My body, my health, my worth
I. Your Body is a Battleground
Kruger was right. Women’s bodies, even today, even more than ever, are not their own.[i] Mulvey was right. The female body is an object, never the subject — the object of the male gaze.[ii] Margaret Atwood was right. The female body is a vessel, around which our tissues coalesce like an insubstantial vapour.[iii] Penny was right. “Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love.”[iv] Gay was right. The female body is unruly, and the fat, unruly body is read as disgusting.[v] hooks was right. Standards of beauty are means of domination.[vi] It’s difficult not to experience the bombardment of viewpoints and readings of the female body as evidence of the vast conspiracy of patriarchal industrial capitalist power structures. As a woman, it’s difficult to just allow one’s body to exist, without poking at it, starving it, wanting more from it, wanting less.
As I write this, I’m on my sixth day and counting of a bout of acute bronchitis. Worsened surely by the reality of my suppressed immune system — suppressed by the drugs I take on a daily basis, the same drugs given to organ transplant patients to stop them rejecting their new organs, only I take these to stop my body rejecting common allergens, rejecting rain or washing my hands, rejecting the everyday world around me — my chest is wracked by painful coughs. Two competing thoughts return to me in between marathoning the new Sabrina and old X-Files series. One: this cough is doing wonders for my abs. Two: I need to get back to work.
How did I arrive at a point where the big, ungainly, occasionally joy-giving, often-irritating body that carries me around is subject to these two drives? The drive to work, and the drive to be thinner. These two drives aren’t unrelated. The capitalist body is the healthy body, capable of working. The capitalist body is also the body we pour resources into. The healthy body, increasingly it seems, requires expensive, time-consuming help to achieve health. This is problematized for me on a basic level because I truly do require a regimen of medications and preparations to get my body out of bed and upright every morning. But beyond the basic abilities to breathe, move me around, and not feel like my skin is on fire, I want more from my body. I want it to function but I want it to give only the merest appearances from outside of all of the internal systems that it requires to function. I want Bella Hadid’s impossibly 2D figure — where does she store her organs?? I want a body that works, but I also want a body that self-effaces.
II. Health as biological imperative
I’m sick of reading about spurious scientific bases for the assumptions we make in modern times about the body and its biological imperatives. I’m sick of hearing that we value youth in women (strangely never in men) because of its supposed signification of fertility. I’m sick of hearing about ideal waist/hip ratios as markers of fertility. Sick of hearing about this or that diet being authentic, being primordial, being preordained in its probity because it’s how our ancestors ate, because of course we haven’t changed or developed new behaviours or new needs or new impulses in 200,00 years.
A startling essay I read once, in the midst of Honours thesis research into visualisations of the female body, carefully picked apart the received neutrality of the scientific language with which we frame the body. I couldn’t shoehorn the essay into my thesis research so unfortunately didn’t keep a copy, but it’s stuck with me more persistently than anything else I read that year. Why is the female reproductive system discussed in terms of waiting dutifully, every month, for the sperm that might never come? The female reproductive system is passive, waiting for the arrival of the active agent of the male reproductive system. Why do we talk about the female body releasing — and then destroying, unused — an egg each month as if the female body is in a state of constant wastefulness and surplus, but not frame the surplus of male sperm the same way? After all, if we only need one egg, we certainly only need one sperm.
Millennia of cultural bias frame our understanding of not only aesthetics and attractiveness, but also the functions of the human body at a fundamental level. Health is not an objective, absolute state of being. Like any other cultural artefact, the human body is composed in our collective consciousness of perceptions, not absolutes. Why not health? Our ideal of the modality of bodily faculties is fundamentally subjective. There is no ultimate health, no objective truth of the perfectly functioning human body. There is only the acculturated mould into which we try to force it.
In the 21st century, the ideal of health has become the ideal of thinness. No other external markers of the internal health of the body matter. Much has been written, of course, on the inversion this represents of earlier ideals — the fleshly, Rubenesque feminine ideal replaced with the willowy Victoria’s Secret tally of collarbones, ribs, hip bones and knees. But the greatest change, perhaps, is the reshaping of all of our scientific and medical apparatus to tightly enclose the circumscribed form. The thin body isn’t just the aesthetic ideal, it’s the ideal of health. Men — and sometimes women — who crowd into the comments section of a plus-size model to offer their opinions on her figure don’t just talk about how she’s ugly — suddenly they’re deeply, touchingly concerned about her health. Messages reinforcing the thin ideal don’t just come from advertisers, they come from other professions as well.
