Embracing our bodies in the land of face lifts

I went to a gathering last night where we discussed, among other things, plastic surgery and body image. If Southern California isn’t the world capital of breast implants, then it’s close. While I don’t really run in entertainment industry circles, the narcissistic spirit of Hollywood seems to loom over the landscape and I bump into it at unpredictable intervals. I did find myself mentioning my therapist while eating a vegetarian sandwich last week, so maybe it’s only a matter of time before I start carrying a small yappy dog in my purse and visiting a pet psychic while adopting small children from developing countries, who I shall name Nigel and Starblossom.

There were a few people in the industry there. Catherine Zeta-Jones has had some work done, and Ewan McGregor is charming with really bad teeth, in case anybody cares. (Not that they were there - just people who had lighted and styled them.) My life is mostly a celebrity-free zone, but practically nobody looks as good in person as they do on screen. Apparently, good lighting works wonders. There was a woman there who had had plastic surgery, and she said that for a face lift they slice open your scalp, pull your face off your skull, then pull it back and staple it to your head. You wake up with a face the size of a pumpkin until the swelling goes down. The fact that so many people do this to themselves voluntarily seems not quite sane to me.

It seems counter-intuitive to say it, but I think that, for all of our body obsession, the problem is not that we love our bodies too much. We love them too little. What we love is some sort of Platonic ideal of our bodies – the one with perfectly even features, without wrinkles and cellulite and droopy bits. It’s the bodies we’ve actually got that we don’t like, so we do all kinds of crazy stuff and end up treating our bodies like just another commodity.

And it’s deeper than just body image or not liking what we look like. Somewhere along the way, we got disconnected from being human. It manifests in different ways – a billion dollar diet industry, thinking that we can live on Pop-Tarts and Cheetos and 4 hours of sleep, or spending so much time in virtual reality that we don’t notice that in actual reality we are pasty and isolated. Somehow we need to move away from all the ways we treat our bodies as just something we’re wearing and move towards a radical embrace of our human-ness. We are embodied for a reason, and I don’t think we are meant to transcend that. We get tired and hungry and sick. We don’t live forever, and fifty year olds aren’t supposed to look twenty-five. We age, and then we die. We have limits.

When I think of the older people I admire, they look, well – old. They’ve got wrinkles and glasses and move slower than they used to. They have had to grieve many losses and accept limitations and face their failures and live with physical pain. Those who age well do that with grace and humor and gain a clear-eyed wisdom I would like to have some day. Maybe there is something to be said for being past the age when anyone expects you to be beautiful.

But until we reach that point, I think that a lot of our inner self-hatred and disconnection gets played out in the world of cosmetics and magazines that give us “Ten Tips to lose Ten Pounds by Summer.” As an example, I had an African-American roommate for a couple of years, and I still remember learning about the tortured relationship that many black women have with their hair. She decided to stop straightening it and go natural while we were living together, and it took me a while to really get that this decision was far more than a personal style choice. It was the realization that all the chemical processing in the world wasn’t going to solve being black in an Anglo-dominated society. It was a way of saying, “Fuck ‘good hair’! This is my hair and this is me and it IS good.” (That is a paraphrase, since she doesn’t use the F-word.) For her, it was a way of embracing who she was as a black woman and of stepping away from self-hatred.

Her journey and mine are different, but I thought about her last night during the discussion. I still can barely stand to look at pictures of myself, but no amount of Botox or collagen can fix that. My weird photo neurosis is just a manifestation of a lot of deeper stuff that I keep digging out and bringing into the light. I am split in some major ways, and my therapist told me a couple of months ago that I will probably never be normal, but being “normal’ might not be the point anyway.

For me, wanting to transcend my humanity ends up making me less human. It is only in accepting all my broken pieces that I free up the energy to become more whole, to embrace all of who I am, good and bad, light and dark, jiggly thighs and varicose veins running up and down my left leg.

Comments

[Soen Joon]

One of the strange, unexpected releases of ordination was that my body was suddenly not the point, or not the same point: all the "care" I'd done previously as a lay-woman, which was largely to look acceptable, if not also attractive, vanished. What hasn't vanished, however, is the *body*--and so this:

"Somehow we need to move away from all the ways we treat our bodies as just something we’re wearing and move towards a radical embrace of our human-ness. We are embodied for a reason, and I don’t think we are meant to transcend that. We get tired and hungry and sick. We don’t live forever, and fifty year olds aren’t supposed to look twenty-five. We age, and then we die. We have limits. "

is exactly the place I find myself in each day. It's not about sex appeal or even "looking good" in any ordinary sense, but accepting the body as it is, in all its pains and imperfections, which won't go away no matter what, is absolutely necessary. (Korean Buddhists never really got into self-mortification anyway, so the spiritual culture is supportive of a body-image that's both non-sexual and non-hateful, at least by the slice-your-scalp-open set of standards.)

It's a worthwhile challenge--making friends with the body...

[Sarah]

uhh, the post is great, but i can't get past the description of what a face lift actually is. i had no idea. and now i just keep seeing my face being pulled away from my head and then stapled back on - it's all very disturbing and going to make doing my homework much harder. gosh.

[Phyllis]

Christy,
I love this post, especially the part about owning the bodies we're in. I've been trying to do that, but the compulsion to improve isn't shrugged easily. It's like if I don't keep up the angst, then my body will really go to hell, as if angst has gotten me anywhere up till now. Anyway, great post.

[Ms. D]

Reminded of two things:
1) That Jesus said that we should love others, as ourselves (I wish I could italicise here). I've often thought as I get older that without learning to love yourself, which seems to include a lot of the corporeal bits, it's impossible to love other people.
2) Every time I come home I feel fat. I'm not really that fat (I checked I'm on the edge of 'overweight' on one of those graph thingies), but 2 days into being in the UK I find that I've turned into an elephant, clothes are too tight, and I'm hopelessly uncool, ugly, fat, etc etc. That sure blew up my idea that advertising doesn't really influence you. It's only when I'm in countries and cultures when I can a) read, b) understand the advertising messages that I discover all this discontent. So to love your bodies, you kind of have to learn to listen to them, and not the zillion voices out there. Easier said than done - REALLY!
That's my 2 paisa worth.

[Dana Ames]

Very well said. Thank you.
Dana

[Christy]

Soen Joon -
If you ever feel like writing a post about how ordination changed or is changing how you accept and relate to your body, I'd love to read it.

Sarah - Sorry to interfere with your educational experience, but at least you won't be getting any plastic surgery now.

Phyllis - It's easy to get attached to the angst, isn't it? Hard to get rid of the relentless drive for self-improvement.

Ms.D - I find that it makes quite a bit of difference what neighborhood I'm in. If I'm hanging out in areas where most people are working class, then I feel less self-conscious because people just don't have the time and resources to look as good. But if I'm in a more affluent environment where I am surrounded by skinny chicks, then I find myself worrying much more about my weight and what I look like.

[Jon]

Good post. I can struggle with this too. I think it's probably more common among guys than we admit to anyone else.

[Susan]

Loved this post.