, now, the legs are an innovation, a modern wonder, proceeding as they do from that curious lilt of the pelvis that permits them to swing in a more or less upright fashion. Ignore that they are razor-scarred, terminating in those inelegant protuberances of meat and bone the feet-the legs are sinew and joint, they are modernity, sleek and functional as an Ikea lamp-they enable the inattentive observer to believe in purpose, or at least in direction. Unlike the trunk, hopelessly stolid, with its intermittent leaking and birdcages of sultry human tissue, hemmed in by breastbone and rib-bone and the southward ballooning of skin-no, the legs are what you want.
(I heard once that they meant to put something into the vacuity of cranial cavity-to my knowledge, the embellishment has not yet been made.)