Because thinness is conflated with health, and fatness is conflated with unhealth, any illness suffered by a fat person must be a product of their fatness. Thus my older sister’s chronic fatigue was imputed by a parade of doctors to her fatness. Her difficulty later in conceiving was a function of her fatness. My mother’s lupus and chronic arthritis is due to her fatness. Friends’ PCOS symptoms were due to their fatness. With a BMI that, despite the size of my frame, has never actually tipped over the line into “overweight”, however arbitrarily drawn that line is, I’ll never forget the doctor who suggested, unsolicited, when I visited for routine reasons to get a new prescription written, that I could — should; heavily implied — consider losing weight.
Never mind that chronic fatigue left my sister so exhausted for years of her life that she couldn’t leave her bed to shower, let alone exercise. Never mind that my mother takes a cocktail of prescription painkillers every day to allow her to continue to walk, move, and even sit amid the constant haze of joint pain; exercise for the sake of weight loss a virtual distant dream. Never mind that PCOS is so little understood and the women who suffer from it so little listened to by the medical establishment that the very often cited experience of gaining weight due to PCOS is not recognised. Never mind that the script I was at the doctor to obtain was for corticosteroids, long-term use of which is known to accrete fat to your cheeks, to the back of your neck, to your torso. Because thinness has become the ideal of health, its binary opposite state of fatness must equal unhealth.[vii]
III. Health as productivity
The process of gaining some simulacrum of normal, functioning health has been at times arduous for me. I managed to wean myself off the corticosteroids, with their aforementioned side effects, and many other worse and less visible side effects besides. The alternate therapy available to me was immune suppressants, beggaring belief as the lesser of the two evils. When I started taking them, for the first two weeks I felt as though I had been hit by a truck, or had run a marathon, or possibly both. Getting out of bed was difficult. My body had to adjust to the sensation of having its natural systems’ activity forcibly suppressed.
Once the fatigue had withdrawn to a manageable level, for the next six months, at an interval of roughly every two weeks I would experience a bout of almost uncontrollable vomiting, for up to 24 hours, or until I could get myself to a doctor for an injection of anti-emetics. Holding down what could be considered gainful employment by most was a challenge. Luckily for me, I was at that time in the grey zone that many young people fall into of under-employment combined with study. I worked at a liquor store which was at times a physically demanding job, but it was shift work, so I was able to take on less of it in order to accommodate my body acclimatising to its new reality. My studies suffered so greatly that I had my new drug regimen cited in my PhD annual progress report, to help my case for an extension at the end of my planned candidature because I had lost so much time to achieving some semblance of health.
Eventually my body did acclimatise, and for the most part, I pass as physically sound. However, a friend has sympathetically extended to me a welcome to the disability community. When I get sick, as I am now, I get sicker than other people, for longer. The passage of illness takes more out of body than from others’ as it passes. I get sick less often than I had imagined I would when I first started taking this medication, but when I do I am reminded forcefully, painfully, of the frailty of my body, belied by its hearty appearance. I am not able-bodied. My body is not able to do everything that most other people’s bodies are able to, include work and function in its ascribed role in society for the required out of time per day, per week, per month, per year.
The idea that body’s purpose is to work is, in my case, received Anglo wisdom from my parents, upon whom I have — perhaps to their surprise and my own — modelled my conception of work. My mother, despite her own increasingly impaired mobility, adheres strictly to the same Protestant work ethic that once prompted my father to ignore his own dental health needs up to the point where he collapsed whilst operating on one of his own patients, and had to be wheeled into another operating room for emergency root canal therapy. This wasn’t a fear of dental work; this was an imperative to work until he quite literally dropped. My mother is obtusely unsympathetic to my infirmity, despite having spent every one of her birthdays for a period of several consecutive years in hospital with me for my annual asthma attack (her birthday coincides with Australian spring).
Once when living with my parents and commuting to another city for work, I was so sick with gastro that I couldn’t leave my friends’ house, where I had with poor timing being staying when I became infected. My mother, upon hearing this, said only, “oh dear, I hope you don’t miss too much work”. After several days lying in my friends’ bed, and then making the hard slog back to my parents’ home, the next day I found it easier to get up and make the two-hour journey into work than to have an argument with my mother that morning about why I couldn’t make it. When I arrived at the office I was so exhausted that I had to lie on the floor. My manager sent me home and, laughing, offered to write me a sick note to take to my parents. Health is measured as fitness to work, and work happens at the expense of health. Even now, though my doctor has signed me out of work for a whole week, I feel the pressing urge to return to the office. Unfortunately, given a critical mind and really quite basic scientific knowledge, I am aware that no drugs exist to help me with my current illness, unless it gets markedly worse and turns into pneumonia.
