Posts tagged body image

robaemea:

REAL

goforthandbeawesome:

real women

Posted on June 23, 2011

Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.

Real women do not have curves.   Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not.   They are tall, and not.  They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not.  They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls.  And as baby boys.  And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards.  Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change.  Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo.  Real women have hair so long they can sit on it.  Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts.  Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.

Real women have ovaries.  Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed.  Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above.  Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.

Real women are fat.  And thin.  And both, and neither, and otherwise.  Doesn’t make them any less real.

There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla:

There is no wrong way to have a body.

I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis.  All human beings are real.

Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised.  It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel.  But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem.  Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me.

(Source: ushahidi, via robaemea-deactivated20120917)

feministguy:

…You get a lot of images that look like this. And a lot of links to websites for gynecomastia reduction. I’m about two weeks out from my surgery (which is, in many ways, similar to what those sites advertise). My chest is still swollen, still healing. I feel immeasurably better than I did before. But I can feel the creeping temptation to compare myself to guys like in this image. Unless I want to eat a whole lot more than I do now (I’ve tried; I don’t do well at that) and spend a lot more time in the gym than I do now (also not something I’m genuinely interested in, at least not given other priorities), I won’t look like him.

I’ll probably look more like this guy once the swelling goes down, though with a little bigger nipples and areolas. And that’s okay. I have, at various times during the day, been making myself look at every guy that I see around me to remind myself of the fact that bodies come in all shapes and sizes.

Looking around the Internet, there are plenty of (what I take to be) non-transgender/transsexual men who are worried about their nipple size. On the other hand, there are men who are trying to increase their nipple size (nipple pumps abound in online sex toy stores). What I am  self-conscious about is something that plenty of people find desirable—including, of course, my ladyfriend, who has loved me and my body for years, throughout its various changes.

Still, despite knowing this, I have, historically and intermittently, said  ”I’m going to get big!” and then proceeded to try to figure out diets or exercises to get me looking more like Hunky Dude above. I’ve said it quasi-tongue in cheek, but with a genuine wish that I could be more like him. Because that would make me more masculine, more attractive, more __[insert adjective here]__.

It’s something that I’ve seen a lot of in the few years I’ve frequented FTM-focused websites: young men who are focused on bulking up their muscles in order to be perceived as more masculine. That’s something that our current American culture emphasizes, but it is (like other standards of beauty) contingent. I’m sure it’s a struggle that I’ll continue to have. It’s a struggle that I also share with men who were assigned male at birth. It’s also a struggle that is, I think, particularly acute for those of us who have had to make major modifications to our bodies in order to feel “right” (which, I might add, is not a description only of trans* people—this kind of body dysmorphia happens to many kinds of people). And it brings up the question of motivations for such changes.

To what extent was the internal pressure to have my chest surgically altered of the same kind as the internal pressure I feel to look like Super Hunk? I want to resist the latter for political reasons, but I think that I did something that feels “authentic” in the former case. I want to affirm the action of preserving bodies as acts of political resistance to norms which are dehumanizing. But I also want to affirm the action of body-modification as resistance. And I don’t think that always it’s clear-cut when an action is resistance and when an action is participating in a dehumanizing norm (after all, some people argue that transsexual surgery is inherently “giving in” to gender binaries).

And I’m absolutely not saying that I’m going to personally shame people for making choices regarding their own bodies. I’m talking about reflecting upon culture and the way that it influences decisions—I’m reluctant to say I have self-knowledge about my deepest motivations and psychology, and am likewise reluctant to attribute motivations to others. I’m just interested in how society influences the kinds of chooses autonomous people consider as live options, how it influences our decision-making, how it influences the outcomes of these decisions, etc.

All this is to say that reflection upon one’s body and its relationship to cultural pressures is really complicated. These pressures aren’t going to cease just because I’ve had a certain kind of surgery, and I don’t get a free pass to stop reflecting. It doesn’t mean I can’t go to the gym, or work out, or even want to gain a little weight and muscle—but it does mean continued critical engagement with my reasons and desires.

(via robaemea-deactivated20120917)