I need to make a plea to you. I’m a mother of twins you see. One boy and one girl. Now, many parent’s have girls and boys, but not as often do they have them at the same time, at the same stages, and I tell you, it awards me an interesting perspective. Also, I’m a feminist. So I tend to seek equal opportunities and futures for my kids. Not the same, because they aren’t the same kid, but equal, you know?
So I’m here with kind of a weird plea. See, because of the circles I run in (parents, feminists) I’ve found a lot of really beautiful books for girls. Books about being who they are, and cherishing that. Books about how they can want anything for their future. Books about being any kind of girl they want to be.
Which is great. Yay? Definitely yay.
But hey, again this is kinda weird. My son, he needs these kinds of books, too. He needs books that celebrate whatever kind of boy he is, and that tell him his trajectory is his alone to decide.
And I tell you, as much as it is a man’s world, those books are hard to find. There’s plenty about being brave, and being rough. There’s plenty of books that celebrate being a knight. Or being an adventurer.
Few that celebrate being a father. Or being a chef. Or just being a good friend.
Write these books for me, children’s authors. Please. Neil Gaiman, you gave us a Blueberry Girl. I’d really love something for my Blueberry Boy, too. Jane Yolen, dream up nurturing stories for my son as well as my daughter.
All you writers, write. Remember that the little boys love cuddles and dreams as much as the little girls do. Be soft to my son, please. So when I lay my head down on his pillow next to him at night to read him a story to send him off to sleep, the stories I read him will make soar with feathered wings. Give my son softness.
I was standing in the checkout line waiting my turn. Bored. Looking at the magazine covers rather than making eye contact with the other people in line.
As you do.
I was doing this, and something really clarified for me.
See, there was this horrible rag cover. Globe or National Enquirer, or Star, or something. It had the title of “Worst Beach Bodies.” There’s Kim Kardashian’s butt, front and center, titled “Double Wide.” Ha! Ha! Because Kim Kardashian has a butt that is wide, you see. Oh, and we all agree that big butts mean fat, and fat means ugly err, I mean not healthy. So we can all make fun of her butt being big because really we’re just concerned about her health and fuck if she doesn’t deserve it because what the hell is she doing thinking her big butt is okay to show off to the world as desirable! How dare she?! The nerve!
NEEEEEXT!
People I don’t know, people I don’t know, people I don’t know and… what? Is that the little person from that tv show? Amy Roloff? What in the actual fuck? They’re making fun of her? Because her body is different? And she dared to show it on the beach?
Are you fucking kidding me?
You know that point when your ears start to make that whooshing sound and your vision narrows, and you realize that you might just actually be one ragequit away from a for real stroke because you actually got that pissed off?
I was there. Right there.
And I want to use nicer language. I want to not use curse words, because I’d like for you to pass this around, and I know that using curse words makes that harder for you to do. I know that curse words are the retreat of a small vocabulary and that it takes finer skill and creates more power to write without them, but I am so enraged by this.
But it made something clear.
See, I’ve grown desensitized to the fat shaming. Every now and then it’ll get my ire up, but I have come to expect it. It’s what our media does. It’s what people in our culture do. It’s what our coworkers and friends and family do. Not all of them, sure, but enough. We can spread the body positivity from here to eternity, but the streak of shame and blame that we place on people, and ourselves, for fat, for daring to be fat? That’s wider than all the fat combined. It’s heavier, meatier, and I am here to tell you uglier.
Gabourey Sidibe can make her speeches about living past the hate and finding her own beauty, but at the end, we know, we all know, there are a world of comments that will come after about how she should still lose a few pounds. At the least, “for her health.”
And we’ve come to expect that, if not accept that. We don’t, as a culture, accept that fat is a genetic difference, we don’t, as a culture, accept that fat is just another one of the facets of beauty that exists in our species.
But.
I did not expect that to be put on a little person. I didn’t expect the highly critical eye of the media to turn to a person who was born with the genes that express themselves through one of the many varieties of drawfism. Amy Roloff is a little person. Her body is different. Making fun of her body for being different makes as much sense as making fun of Stephen Hawking because he’s in a wheelchair.