The healthy body, and particularly the healthy female body, exist as capitalist assets. Work must be done, to facilitate the acquisition of wealth, which can be used to buy sustenance to pour into the body, so it can work. The female body, additionally, supplies the means for production of goods with monetary value, but also completes the labour necessary to maintain the home and the domestic sphere. The female body which does not work does not fulfil the obligations of the female body, which are twofold: to provide labour, and to labour in the act of having children and providing domesticity.
That women would continue to shoulder, largely unheeded and certainly unhelped, the majority of domestic labour, while men laboured fairly in a reciprocal arrangement for their comrades under Communism, was assumed by male philosophers. The Industrial Revolution made domestic labour easier, but didn’t reduce the amount of time women spent doing it. Women’s rights movements of the early 20th century achieved a place for women at work, but they didn’t manage to fill the women’s places in the home (except, for the lucky rich ones, with the labour of brown women’s bodies).[viii]
The female body which cannot work fails to fulfil its duties twofold. Her duties to the capitalist agenda go unfulfilled, as well as her duties in the domestic sphere. When my body is in ill health, not only can I not work, but my already-low impulse to perform any sort of domestic labour is greatly reduced. My ill health threatens not just my ability to work like a good white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but like a good woman. The work of being beautiful and ornamental while fulfilling the above duties, needless to say, goes undone too.
When I went through a period of unemployment last year, I was both depressed and poor (depressed because I was poor); I was also the thinnest I’ve found myself in years. Paradoxically, the lack of work allowed me to pass as conventionally healthy, by which I mean thin. We called it my depression shred, but really it was the result of sleeping until around 11, eating one meal, going to the gym because I had nowhere else to go, eating one more meal, and then a long productive night of worrying and crying. No more food because I couldn’t afford it. Sleeping was helpful — sleeping helped me fill the hours where I would otherwise eat. It’s what I’m doing now, in my convalescence. Today I put my watch on for the first time in a week and the usual notch on the band felt too loose. I am not healthy, I am not working, but I am becoming thinner, and that thinness will allow for me to present one of the accepted markers of health. Luckily there is no attendant depression this time, as I have a contract and health insurance — the trappings of working in a society whose capitalism was preceded by a socialist republic.
IV. Health as commodity
Increasingly, and not only in the sense that others like me can buy medication which makes them temporarily pass as some semblance of functional, health is a commodity — something you can buy. Or not buy, if you’re not you’re not white enough, not idle enough, and most of all not rich enough.
If you are rich enough, you have access to a plane of health unheard of by the great unwashed. The time and idleness afforded by wealth, importantly, afford the time and wherewithal to pursue a sort of purity through health reached when conventional measures of health and fitness don’t go quite far enough. Governmentally-prescribed quotas of activity minutes and daily vegetable servings — that most adults struggle to achieve — are not enough for the ultra-rich and the ultra-idle. The rarer a commodity is, the more valuable it is, so to be worth obtaining for these people, health must become yet more rarefied, codified in its exclusivity, the knowledge of its vendors and sages a shibboleth until the inevitable New York Magazine profile exposes all, and the über-healthy must extend their pursuit for new gurus further afield.
The version of health being peddled is maddening and ever-shifting in its specificity. Open Instagram, or any magazine, or any current pop culture website to see its boundaries, visible, ever-present, collapsed into punchy dicta and glowing, saturated white imagery. Health is a green juice comprised of an arms-race of rarer and more powerful berries, seeds and dust. Health is a vitamin regimen. Health is an exercise program represented by an acronym, with a military industrial ancestry. Health is brushing your teeth with charcoal or maybe swishing your mouth out with coconut oil. Health is rubbing crystals in your armpits and shoving them up your vagina, though one hopes not the same crystal. Health is mindfulness, health is a lifestyle, health is a way of being. It is wellness.
I hate the term wellness. I hate everything it signifies. It signifies the elevation, it signifies the abstraction of the principles that comprise it, ever further from the everyday life and realities of the people it is sold to. It’s not enough to try to put some decent food in your body and try to move your body around a bit and maybe take a moment or two once in a while to do something nice for your body, whatever that might be. The pursuit of wellness is aggressive, and it is rarefied. It is something only the most privileged can fully devote themselves to. You and I can’t sequester ourselves on a yoga retreat, we can’t attend Goop’s wellness weekend festival of fuckery (well you can if you work there maybe, but don’t expect to get to paid for your time in anything other than pure chicanery). The level of devotion required to pursue, never mind attain, anything approaching a contemporary definition of wellness, necessitates by the very amorphous nature of the concept, a great deal of disposable income and time.
