The way we feel about our bodies is personal.
We form a relationship with our bodies and ourselves throughout our lives, and like every relationship, that relationship is unique, reflecting our long history together.
But the way we feel about our bodies is also reflective of a larger cultural dynamic in which some bodies are treated as superior or inferior to other bodies; a cultural dynamic in which some bodies are celebrated, and some are despised.
Here’s the thing– the reason you hate your body is different than the reason someone else is gonna hate their body. Maybe you’re obsessed with your belly fat or the fact that your legs are “too big” while she’s obsessed with the ways in which her body betrayed her with fibromyalgia. One person might hate her body for looking so sexual that she got assaulted, and another might hate her body for not looking sexual enough to keep her husband interested.
When I work with a client, I help them identify the unique story underneath their feelings of negativity, hatred, resentment, betrayal, or anger toward their bodies, and it varies dramatically from person to person.
This is why most of the work I do is private and one-on-one: because each person needs to look below the surface of their own individual body stories, experiences, beliefs, fears, shames, and desires in order to suss out what needs healing, changing, uprooting, replacing, and accepting to make amends. There is no “one path” for everyone when it comes to body neutrality.
That said, there are patterns of conditioning internalized by all of us from the moment we’re born, about what kind of body is good and what kind of body is bad; about what the shape and size, age, gender, and presentation of someone’s body means about a person’s moral character and value, and what they deserve in life. We are conditioned early to “know” what kind of body is worthy of visibility, respect, love, acceptance, and celebration… and what kind is worthy of marginalization, bullying, disrespect, violence, and erasure.
In short, we are conditioned early to believe that when a person looks a certain way, they deserve to be treated a certain way, and that therefore we can tell how a person deserves to be treated just by looking at them.
In the book I wrote (and benched due to limited bandwidth thanks to COVID) I start by describing the seven biggest social hierarchies we see in our culture which impact body image– seven areas in which we unconsciously learn that one kind of body is better and more worthy than another.
The seven areas are:
The hierarchy of weight & size
The hierarchy of race & ethnicity
The hierarchy of ability
The hierarchy of gender
The hierarchy of gender normativity/expression/performance
The hierarchy of age
The hierarchy of beauty & desirability