Here’s another horrible part of this. They cropped the picture carefully. They didn’t make fun of her husband for daring to be a little person on the beach. All the hate was reserved for her. Because that’s what we do.
And I really should have known better. Because we know better, don’t we? Of course the media is going to make fun of Amy Roloff. Just like they make fun of Gabourey Sidibhe. And it really is all the same. And it isn’t about a focused set of standards of beauty. It isn’t about the overuse of photoshop. It isn’t about fashion. It isn’t even about attraction, or health.
It’s about being bullies.
We’ve accepted a culture that bullies, especially, women. We take part in it. We consume it and regurgitate it and spread it far and wide on Tumblr and Pinterest and blogs and Instagram.
And god. I sort of want to thank that horrible magazine for clarifying it for me. Because damn if another picture dissecting what parts of whichever actress they took apart this week for being too fat was going to get through to me.
If you are a woman, you are less than. You are a consumable product. Here are your array of products and services to purchase so that you can be consumed. And you will consume it. $20 billion a year on the diet industry. $34 billion a year on beauty products and services (I’m sure there’s some overlap there on beauty services/products and the diet industry, but you get the idea). There’s a lot of money to be made by telling you that you look like crap. And when you get fed up and feel down and depressed about it, there’ll be a whole row of magazines at the grocery store, and entire blogs dedicated to ripping apart actresses and female celebrities who didn’t live up to the expectations that you haven’t been able to live up to either. And maybe you’ll rip them apart, too. So you can feel better about how shitty you feel about yourself, inevitably.
And maybe it’s time that we see that we feel like shit because we have been consumed and processed through a machine that digests us to turn us into ready consumers for their products and services. Maybe it’s time we realize that this media machine is not celebrating the beautiful life, but the impossible life, simply so we will consume it and be consumed by it. That the reason will feel like shit is because we have been shat.
And maybe we need to step away from the bullies and stop giving them our voices and ears to use. We need to stop consuming this. There’s just no world where it is acceptable to make fun of people’s bodies for being different. We need to turn it around on ourselves. There’s just no world where it is acceptable to make fun of our own body for being different.
Dammit, we are the expression of a beautiful conglomeration of millennia of evolution. We are life. We are living, breathing, thinking, dancing, rolling, wrinkling, jiggling, taut, stretched, bunched up, beautiful life. In myriad forms. We are life.
Not that long ago or far away, I worked in a bookstore. It was good work. Intellectually stimulating in spots. Physically demanding in others. Emotionally satisfying most of all. It was good to help people to books. Help them find the books that would entertain or educate. Good to work around other people that felt as strongly about books as I did.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I started working there, but by the third year I knew I had found my niché. The thing that makes my heart sing, you know?
What it didn’t do is pay the bills. Not even as I climbed the ladder into management did it do that.
During most of my tenure as a bookseller I shared living spaces with anywhere from 2-6 other people. Sharing bills is how you get by at minimum wage. None of my roommates had children, so we all sort of stayed above water. Barely. A few didn’t.
The homes were somewhat revolving doors of changing circumstances.
This is the kind of lifestyle that we are led to expect of our college years from the generation that has come before us, but for most of us, we were in our late 20’s and early 30’s. One of my roommates worked in the IT industry and brought home an above average salary of anywhere from 60-80k a year. Utility bills were made out in his good credit name. The rest of us were minimum wage service industry, with a few pink collar specializers floating in and out with their “good money” of 30-40k a year.
I was one of the lucky ones. The very few. In a store that employed 30 or 40 people I was one of around 6 that broke 20,000 a year in wages. Gross income. Pre-taxes. This is what climbing the ladder of management means. If I went much higher I would be salaried, and that would mean all my overtime would suddenly be gone. I would work the same grueling overtime hours, but without the perks in my paycheck. A small nod of a few extra thousand would be added to my salary, but the overtime generally meant a lot more. So I didn’t fight that hard to climb higher. My elevated position meant I was granted overtime far more often than those beneath me.
