Zuzu has a post up this morning: Wonderful, Glorious, Me. She writes:
Let me try to open up the floor to give us a chance to do something together.
We’re conditioned, particularly as women, to be self-deprecating, to not take up space, to not revel in our bodies and ourselves. We can get 150 comments in a thread about when we realized that we were aware our bodies weren’t up to snuff; let’s see how many we can generate praising ourselves.
Your mission: list at least five things you love about your body and yourself. Five is the floor; you can always do more. And no self-deprecation! No offsetting a compliment with a dig.
Great idea. If you’re a woman, please visit and consider contributing.
The thread is, I sense (perhaps wrongly) women-only. It’s not as if men don’t have body anxiety! But in our culture, as intense and incapacitating as male fears about their own flesh can be, it’s worth acknowledging that women still are held to a higher standard. Men are allowed to deviate dramatically from the physical ideal and still enjoy recognition; women (with a very few exceptions) aren’t.
For what it’s worth, the male anxiety I see in myself and in my peers is qualitatively different from what I see in many of my female friends. I hang out a lot with men who run and work out quite competitively. There’s a tremendous collective concern about our bodies; there’s a fair amount of subtle preening and worry. But at the same time, we voice those concerns differently. We talk about acts, not about aesthetics. For example, my running buddies and I can talk endlessly about split times and heart rates. We worry about our aging, and about whether our bodies can still run a 10K under 40 minutes or a marathon under 3:15 or whatever the threshold of the moment happens to be.
It’s a classically masculine anxiety: the sense that the body is a “performance machine” threatened by sloth and by ageing, always in need of vigilant monitoring. Of course, many of us (I know this well from unguarded conversations) are worried about how we look; we do compare ourselves to the men on the cover of the fitness magazines. But unless very comfortable, we tend to cloak our fears in concern about performance rather than aesthetics. A desire to be faster, after all, is evidence of athletic ambition — a desire for a more beautiful body is evidence of an unbecomingly feminine vanity. It’s a masculine moral calculus that elevates the body doing to a higher position than the body appearing.
It’s silly, and ultimately indefensible. Our physical achievements on the gym and on the track don’t make us better husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons anymore than our sister’s breast enhancements make her a better human being. Its all culturally reinforced fear and vanity, but it’s worth noting that it often operates differently for both men and women.
UPDATE: The thread is not female-only.
Second UPDATE: The comment thread here is for those who identify as feminists or feminist-friendly only. I’m tired of having a few men’s rights advocate trolls hijack the discussion. Comments that are anti-feminist will be deleted without discussion. This will not be a policy in all my threads, but in this one, yes. I’m adopting the Alas, A Blog, policy — a bit late, but it’s the right thing to do.
The thread is, I sense (perhaps wrongly) women-only.
It’s not. Though it will probably be majority-women, since women find it so hard to unreservedly toot their own horns. In fact, that’s what people are saying over and over.
I think your “body as performance machine” analogy is pretty apt. By couching the value in terms of doing-ness, rather than being-ness, there is the sense, as you note, that such concern isn’t simply (feminized) vanity, but it also allows for some measure of “proof” that isn’t reliant on other’s visual confirmation, i.e. “I can bench-press 250 lbs, which means I am Strong and Manly (even though I may have a huge beer gut),” or “I can run maintain a four-minute mile for blahblahblah, therefore I am Ironman (please don’t notice my chickenlegs).” So the machine has some parts that stick out or whatever, the machine *performs*.
Good points. I was talking to a couple of friends the other day about the fact that I am currently leading un unhealthy lifestyle, which I want to change, but I am afraid to start, because it would make me unhappy with my body. While I am a little overweight right now, I”m happy with my body– I look at myself and I feel positive rather than negative emotions. However, I fear that if I do get myself into the healthy weight range, I will start focusing more on my weight, and thus become LESS happy with my body.
One of my male friends suggested that the problem was I wasn’t setting goals about what I can DO– that I need to time myself when going for a walk, and push myself to improve that. And suddenly the idea of becoming healthier made much more sense.
Hugo said: “It’s not as if men don’t have body anxiety! But in our culture, as intense and incapacitating as male fears about their own flesh can be, it’s worth acknowledging that women still are held to a higher standard. Men are allowed to deviate dramatically from the physical ideal and still enjoy recognition; women (with a very few exceptions) aren’t.”
