Leave My Body Alone

     I can still vividly remember sitting on the 5th avenue bus, my legs dangling against the plastic seat, daydreaming about becoming a witch one day, when my mother leaned over and whispered, “People are looking at you.” Seeing my confusion at her statement, my mother said, “They think you are beautiful.” Most adults might think my mother was trying to complement my appearance, and teenagers might think I should have rolled my eyes at her effort. However, I felt horrified, confused and embarrassed that anyone at all would notice me, let alone judge my body. If I was ‘beautiful’ in that moment, would I be ‘beautiful’ in the next? Was I ‘beautiful’ in the last moment? How could I have anything to do with my appearance when really I had nothing to do with the creation of body? In fact my mother, if anyone, could take credit for that. All of a sudden I, like the strangers on the bus, was outside my self looking at my body and wondering what rules, what laws I had to follow to maintain this favorable judgement. Or what rules I needed to break so the invasive eyes of strangers would not bother judging me. Lindsay King-Miller says we focus, “…Too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity…” King-Miller also quotes writer and performer Denise Jolly, “The semantics of beauty are so entrenched in our culture that we would have to interrupt it from birth to escape it.” (https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/pretty-unnecessary-beauty-body-positivity)

     My mother of course was not leading the effort to police my body. She was merely a pawn and a victim of the patriarchal system of our culture. The beauty industry is a capitalist marketplace where useless, sometimes harmful products are sold to women by advertisers that instill insecurity in women and girls by using models that are airbrushed to perfection. Television and social media also showcase the perfect and perfected female body. The ‘ideal’ figure has changed over the decades but a beauty standard still exists in popular culture today and women measure themselves against it. A brief history of the ‘ideal’ woman (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl/index.html) reminds us that we can trace back to the Victorian era, the effort of men to create an ideal body shape, a way in which to capitalize on products to achieve that ideal and cruelly a way to literally break women’s bodies. Note in the below picture for this corset the ad copy states, “Combining features of daintiness and the best ideas of a shapely and hygienic form.” The message being, you will not be dainty, shapely or clean if you don’t buy and wear this garment. Horrifyingly today, women are having ribs removed by surgeons and going to other extremes to achieve an ideal shape. 

Bruising her softly, one rib at a time.

     Advertisements are particularly harmful because they are everywhere and nowhere. Like an invasive species, having flourished in newspapers, magazines, radio, and commercial television targeted advertisements now seed our online life. When we want to look at photos of our family on facebook or instagram we must also look at (even if we don’t take the information in consciously) targeted ads. Maggie Wykes and Barrie Gunter explain that, “At best, media images of the feminine body are politically oppressive and commercially exploitative. At worst they may justify a young woman’s efforts at self annihilation.” (Conclusion: Body Messages and Body Meanings, p.219) In this way the advertising industry, corporate industry, and the entertainment industry police women’s bodies and set down the influential ‘laws’ that are used to police the way we look. 

    Leading the effort to influence and create actual laws and policy concerning women and their bodies are men in government. What our politicians say influences the way a majority of people think. In a Vox article from 2017, Ann T. Donahue described Donald Trump’s comments on women by saying, “…Throughout the years [Trump] paints women’s bodies as disgusting, confusing bags of flesh and blood whenever they function outside the role of eye candy.” (https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/7/1/15905632/trump-tweet-mika-brzezinski-morning-joe). Besides the policing of beauty there is the policy around what women can and can’t do with their own bodies. For white middle class women the concerns usually only extend to health coverage, contraception and access to abortions. In the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s women of color were not initially not given a voice regarding serious abuses of their bodies. From Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, Jennifer Nelson writes about the history of poor, women of color losing their ability to have children through involuntary sterilization. This inhumane treatment of women’s bodies was legislated throughout the country. In fact, Federally funded sterilization took place until 1979. This was explicitly to control for populations deemed 'dangerous' because they were not white. 

The Horrifying Map of US Sterilization in 1935

     In The Alienable Rights of Women (https://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-alienable-rights-of-women/), Roxane Gay says, “There is no freedom in any circumstance when the body is legislated.” To insure that all women, whatever their financial situation, have control over their reproductive rights, access to health care, access to birth control and a social safety net for their family, we must vote for representatives that will create policy and uphold the rights women currently have. Two groups that keep track of what our politicians are doing for women’s rights are https://americanbridgepac.org/ and https://weareultraviolet.org/.