This is a sweet spot in the retail and service industry that’s rarely understood outside of it. Shift managers, assistant managers, supervisors, team leaders – all different titles that generally mean: I can’t afford to make less money, and I can’t afford to make “more.”
Again, I was one of the lucky ones. I was surrounded by coworkers who did not get by.
During my time working with books I had coworkers who lived without gas for years because no one in their house had the credit to connect that utility, nor the money to pay the extra that gas companies ask for if you don’t have it. They took cold showers in the Winter, and used space heaters well into Spring. I had coworkers who squatted in abandoned houses without water at all. I had coworkers who had teeth rotting out of their head because dental insurance was just one extra too many after paying for groceries. I had coworkers, so many, who worked 2 and even 3 jobs trying to hobble together enough to pay for a simple life. Coworkers with no cars in a city that had very limited mass transit. Coworkers who worked only for the insurance because they were cancer survivors, and insurance companies would no longer take them and their preexisting conditions. Everyone skipped meals there. Everyone.
The vast majority of those who I worked with were not teenagers. They were not bored spouses filling up their empty hours. The few teenagers I did work with were not making pocket money. They too were just trying to pay their bills. Heck, some of the people I worked with were well degreed people. Teachers, engineers and lawyers who had left their professions when times got tough. Service and retail was what could be found. So we worked shoulder to shoulder. A goodly portion of my coworkers had children to feed and clothe.
The public perception of what it means to be poor is somehow “other,” but 57% of families in the US are below the poverty line, and having lived there I can tell you: poverty is everywhere.
The cheapest new car starts at $17k. Most new cars are closer to $30k. That’s more than or almost a year’s salary for most people. For most of the US a new car is stratospherically impossible, a bizarre castle in the sky that is referred to but never seen.
I’ll tell you, the new dream of this coming generation isn’t home ownership. From their homes with roommates or the basements of their parent’s home where they still live? Simply buying a new car is the new dream. “Someday I’ll buy a car that isn’t already broken. That I don’t have to spend a quarter of every paycheck to keep running.” That’s what Lennie and George would be talking about in our brave new economy instead of their far off dreams of a small farm to own and live off of.
During one of the regular “charity drives” that our chain of bookstores had wherein customers would buy books off our shelves to donate to children who are in need (a self serving charity if there ever was one, but one that did indeed get books into the hands of children who had never had a book of their own outside of a library) I had a customer look at me in her multi-thousand dollar coat, clutching her hundreds of dollar purse and tell me of course she wouldn’t buy a book to donate to local children in need. There were no local children in need here. No one was in need in her community.
She honestly believed it. It was all she knew. She was not mean spirited, she just could not see what was beyond the doors of her own house.
People don’t walk around telling you that they are in poverty. Even when we are, we rarely say it. We make do and get by. We skip meals, and juggle bills. We don’t go to the doctor or the dentist. We share homes and stretch our dollars.
We are decimated by furnaces and cars that need repair. School loans that automatically deduct our money. Accidents and illnesses that chip away the foundations we stand on.
No one is in need in our communities. We all are.
If you don’t see that, you Paul Ryan’s of the world? It’s because you have closed the door on the rest of us.
I’m going to say something here that is sort of unpopular right now among the people I know.
Science is not the place to debate theology.
Just quit it. Stop debating Creationists.
Bill Nye, I love you. I love what you stand for. I love science and reason. Heck, to be quite honest, I even love theology and world religions. But please, quit it. Stop giving airtime to theological belief structures that have been patently disproven.
Creationism isn’t a competing scientific theory. It can not stand on the same platform as evolution, or membrane theory, or the big bang theory, or the laws of thermodynamics, or the search for the unified field theory, or any of the thousand and one different scientific theories that work at explaining our universe and it’s rules. To pretend otherwise elevates it beyond what it is, and lowers all of those.
Creationism is a belief structure. One that at it’s heart relies on ignorance or cognitive dissonance towards the facts as they are known and proven.