To achieve wellness you need a sleep doctor, a life coach, a personal trainer, a subscription to SoulCycle, a juicer or maybe a machine that squeezes pre-juiced juice out of a packet for you, a captive doctor who won’t mind running bloods for you to check that your diet fits your blood type, you need of course the right clothes, the right bra, the right shoes for your yoga class, another set for running, another set for barre or aerial Pilates or pole or spinning or maybe hot yoga or paddleboard yoga because lord knows they’re different from the other type of yoga you already do in an inner-city wooden-floored, concrete-walled, bare-beams studio with floor to ceiling windows filled with other barefoot middle- to upper-class white women who are all bone, no tone, no strength, only flexibility but god forbid they have the mental flexibility to realise that their very narrow definitions of what it means to be healthy and to try to take good care of your body are simply inaccessible to 99% of other people.
Make sure that in addition to the above, you also espouse the new language of wellness. It’s about health, not weight. It’s about living the best life that you can. It’s about detoxing from all of the insidious poisons of the modern world, never mind the organs we have in our bodies already whose sole function is to do so for us. It’s about mindfulness. Those who pursue wellness are more mindful than the rest of us who just thrash our bodies carelessly, heedlessly through life and the modern world and its toxins and sharp edges and fatty foods and unnecessary substances and microwaves and mobile phones and oven pizzas from a box. Those who pursue wellness have a greater purpose than those that don’t because they pursue a sanctified state of being, of purity and unity of mind and body that someone who eats French fries and drinks beer and doesn’t have a step counter could never achieve. Those who pursue modern health and wellness are just straight up better people than the rest of us.
V. Health as Technology
They’re now even performing better than us in other facets of their lives than purely the physical — or so the new rhetoric of self-optimisation tells us. If you wanted to be cynical (probably fat and cynical, no doubt), you could theorise that this is merely the new marketing slant of an industry looking to extend its audience to new target groups of men, tech brosephs, office jabronis and others previously immune to the largely feminised language and imagery of weight loss products. But I wonder if the latest permutation of the way fitness, health and wellness crap is sold to us represents merely a mutation, a foretaste of how the virus of health-as-commodity is going to survive to infect us for the next 10–15 years, before it shifts again to whatever the zeitgeist requires.
The truly modern fitness fanatic has two choices, two divergent roads in the yellow wood which, further down the path, converge on the same mystical, feted body in a perfect state of health. One is wellness, the Goop route, of jade eggs and moon dust in your turmeric latte and activated charcoal. The other is self-optimisation (how long before we notice its collapse into that other internet sadboy phenomenon, looks-maxing?). If you work at a tech company and you wear a sleeveless vest of some rarefied performance fabric and you like to research which cryptocurrency to invest in, you might also like to take your health to the next level by gaming your own body, gaming your biology; figuring out the formula and the ingredients for perfect health. There exist now a plethora of companies offering a revved-up, science buzzword-heavy version of health, diet and exercise products and services, with a shiny tech veneer.
In my memory, the advent of the current tech-flavoured iteration of the wellness industry was a guy who was sick of putting food in his body and still not achieving the right nutritional input to be able to do the stuff he needed to do (which if I recall correctly, was work).[ix] I remember reading his amazingly 90s blog-looking site, recording his experiments with coming up with the right components of a powdered substance which would provide his body with the adequate fuel to function. Again, I may be misremembering, but the primary drive I understood from his experiment was impatience with the chore of feeding his body, which surely every independent adult has felt at some point. Other internet science and nutrition aficionados flocked to the experiment, offering their viewpoints, as internet aficionados are wont to do. At some point, it became apparent that there was quite a market for this sort of thing, old mate began selling his concoction, and in my mind an entire wellspring of health ideas of spurious scientific grounding arose from there.
In reality, that was only my Baader-Meinhof moment for what was likely a growing trend in health and wellness already. You can have a coffee that purports to eliminate other toxins from your body that “rob your performance” which definitely sounds like a thing you should be worried about, and also a thing that is probably solved by fancy coffee. You can take a supplement that’s a step more advanced from a multivitamin because it’s a nootropic, so it purports to be based more on science than on old wives’ tales. You can have your DNA sequenced to identify the most effective way for you to eat and exercise, rather than guessing and just skipping leg day at the gym again.
The ideas that drive these companies are becoming increasingly niche, and in the process, really fucking funny. I’m too punch-drunk from years of being worn down by ads for underwear and movies and soft drink and household cleaning products using the commodified female body, too weary of the magazine headlines touting diet and weight loss tips, too tired of hearing about celebrity exercise routines and Master Cleanses, to find those anything other than oppressive. The apparatus of control over women and their bodies constituted by the diet and exercise industry is too ever-present for me to find funny, but a company selling me a Ketone Ester Superfuel, whatever the fuck that is; “[a] clinically validated superfuel that can be used to improve training, recovery, and performance”? Sign me the fuck up, that sounds ridiculous.