The above is not only demonstrably false, but patently ridiculous. Unless you are talking about aesthetics, in every other manner it is men who are held to a much higher standard vis-a-vis body physique, etc. For example: Heavy lifting and other physically demanding and/or dangerous work? As a matter of course our society expects men to step in like beasts of burden and risk their well-being in order to spare women such work. And even as far as aesthetics are concerned, women are not held to a “higher standard.” Bald heads (unintentional, i.e., male pattern baldness, not shaven), beer guts, hairy chest/backs, etc. are given no more slack than fat butts and thighs, etc.
When you base your arguments on false premises everything that flows from it is equally false. As is your missive here.
Mr. Bad’s and Hugo’s different perceptions could have something to do with what subculture you look at. Men in the intellectual or entertainment world, as opposed to professions where macho-ness and physical prowess matter, aren’t expected to look perpetually young or even particularly well-groomed, but women are supposed to be young, thin and pretty whatever their profession. Just look at the dress code for awards ceremonies - you’re lucky if the men wear shirts and shoes, but the women’s outfits get picked over endlessly. Mr. Bad qualifies his statement with “unless you are talking about aesthetics…” but aesthetics can affect access to power in certain professions, so this is not trivial. I’ll bet if you did a count of the “stars looking fat and hungover” photos in the tabloids, the vast majority of them would be women even though the guys party just as hard.
but women are supposed to be young, thin and pretty whatever their profession.
No, I don’t buy that. This is a common feminist claim, but I do not see empirical data to support it, nor does it comport with my experiences in everyday life. Merely repeating unsubstantiated feminist dogma is not terribly persuasive.
Jendi said: “Mr. Bad qualifies his statement with “unless you are talking about aesthetics…” but aesthetics can affect access to power in certain professions, so this is not trivial.”
I’ve addressed this other posts from Hugo so I won’t belabor the point, but the issue you’re addressing here is based in professionalism not gender bias. Anyone, woman or man, who dresses and/or acts like, e.g., a slob in the workplace deserves to be passed-over for promotions, cut out of the loop vis-a-vis power, etc. Being unprofessional isn’t a recipe for climbing the ladder of success, and rightly so.
Jendi continues: “I’ll bet if you did a count of the “stars looking fat and hungover” photos in the tabloids, the vast majority of them would be women even though the guys party just as hard.” Like Tom, I too call bullshit on this. In fact, the fat slobs that I see in the tabloids are almost exclusively men, so there we go - our anecdotes cancel out.
As Tom said, feminist slogans and dogma don’t cut it. Let’s have some proof for this tenuous claim or else it goes onto the already-mountainous heap of BS feminist rhetoric.
Mr. Bad, the phrase “BS feminist rhetoric” will get you banned for perhaps the fourth time.
Picked up a copy of People magazine lately? The Enquirer?
Hugo said: “Mr. Bad, the phrase “BS feminist rhetoric” will get you banned for perhaps the fourth time.”
Heh, getting banned from a feminist site simply means I’m stating uncomfortable truths, so it wouldn’t bother me very much. However, the discussion here would suffer as it has in the past whenever you’ve conducted your periodic purges of us heretics.
Still, I hear you Hugo, so sorry about my own rhetoric. Your site, your rules.
Hey Hugo - I’ve been pondering this topic for a couple days. Working with youth at my church, especially facilitating sexuality education, I see the anxieties about their bodies that many adolescent males feel - “Am I masculine enough? Muscular enough? Why don’t I have hair on my chest? Am I too hairy? Am I tall enough?”
Within the gay community, issues about the male body are inescapable. With sub groups in the community dedicated to very narrowly defined body types. Twinks - very youthful, willowy men. Bears - large, usually hairy men. Jocks - defined by their well defined abs. Each group has its dedicated members and followers. Bears in particular fetishize secondary sex characteristics - facial and body hair. Many gay men place so much emphasis on strictly physical appearance that a lot of great guys who don’t fit into a specific category are left on the sidelines.
In recent years, I’ve read of men increasingly attempting to care for their physical appearance without necessarily seeming to care for their phsyical appearance. More and more men are doing manscaping, yes, but more than that, men are learning that their is an ideal body - it is youthful, fit, able to perform sports.
Well, Mr. Bad, my comment got deleted here. Oh well.