If you’re hoping to catch people before their ignorance trips them into Creationist beliefs, debating those that have a theological imperative to believe in Creationism is not the way.
Teaching is the way.
And you know that. You know that, especially Bill Nye. Hell, that’s the entire life purpose that you have operated on. Teach them. Teach them about rational thinking. Teach them about science. Teach them about the passionate love of learning the mechanisms of observation and rational thinking.
Don’t try to go head to head with their belief structures. There can be no quarter there. And when you back them into the corner of pro and con that debate makes, where science stands on one side, and belief on the other? You lose. And in losing, you will lose them.
Fairly soon, March 2014, a new generation will be exposed to a new iteration of Cosmos. Sagan’s great work, and a true labor of love will again light sparks in people’s heads. Your bromance love, Neil deGrasse Tyson will present what is not a debate, but instead, intriguing answers and intriguing questions.
Because that’s what science does. That’s what science is.
Creationism has no place there. It’s not science. It’s flat-earth mumbo jumbo. You might as well present it along with heliocentrism if you go that route.
Theology goes about explaining the Why? That’s not science. Science asks What? and How? Leave the why to the theologians and storytellers. Don’t debate them.
Something sort of weird happened on the way to sharing a picture for the #WeStandWithWendy campaign.
A couple years ago my friend Lady Katza from Peanut Butter Macramé took a picture of her daughter. She had made a gorgeous Little Red Riding Hood costume for her daughter, and completed the costume with a bloodied axe and a wolf’s head.
Her daughter was 8 in the picture; unmistakably prepubescent. There was little question of context for herself, her husband, or for me. In this storytelling, Red had saved herself with a Huntsman’s axe. She did not need saving. The girl in the picture was wide eyed, with her innocence still visibly intact. She did not look menaced or menacing. She looked determined, and young. It was, ultimately, a picture of female innocence that was capable, and not the least bit helpless.
It was the kind of story-in-a-picture that upends paradigms, in short.
We loved it.
A few years passed. Years full of assault to women’s rights and women’s autonomy. Steubenville. The Paycheck Fairness Act being rejected by every single Republican representative. State after state falling down in upholding Roe vs. Wade.
Texas front and center.
State Senator Wendy Davis’s now famous filibuster blew our minds. We stayed up late into the night, completely riveted.
We watched as the Texas State Senate ended Ms. Davis’s filibuster on technicalities. We watched as other Senators picked up Senator Davis’s mantle and continued her filibuster. We watched as the Texas State Senate closed them down, too. Then we watched as the outrage filled the Senate, and the people in the gallery picked up the mantle and ran the final minutes of the clock down. Then we watched the complete disregard for their own State’s Law with which they took the vote anyway, and passed the bill that would deny not only the rights that had been established with Roe vs. Wade, but also general healthcare for women in Texas. We watched as the record was fraudulently changed to show that the vote had happened within the time limit. Then we watched the bill dissolve under the world’s scrutiny. Then we watched Texas Governor Rick Perry do what all knew he would, and schedule a second special session to again pass a bill that had been denied passage by the people of Texas.
This isn’t really about that, though. I mean, all of that matters, but that’s not even what I’m talking about here.
Orange was the new color. We donned orange to stand with Wendy Davis. Lady Katza mentioned the picture she had of her daughter and thought it would be an interesting picture to submit, were the color to change from red to orange. It was a picture of a girl with courage, determination, strength and no fear. She did not need to be saved. She was saving herself.
I agreed. It was late, though, and she had to go to sleep, so I turned to Laura Ross at @laurarossdesign.com to help turn Red’s clothes orange for us. Laura obliged happily. Red was now orange, and some subtle highlighting was added.
I sent the result to Lady Katza, and in the morning she tested the waters by posting the original pic to her FB feed.
Then the weirdness started. The photo was picked apart. Red was recast as Lizzie Borden. Lady Katza was unsure whether it would be a good idea or not to post the picture at all, let alone with orange and text. Was this actually a strong picture, as we thought?