The rhetoric used by those touting the nugenic wares is truly a delight: “I’m focused on longevity and cognitive performance,” said Geoff Woo, “CEO of the biohacking start-up HVMN”, purveyors of the afore-mentioned Ketone Ester Superfuel (TM, one assumes).[x] Oh Geoff, 10/10. Could you please make your coding of health as a moral virtue a bit more obvious? “What if illness could be elective?”, asks the website Viome, which will read your shit “[using] state-of-the-art proprietary technology” to create “unique molecular profiles” to help you better understand your health so you can…optimize it. The logical conclusion to be drawn from Viome’s Gattaca-lite meets literal shit-in-a-bag concept is that if you don’t care enough to send you shit to someone to analyse, you deserve any illnesses you have because you don’t care enough about your health. Any claims that I am applying a reductio ad absurdum argument here are rendered void by the fact that this company’s whole bit is based on shit. Actual shit. I’m not making this up. (At time of accessing, the website’s headline read: “Conflicting food advice is now obsolete”. Bold.)
Shit jokes and jokes about shit aside, the technification, the Silicon-Valley-ing of health, introduces a new, yet more elitist, element to the already extremely exclusive and rarefied pursuit of health in the modern era. Now it’s not enough to be seeking corporeal equilibrium; now a further realm of hitherto-undiscovered self-optimisation is the goal. Men on online message boards devoted to biohacking speak of reducing the amount of sleep they need, of resetting bio-rhythms, of making minute tweaks to levels of micronutrients necessary for better muscle regeneration, better memory, sharper focus. The goal is not to have a body that doesn’t hurt, or a body that can get through the day without caffeine; the goal is a shifting goalpost of theorised enhanced performance. Health is redefined as more than, better than. If you’re not doing the most to get every microgram of potential out of your body, are you really doing anything at all?
That this new version of health chicanery, which happens to be “tech-coded” is also “masculine-coded”, is to me no coincidence. The drive to perform is the message driven into men with perhaps the same force that the message to be obedient is driven into women. To coat the aggressive masculinity of hyper-performance with the veneer of authority which the association with science brings is genius. The men who partake in biohacking see themselves as elevated from the fat suburban middle-aged housewives who go to Weight Watchers meetings and by the branded jam and count points. Their pursuit of enhanced humanity is purer, holier than that of the mere dieter.
However, these men miss the larger project that their individual experiments further. The underlying objective being serviced is that of capitalist production. Their contribution to this end goes beyond the act of purchasing a special ketosis-inducing coffee, or purchasing a bag to put their shit into to send to a company in California. The first tech industry biohackers were driven to see if they could overcome natural limits so that they could work harder, better, for longer. “Performance” is a verb which must be turned towards a target; however much the men who fall prey to these new magic potions may tell themselves that their urge to “perform” comes solely from within, solely for their own personal benefit, this ignores their susceptibility to the capitalist agenda. If you push yourself further, you are producing more and consuming more.
Which brings me to my storied hatred of health-touting MLMs. There’s so much to hate and so much to make fun of, it’s hard to pick a starting point. But perhaps what bothers me the most is the brazenness of the link between capitalism and health. To actually claim that health — a very narrow, and very peculiarly modern, definition of health — can be bought — and more, to encourage the idea of making money from the pursuit of this image of health, appals me.
There exists an entire industry — a united kingdom of smaller industrial duchies — to sell you not only the accoutrements and ingredients of health, but the act of selling itself. One step further, the snake oil salesmen have already invaded every physical process and site of the pursuit of health, so they commodify the sale and offer it as a moral imperative. To sell the product that gives health is truly transcend to the next level of wellness: you are so well that you want to offer this feeling of wellness to others; you evangelize, you proselytize. The feeling of selling wellness is a new add-on to augment your own existing wellness.
Truly, I’m surprised that the ill-fated juice presser which pressed pre-pressed juice out of a bag wasn’t the notion of some MLM mastermind.[xi] The level of abstraction from the thing, the number of steps between the object being sold and the concept being sold, to me has a real “this works for me, sign up tomorrow to feel great and earn residual income for spreading health!” smack to it. The Ouroboros of the health industry is the pyramid scheme which sells the selling of health. Surely this is the very apotheosis of wellness; surely this is where it ends. But it won’t — not now we’re hooked on the virtuousness of the pursuit of health.
