Hello friends near and far,
I’m writing today to share some ideas I have about the bread-and-butter of my therapy practice and research which is “body image”. Ugh, I hate that term. I hate how minimizing it sounds. I hate how it sounds so clinical and cliche. I hate how it sounds like, if you just had positive body image instead of negative body image, you’d feel fine. I hate how it sounds like a teenage woman problem, as though teenage woman problems are dumb and vain.
I don’t see the ways women imagine our bodies as a simple, only-cognitive, young woman problem. I’ve always thought of body image and the subsequent ways women, in particular, are encouraged and compelled to control our bodies, as internalized aspects of patriarchy and misogyny that have far-reaching effects on our culture and lives.
Kate Manne’s work has added a clarifying layer in my thinking because she has articulated her perspective that, while patriarchy is plausibly deniable (do you see anyone holding a glass ceiling over your head? I don’t…), misogyny acts as its police force by enforcing patriarchy. Misogyny is enforced through disgust towards, and shame of, being a woman who is not conforming to the values of patriarchy. Internalized misogyny is how this police force inhabits women, entering us through the osmosis of small remarks, visual culture, a side-glance, and also, the overt diminishment of women and our bodily agency (i.e. not paying for feminized, invisible, care-giving labor; rape culture being normalized, etc.)
Where I see this intersecting with body image is in the tension women hold between the internalized ideal body (the body we are taught to want) and how we perceive our actual bodies.
Sometimes I’ll ask a client, “Try to imagine yourself on a beach. What do you see?” Usually a woman will imagine herself on the beach—she will view her body from the outside and can tell me in detail what’s wrong with it. Sometimes she will feel the sand and the sun, but more often than not, she sees herself from the outside. Do you think this is the case for men? Do you think a man would think of his body in a bathing suit? Or would he see the ocean (or women)? (Yes, I’m being heteronormative to make a point). I don’t work with men so I’ll leave that up to your imagination.
This tendency to view our bodies from the outside-in rather than seeing from the inside-out is how we internalize the misogynistic police force. We know how we look and we know how we should look. Women are forever trying to close that gap between our actual bodies and the internalized ideal for safety, relief, and finally a moment of rest. But this moment is so, so temporary and so rare that I hear of women finally celebrating on their deathbed that they are their thinnest they’ve ever been.
Arriving at an idealized body is momentary relief. Yes, the gap between the image and the ideal is closed, the tension holding that gap, is relieved. Exhale…And then…seconds, minutes, days later… I don’t know how I will maintain this… The toll of holding that gap closed is high. The price is often health problems (gut issues, low energy), mental obsessiveness to the point of occluding anything else of value, difficulty maintaining depth in relationships because the body is the focus of all energy, and spiritual depletion—holding the body so tightly in the ego’s grasp takes a kind of prayerfulness towards willpower rather than openness to god or the divine or the uncontrollable nature of the body, itself.
Weight loss medications have helped relieve the toll of holding the gap closed recently. It’s not that hard to have an idealized body now. But it not being that hard is complicated… now there’s an escape hatch, a shortcut that sabotages the moral superiority of the idealized body. The rules of patriarchy are a bit… undermined. If just anyone can take a medication and have a thin/ner body (albeit not white, straight, or feminized), then what’s the point? Thinness has been held as a symbol of white, protestant morality for generations. It has stood as a signal that a woman can control herself. So if a medication can do that controlling for her, is the woman still earning her gold star? Is she following the rules of patriarchy? Or has she cheated?
I hope you can hear the impossibility here. The absolute damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation women are in. The issue, to me as a therapist, is not whether or not someone decides to try to pursue an idealized (and, since I haven’t said it yet, idealized is also healthy, fit, clean in our sly wellness-cultured world), it’s how we can make the compulsion to close the gap between reality and fantasy conscious. Can we look at what is so urgent and wanting in us to change our bodies? Can we imagine what it would require of us to not close the gap? What would it look like to break the rules of patriarchy regarding controlling our bodies? Is that risk too big?
I’m sending you care in your body today and hope that we can take a collective breath to feel our bodies rather than think about our bodies for just a moment.
With love,
Kathryn