See, the thing is, there’s no context for this picture in our culture. This fits no archetype. A woman who violently defends herself is sexualized and fetishized into Lara Croft type tits-and-ass caricatures. We, as a culture, slut-shame away her frightening power.
That just wasn’t possible with this picture. This picture shows a little girl who is not menacing or menaced. She is competent, unafraid, and still in full possession of her innocence. The only other example we could even come up with was Hit-Girl from Kick Ass. That was kind of startling.
Of course people were going to create a menacing context for the picture, there was no other available context with which to view it.
Well then. We just need to change that. We need to create stories where the girl saves herself. We need people like Senators Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte to be strong examples for us. We need Brave’s Merida, and no, thanks, we don’t want her slimmed down, given bigger boobs, a tinier waist, and made into a simpering Disney Princess that needs her complementary Prince. We need a Little Red Riding Hood that doesn’t wait for a Woodsman to save her, but saves herself.
We are ready to stand, and we will not sit down, and our daughters are ready, too. We will be brave. We will be heard. We will stand.
I’ve been very wrapped up in my kids’ stuff lately, and that’s put my mind very much on them, and noticing all the different things about them that are happening during their very exciting journey of being 4 years old.
Of those, one thing has been striking me repeatedly with it’s abstract bittersweetness.
My children are entering a tunnel that will take them away from me for many years. Occasionally I will get glimpses of who they are, but as the years go on, I know I can not go where they go.
They are entering childhood, and no adult may tread there. It is a land of alliances, treaties, pacts, battles, wars, folktales, ballads, native culture, secret handshakes, separate worries and separate truths.
It is a place of scientific inquiry and an absolute certainty in local superstition.
I can give them the knowledge of my own travels in that land, but the nature of these communications is such that the further inland they travel, less of this information will reach them. Many times by the time they receive that information it will be by their own hands and their own hard-fought experience.
I sometimes wonder if parenting styles like helicoptering, attachment parenting, free range parenting, and many others are simply methods people have come up with to fight or claim treaties with this land and those who travel through it.
My own truth is that I think there is no treaty to be made. All you can do is aim, and try to be a good person. I remind myself, again and again, of Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem “On Children”
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I didn’t really want to write this. I’ve already written versions of this, over and over. I’ve even touched on it here in the past.
But then someone did write about it, and they did it well. And I shared it on my personal Facebook. Because that video had been making the rounds on my Facebook. And I didn’t want to take away from how people were feeling about it, so I hadn’t been sharing the video, but I had been noticing them feeling good about themselves, and I can’t, I don’t want to, shit on that.
People feeling good about themselves is pretty important, and I am certainly not going to pretend that we are somehow divorced from the biological imperative of being attracted to people who are biologically attractive. But those two thoughts themselves sort of aren’t even related.
Forgive me leaving the rules of grammar and editing behind as I’m writing this because damn if this isn’t an immediate and strong reaction. I don’t want to break my flow.
Because. Because here’s the thing, what our culture states as attractive has very little to do with biological attraction.
Let me put a box around that sentence and drive it into your head with a soft hammer made of love and compassion for the sack of flesh and muscle and bone and other tissues that you move around in and is so completely sacred a thing that it is fucking derived of nothing less than stardust.
You are stardust.
Okay. Yeah. Sure.
Everything is stardust. Step away from the reverence for a second and let’s attack it from another angle, though.
What we consider to be culturally beautiful and attractive has little to do with biological attraction. Biological attraction is about fitness to mate, strength for survival, acuteness of intellect.
That’s the bare bones of it. It can be summed up by a few simple things, though.
In the modern Western world, the ability to provide a steady income can indicate both strength for survival and acuteness of intellect. There’s also sickness. So we look for healthy teeth, clear eyes, clear skin.
Then there’s fitness to mate. In a man, this is generally biologically gauged by your lizard brain in glutes and abdominal muscles. The hips, ass, and stomach that indicate an ability to thrust the penis well into the vagina, and deliver it’s payload.
In a woman, it’s gauged by hip to waist ratio. Hips that can carry a wide load of baby, and deliver it without dying.