VI. Health as moral strength
At my gym, health as fitness is seen as the ultimate virtue. There are many people at this gym who could be understood as suffering from orthorexia, the newly-documented eating disorder that comes of taking an obsession with eating healthfully to the extreme.[xii] It’s telling that this sort of eating is so often described as “clean”, with all the moral connotations that word carries. Whilst defining this set of behaviours as a disorder requires that it result in some form of detriment to the body as a result of the deprivation it entails, I doubt very much that the regulars at my gym would view themselves as sufferers of any sort of illness, or their habits as constituting “disordered” eating. For them, their eating, their exercise and their lifestyle are the pinnacle of “ordered”. The particular modality of health that they subscribe to is the rigour of self-sacrifice, routine, determination and orthodoxy. At my gym, health is strength, and strength is virtue. I need hardly make explicit the inherent dangers of a German institution devoted to physical exercise adopting such a stance, though this appears lost on many regulars.
Nevertheless, I spend hours of my life at this gym, though I have granted myself the gift of restricting those hours since my first strength competition, and it has become apparent that, unsurprisingly, my poor embattled body responds better to less training and more rest. This gym, though as a collective it considers itself above trends in fitness and philosophical thought, is immune to neither — so the rhetoric of self-love and self-acceptance exists here too, uneasily, beside the masculine-dominated, testosterone-fuelled rhetoric of self-betterment through challenge and hardship.
A curious contradiction becomes apparent in the lead up to any competition. The usual rhetoric of, it’s the lifts that matter, it’s your strength that matters, it’s your health that matters, is replaced by the pursuit of “making weight” — that is, dieting, restricting or otherwise “cutting”, as it’s known, down to the required weight of your desired competition category. I compete (have competed — once, disastrously) in a strength sport where weight categories are all but meaningless, so I’m spared the ignobility of a cut and public weigh-in. Given the preponderance of people and women in particular with self image problems in the past at this gym, I wonder how they submit themselves to these cuts. But perhaps a lifetime of self-monitoring and self-doubt and self-deprivation is the best preparation for a strength athlete because for many the weight cut is the most competitive event of all.
The deprivation, I suspect, is what counts. What counts is that you can demonstrate you have the strength, the self-discipline, to deprive yourself. When I first arrived at the gym, the person who is perhaps the most visible example of the health-as-moral-strength paradigm, was heard to criticise me as too fat, and by extension, inherently unattractive. What stung me then as a cruel, and not even particularly fitting, stereotypical mean girls’ jibe, makes more sense now as I have come to understand the underlying behaviour. What she was criticising was my choices, and their difference from her own. How could someone who ate cheese, who drank alcohol, who didn’t spend time every day at the gym — in short, someone who allowed herself rather than deprived herself — be considered attractive? If I was attractive, then in what light did that cast all of her own sacrifices, her deprivations?
I was being taunted with the jibe of being weak — not only weak of muscle, but weak willed. I could not exist on the same plane, in the same space, as the other gym-goers, because I was weak — not at the barbell, but in how I prioritised my life. Though this person, and the one particular example who comes to mind for me as a representative of that rarefied pursuit of modern wellness, would probably consider themselves to be diametric opposites, I have felt the judgement of both to be similarly motivated. Because I do not seem to prioritise their particular definitions of health, I am immoral. They value their own conceptions of health and wellness so highly that, because I do not fit them, I am inherently without value.
One self-described “fat” author writes, of the experience of being seen as a fat person: “You will wonder when I let myself go, how I permitted the slow-motion tragedy of my body to take place”.[xiii] Fat is a lack of control, a lack of restraint, that results in a grotesque surplus. With control comes the disappearing act of the thin — read: healthy — body. This is what the “healthy” or the “well” see when they look at a fat person; when they look at me — I am not obese but I do not fit their model of health because I am not in control of my body. My body’s urges to consume control me. I am consumed by my body, my flesh overcomes.
My body can be seen a lot of ways but the layers of their perceptions of me — slovenly, gluttonous, opaque, without virtue — clad my body when they look at me. The vacuum of their expectations of others draws me in, despite whatever choices, priorities or struggles exist inside my skin. My body is a battleground where the opponent’s weapons hold as much influence as my own. My body is not my own — it exists billions of times over, anew in every observer’s perception. As my body exists in public, it is reconstituted over and over again as a public object, composed of accretions of how others see it; how others interact with it. The female body is public.
VII. The disappearing body
The dissonance levied by inhabiting a female-presenting body is astonishing, and exhausting.
Increasingly, and more often as I age, I find myself unwilling to cede public space to men. I assert myself physically in the street, on a train, in a store. I refuse to move out of the way of men in the street, and their conditioning to expect I will make way for them even at the last minute has resulted often in an awkward body slam, from which I usually walk away the unscathed of the pair. I refuse to fold myself into smaller and smaller convolutions to accommodate a man’s spreading knees on public transport. When I notice I’m being stared at by a man, for the most part I stare back, rearranging my features into a sneer of defiance. I am able to do these things because I am six feet tall, and not of a small build and, it must be said, white.
