Body Talk

I want to talk about what body positivity means to me. I want to do this partly to have a clear explanation for myself. It helps to say it all out loud so to speak, in a way I can actually communicate to other people, instead of just angry ranting on Facebook. I've learned that while a heat of the moment admonishment may feel good ,it's often more effective if you break down your point of view as supposed to just thinking the other party is.. stupid. We all can learn from each other. And I want people to learn about body positivity. I want to explain to those who follow me on Instagram and wonder why I post photos of myself in my bra and underwear, but I want to explain mainly to educate and illuminate. I want women and those who identify as female to wake up to something so big yet so small:

You do not have to be made to feel bad about your body.

I also want to explain a simple obvious truth to men, as I have tried so many times in the past, which is this:

FEMALE BODIES (clothed, unclothed, running, standing still, stripping on a pole or sitting on the subway, breast feeding or strutting down the street looking sexy as fuck) DO NOT EXIST FOR YOU. IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU ALL OF THE TIME.

A lot of people, both men and women, roll their eyes at the idea of a woman claiming to post provocative photos or wear a hot outfit because it makes her feel good/because she knows she looks good/because she's allowed to flaunt her beauty in any form she damn well pleases. It is so upsetting that this idea that she is doing this for herself and not for the attention of a man has become something that sounds ridiculous. How sad that the idea of a woman loving her body is unfathomable.

The importance of body positivity for me came about during a time that I was in a relationship and also a time when I wasn't as active on social media. I hadn't noticed it, but being in a relationship with this man who saw me stripped of any glamour and absolutely worshipped my body anyway made me forget all about my insecurities. But when I returned to social media, this of course changed. I remember scrolling through instagram feed and stopping at some model's photo. I zoomed in, stalked every photo on her page and stared at every inch of her body, legitimately feeling disgusted by my body in comparison. Then I’d scroll on to the next post, and repeat the ritual. It was the same kind of photo, same kind of body type, same kind of self hatred. And it continued down my feed one after the other. To the point that probably around 70% of my instagram feed made me feel pretty shitty in some way. Every day. Eventually I would just scroll down my feed really quickly in order to stay "up to date" while also avoiding getting sucked into a black hole of insecurity by all those “perfect” bodies. But one day I came upon a photo of a friend of mine just laying in her bra and underwear. And it was simple. It wasn't flashy. It was just her. Just a female body. And it made me feel so good. It was the first photo out of hundreds I had scrolled past that made me feel that way. It was like a breath of fresh air. Like "wow I'm not crazy, my body is actually cute". I had allowed all those other models to make me feel like I didn't have the right to look at myself and feel sexy. Like my body was wrong. And so I finally asked myself/yelled at myself "why the hell are you following all these people if they only make you feel bad? Follow more people that uplift you!" I unfollowed probably a third of the accounts I was following, including the Kardashians, the Hadids, the traveling fashion bloggers, and others. I made it a priority from that point on to only follow people whose posts and photos made me feel good, inspired me, related to me. It legitimately changed my life (which probably says a lot about the role that instagram plays in my life but that's another story). I would scroll through instagram and every single post, that was body related, made me smile. I started noticing all the unique ways my body was beautiful instead of all the specific ways it needs to improve.

I want emphasize in this essay that when I talk about body positivity, the act of thinking positively about your body, I do not have any particular body in mind. I do not like body shaming in any form. A thin woman is not exempt from insecurities and body shame. Or a tall woman. Or a woman with long hair. Or a woman with clear skin. She is still a woman. Her body is still policed. She still has to keep up with insane standards of beauty. She is still struggling to reach a goal of perfection that the (male-centric) public produces and consistently changes based on whatever sexual whim they're currently into that year. There is more than one way to be ashamed of your body. Remember that scene in Mean Girls when they're all standing around the mirror analyzing all the particular ways they hate their body. And Cady thinks to herself "I used to think there was just fat and skinny. But apparently there's lots of things that can be wrong with your body."

We are impossibly hard on ourselves! We need a break, we need a breather! We need to see examples of women with all sorts of bodies living normally and gorgeously in the world. We don't need constant reminders that we aren't super models. We do need constant reminders that THAT SHIT DON'T MATTER. Nobody defines your beauty other than you. I'm not saying it's simple, I'm just saying everything changed for me when I realized there are ways to live your life without frowning at your body every time you look in the mirror. Even if you're already hella confident but there's still just this one person who makes you feel inadequate, cut that bitch out of your life! If it's a real life bitch and not just on social media then that's why we need more photos of the incredible diversity in women's bodies. The shapes, the colors, the textures, the wobbly bits, the scars, the acne, the wrinkles, the unpleasant things we all have that don't need to be unpleasant. Knowing that there's more than one type of body that is allowed to exist happily in the world changes the way you see women with bodies you envy. Because it turns out, it's just another body! A different body, one of millions, just like yours. One is not better than the other. And then you can not only appreciate your own body but other women's bodies too. We do not need to compare and compete.

So this is why I started posting photos of myself half naked. Because having a body that looks this way is allowed and it should be celebrated like all bodies. Unfortunately and rather ironically, the boyfriend who was in many ways the catalyst for my initial body positivity, hated my posts. We had a huge fight, it was one of the most jarring and hurtful arguments I've ever had in my life. He brushed over the "feminism" of it all because he felt that even if that was my personal reason for posting body posititive photos, the men who see them don't know that, they just see a girl with lingerie on. I couldn't find the words to say how unheard and unsupported that made me feel. For my own boyfriend, the man I was in love with, to not understand where I was coming from was both infuriating and unsettling. In the end we agreed to disagree because I honestly was just exhausted trying to explain and defend myself. I never stopped replaying that argument in my head. The way he turned something that I was so proud of into something that threatened his manhood. How he could completely miss the point. So as a general response to him, I'm gonna say this loudly, for the people in the back: WE CANNOT CONTROL HOW MEN REACT TO OUR BODIES IT IS NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY.

It fills me with an unmeasurable amount of joy when someone thanks me for not being ashamed to show my body. I love the thought that maybe just one woman will see some selfie I took on a day that I was really feeling myself, and have a sigh of relief. I hope she realizes she can finally go on with her day, and hopefully her life, without being in a neverending quarrel with her body. And more than that, I hope she can live her life in constant awe of her body instead of constant damnation.