And that’s pretty much it. If you look throughout history, you’re going to see an awful lot of human portraiture that emphasizes our genitals, and the muscles and bone structure surrounding them. Because that’s it.
That isn’t to say that is all there is to attraction. Or that without the ability toward fecundity you are outside of the measure of biological attraction. Different chromosome arrangements seek out complementary arrangements. Tall. Short. Skinny. Fat. Red hair. Black hair. Dark skin. Light skin. Hard working taskers. Big picture thinkers. Smart. Average. Passionate. Driven. Etc. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum. Ad astra. The variety is endless, and biology moves us towards that, too, because it loves to mix things up and find out what will happen.
But.
What we have arrived at, currently, as a cultural ideal archetype for, specifically, women, has little to do with biological attraction. Yes, clear skin, clear eyes, good teeth. Sure. Preternaturally (sorry, Ms. Rice, I know you feel an affinity towards that word, but sometimes it really is the appropriate word to use surprisingly enough) so to the point that we use photo editing to achieve beyond human clear skin, good teeth, and clear eyes.
If people walked around with the glow and manipulations of Photoshop, it’d actually be intimidating and sort of scary. Grotesque even, in many cases.
Aside from that is our obsession with a nearly flat and prepubescent body on women who have the height of full grown adults. This truly has more to do with the complexities of fashion design than any nefarious plot in marketing, though.
It’s far easier to commodify and complete clothes that are designed for a standard prepubescent woman who has far more than the height of a nonstandard adult woman. Her shoulders don’t have the width that makes male design more difficult, even. There are less curves and angles than a fully grown woman. Those curves and angles play havoc with the dressmaker.
Ask anyone who sews clothes for a hobby, and they will understand immediately what I am talking about, too. The difference in fit between two size 2 women is far enough as it is. Bring them to a size 12 or 14 (the standard size in the US) and you are talking many inches of difference all over the place just from woman to woman. Bring them to a size 20 or 22, and it’s enough to make a clothesmaker weep and simply offer clothes that are likely to fit at the widest point, and drape otherwise. And an awful lot of knit.
This, by the way, is why knits and stretch materials of all sorts are so incredibly common in ready to wear fashion. And why they become even more common the higher the size.
I’m starting to drift into major essay here, and haven’t even hit all the points, though.
So. Let’s set that aside. Let’s set aside attraction and standards of beauty.
That last bit of that Dove commercial is disturbing as hell.
“It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children. It impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”
Your beauty. Remember, that’s what this Dove ad campaign is talking about here. Your beauty.
ETA: I didn’t address the inherent racism because it’s been addressed by people who are infinitely better qualified than myself. But holy eff, y’all. That was some racist shit right there.
When we are ashamed of something we don’t talk about it. It could be our own shameful feelings that we are hiding, or it could be the shameful feelings of other people. There are things we don’t talk about because talking about it hurts too much, that’s a slight variation, but shame is always painful. So if it’s a thing that is always staring us in the face and we don’t talk about it? That’s shame.
Like our bodies.
Many times I’ve heard people tell their children to not discuss people’s bodies. “We don’t talk about people’s bodies.” “It’s not nice to talk about the way people look.”
Yes we do, and why isn’t it?
Do you mean to say that you don’t judge people’s bodies? Or do you mean you don’t put value on their worth as a person based on their body? Great. That’s not the same as not talking about it.
When a 3 year old child looks at me in a swimsuit and says “wow, you’re really big!” they aren’t saying “gosh, you’re unhealthy,” or “gee, Miss, I think you must eat too much,” or “you must be really lazy,” or even “I don’t think you’re pretty.” Kids that young really aren’t generally that complex. They say what they think, and what they think can be deciphered pretty easily by what they say.
What they also are is pretty savvy. Kids know when you’re not mentioning something obvious. The reason kids mention the way bodies look is because kids mention everything. The way bodies look is one of the more obvious things to mention. They notice tall, they notice short, they notice fat, they notice skinny, they notice hair, they notice clothes, they notice skin colors, they notice bent backs and missing legs.