And yet. The dangers inherent in moving around the world in a woman’s body necessitate self-effacement, to preserve health at a fundamental level, at a maintaining-the-sovereignty-of-my-body’s-borders level. I dress almost exclusively in black partly to make myself more inconspicuous; as a form of camouflage. In winter when I wear a big, formless coat, I am safer because I am more invisible. Viewed from the back I could be a man. When I feel men looking at my body in public, I want to hide. If I could make my body disappear, there are times when I would. But if I was thinner, and my body could be read as more conventionally attractive, would I be more visible and thus, less safe? Would I be less able to perform the physical acts of defiance which everyday assert that I deserve to occupy public space as much as the men around me?
A woman’s disappearing body is, as Naomi Wolf identifies, a symbol of obedience.[xiv] The fat body is an object of defiance — defiance of the doctors’ orders, defiance of the conventional dictates of attractiveness. But the fat body does not protect its inhabitant from unsolicited opinions, from judgement. The thin body occupies too many conflicting planes for me: apart from the fact of its apparent unattainability for me, I feel — as many feminists do — incessant guilt for caring so much about what my body looks like. I know, I know, you can be a feminist and still wear lipstick, wear high heels, like dicks, wear a push-up bra. But changing my body — depriving my actual body, the flesh vehicle that carries the feminist-activist brain around — for the sake of looking like a Victoria’s Secret model? It’s too corporeal, too deliberate an act for me to square away. So instead I don’t admit to myself that I’m chasing this vision of bodily perfection, and instead I approach the goal slyly, through small, insignificant acts of abuse. I skip meals. I celebrate a coughing sickness for its wasting effect on my body. I rebel against my own health.
What is important is to continue trying; to continue changing, revising and reducing. Anything you do to reach the state of perfect health will be insufficient, because once you get there, the goalposts will have shifted again. This is what Wolf told us: as long as women are continuously engaged in the pursuit of an impossible, shifting ideal, we are controllable, we are subjugated, and our minds — and bodies — are busy elsewhere, leaving us no wherewithal to overthrow.
No woman’s body is safe, and no woman’s body is her own. No woman can pursue health without risk, without loaded connotations of the function of that health. No woman can define their own version of health or unhealth without outside influence. No woman can exist without the scrutiny of those outside her body.
VIII. Thankless
What I wish for my body: I wish I could be kinder to it given the long, long struggle it’s had — we’ve had together. Since childhood I have had: innumerable asthma attacks, landing me in hospital probably 10 times or more. Four episodes of SVT — what I call my heart attacks — episodes where my heart beat up to 4 times faster than average, with such intensity that the first time it happened, suddenly and without warning at 15, I was quite sure I was going to die. I have undergone surgery for this condition, consisting of laser ablation of the aberrant pathways that cause the attacks — requiring repeated electrocution for two hours to ensure the surgeons had found the right pathway. I have had laser ablation of cervical warts — HPV — to head off the early stages of cervical cancer. I have had a decade and a half of clinical depression, untreated for about half of this time. Though the toll was levied primarily on my mind, my body suffered too, when I tried twice to kill it. Still my body persists, doggedly, through daily life. I try to be kinder to it now than I have been, but I slip up now and again.
And yet I am SO lucky. At least there are drugs that can treat me. My mother’s mother died at 45 of lupus. My mother, now 65, has had both thumb joints, all of her toe joints and soon both knees replaced with steel. All indications point to similar mobility impairments for me in the future, but with similarly improved treatments awaiting me. For now, at least I can walk, I can dance, I can even go to the gym. I can even lift enough weight to be within spitting distance of competitor weights on some events (one event), so I can berate myself for not being able to lift more. These are extraordinary achievements that are out of reach for so many people. I try to instil a conscious thankfulness in myself, directing it at the parts of my body that malfunction, soothing them with gratitude for how far they’ve brought me when others don’t experience the luxurious bodily comfort — and the passing for white cis heteronormativity that I do.
But it’s not enough for me. I don’t think I will ever stop wanting more from — and less of — my body. But to be able to speak to how deeply troubling this impulse is will, perhaps, allow me a moment’s peace with my body, to if not appreciate it, then to at least accept our coexistence.
Note
This essay is written from the perspective of a white cissexual woman who presents without visible impairments. I can only imagine that many of the problems I have described above are experienced with greater severity by trans men and trans women, non-binary and intersex people, people of colour, and those with visible physical impairments. I would like to include trans women, trans men, non-binary and intersex people, and people of colour, of all orientations and levels of physical ability, in my writing. So when I talk about the experience of walking around a city in the body of a woman, for example, the reader can take that to include trans women and other non gender-conforming people. I do not wish to engage in any sort of bio-essentialism that says only AFAB people or those with ovaries or vaginas or any other arbitrary body parts can understand my point of view. Surely the body policing I experience as a cis woman is far worse for a trans woman. Similarly, I am well aware that the assertiveness I am able to display as a white woman in Europe is greatly different from what a woman of colour would be able to safely get away with. I have no doubt that the bodies of people of colour are subject to even more problematic readings than my own. However, I have not gone into what the experience of those with different gender identities, different races or differently impaired bodies could be, as I am not in a position to know what those experiences are. I would rather those experiences by shared by those who live them.
Additional reading
· https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies — this “pop-up magazine” was curated by Roxane Gay, following the release of Hunger. I highly recommend this collection.
· One of the writer featured in the above collection, Your Fat Friend, has more writing on her site and elsewhere on Medium. https://medium.com/@thefatshadow. I found this article pointed and insightful: https://medium.com/@thefatshadow/i-do-not-know-how-to-trust-thin-people-fbe78e633a50
· On the changing standards that the male body is subject to: https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/news/a7588/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-spornosexual/. I must confess to not particularly caring about the pressures men are subject to, but this article was more interesting to me than most “transformation” blogs.
· https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a13947/are-diets-the-enemy-of-feminism/
· https://www.bustle.com/articles/183890-why-dieting-can-rarely-if-ever-be-body-positive. The title of this article is deliberately click-baity, but it presents a good overview and discussion of current positions on “body-positivity”.
· Further on the link between the body and commodification can be found throughout bell hooks’ oeuvre, a great contemporary starting point is her critique (one of them), of Beyonce’s Lemonade: http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain.
Endnotes
[i] Kruger, B., Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989, Washington (image from https://www.thebroad.org/art/barbara-kruger/untitled-your-body-battleground).
[ii] Mulvey, L. (1999). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Braudy, L. and Cohen. M. (Eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (933–944). New York: Oxford University Press.
[iii] Atwood, M., (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
[iv] Penny, L., (2014). Unspeakable Things. London: Bloomsbury.
[v] Gay, R., (2017). Hunger. New York: Harper.
[vi] hooks, b., (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: Southend Press, see. Chapter 6, “Beauty Within and Without”, 31–36.
[vii] An entrée into the various forms of discrimination, including from the medical community, faced by fat people, can be found in Landrum. S. (2015, July 9). 6 Scary Facts That Prove Size Discrimination Is Real. Retrieved from http://www.adiosbarbie.com/2015/07/6-scary-facts-that-prove-size-discrimination-is-real/, 14 November 2018.
[viii] These arguments are foundational feminist theory arguments. Any good gender studies primer should provide a number of sources for further reading.
[ix] I looked this up — it wasn’t work. From the Huel website’s “About Us” section: founder Julian Hearn “[founded BioHack] whose goal was to create a program that would help people get the optimum nutrition to aid their physical performance. In pursuit of this goal, Hearn put himself on a diet plan that required him to stick to a strict meal and exercise regime. This involved a lot of preparation, having to carefully plan and prepare each meal to make sure that his body was getting exactly what it needed.” The powdered food substitute, the company says, was Hearns’ answer to this — although I wonder if the mythos of the company’s founding hasn’t been reshaped to better suit the Huel audience from the version of it that I remember.
[x] Quotes in this section are from Mull, A. (2018, October 30). The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Language of Dieting. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/tech-industry-diet-products-have-whole-new-language/, 15 November 2018.
[xi] This was a real thing, that garnered $120 MILLION in investment before collapsing in on itself like a dying star. There are many many articles available online about the downfall of the startup, called Juicero. A further conversation could be had about whether the too-hyped startup is just another form of pyramid scheme, but this is not the place.
[xii] Again, there are many accounts online of orthorexia. I found this one to be a good overview, including both personal experience, and professional opinions. McNeilly, C. (2015, November 3). When Does ‘Eating Clean’ Become and Eating Disorder. Retrieved from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/z4jd33/orthorexia-eating-clean-eating-disorder, 15 November 2018.
[xiii] Your Fat Friend (2018, October 29). The First Thing You Will Notice About Me. Retrieved from https://medium.com/s/story/the-first-thing-you-will-notice-about-me-ebc22b002aa6, 14 November 2018.
[xiv] Wolf, N. (1991). The Beauty Myth. New York: Morrow.