They notice everything, and if they don’t mention it, it’s likely because we’ve already told them that it’s not a thing we talk about. That noticing people’s bodies makes them feel bad. If you’re at all savvy for half a second you’ll notice that if we tell kids that we shouldn’t talk to people about their bodies and that it will make them feel bad, you’ll realize that on some level, we expect that the people do feel bad about their bodies, or even that they should.
And that’s not really a message I want to give my children. If we want attitudes to change about appearance based prejudice (any of it), then actually talking about it is something we have to do.
I face this with great sensitivity and sadness. Many people have been made to feel that their bodies really are something they should be ashamed of. Their feelings are very raw there. It’s not trivial. It isn’t with flippancy that I say that we still need to talk about it even if it hurts. It’s with an eye to change that.
I really do want to change it, too. I feel quite strongly about all bodies being beautiful. I love to paint and draw, and one of the things that I first noticed as a student of art was that when a life model is facing you, you look for the things that are them. It’s near impossible to see these things and not see the beauty in them. To see the wrinkles, and the scars, stretchmarks, folds and crinkles, the curves, the bones, the withered muscles, the full muscles, the dimpling, the taut skin, the color variations, to see everything, and not wish to reproduce the exact unique expression of human beauty is a near impossibility. Perhaps not all artists feel it, but many do.
I have a hard time even grasping the concept that these are things I am supposed to turn away and avert my eyes from when all I want to do is write prose that celebrates the elevation of these disparate bits into a whole that is a human body that holds a human life and carries it through space and time with deftness. When I want to painstakingly recreate the ecstasy that glows from each person as Rembrandt did.
There aren’t some bodies that are good and some that are bad. They are all beautiful. All of them. Ask a good portrait photographer and they will agree.
Bodies are beautiful. There is no shame there that was not put by outside influence. I simply refuse to sit silently with eyes closed to the beauty of bodies. I will not be shamed into silence. I will not give that shame to my children.
There is no shame on me.
ETA: I hammered this out at something like 2 or 3 in the morning. You ever nag yourself to get something done, and until you do it, you can’t really rest? Yeah. That’s how I felt about this. I just needed to write it out. Perhaps later I’ll make a new draft of it. Thank you for the love, even though it’s not really my best. I like to fancy that you can see the good in it beyond the preachy bad writing. ❤
I am a child of The Future. Don’t mistake that for me thinking that I’m somehow more advanced, or that I am misplaced in my generation. More that the surroundings and influences that were part of my formative years were those of people or things heavily invested in the ideas of a technologically, sociologically, and scientifically advanced “Future.”
I was born in the East San Francisco Bay Area to heavily geeky parents in the beginning parts of the 1970’s. My mother worked in science and technology labs, and eventually in the computer industry. My father also was heavily into the computer industry.
I don’t really quite remember our first home computer. I can’t say we were necessarily the first adopters, but it feels like there has always been one around. My elementary school classes included lessons in Basic and Hello World is a touchstone for me in the classical sense.
Our converted garage held the local High School’s computer lab during the Summer. My brother and sister both have gone on to careers in the IT industry, having been in it early enough that it easily led to such for people with their talents and intellects.
We were also readers, gamers, fantasy and sci-fi lovers much as you’d expect.
Star Trek was watched faithfully in our home (it’s original airing having ended right about the time I was born, we were mostly watching syndicated broadcasts, though I do believe the original broadcasts were most likely watched by my family).
Next Generation was playing when I was in my very late teens and early 20’s.
This is me trying to work through some thoughts I’ve been having, you see. So, if you’re looking for a thread to follow, there isn’t one as of yet. Perhaps there never will be. It’s just some thought patterns.
What I know is that I was introduced to the idea of post-capitalism exceptionally early. Starfleet and it’s utopian future are even sort of part of my geographical cultural heritage, coming from the Bay Area as I do.
My thought processes are intricately tied to the idea of a space exploration, scientific and technological innovation and utopia.
Not really going anywhere with this as of yet, as I mentioned. Just sketching.
pollychromatic 