Embarrassment
Making Peace With Your Body
How to reject the shame you've been taught instead of rejecting yourself.
Posted March 18, 2022 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Key points
- Judging one's own body is not an individual problem; it's a cultural problem.
- Media portrayals of women have been linked to lowered self-esteem and body image, and a rise in eating disorders, depression, and anxiety.
- Self-shaming thoughts become brain habits, so overcoming negative body image needs to include practicing new, body-positive thoughts.
“No pictures!” I heard a woman say urgently to her friend who was about to snap a photo as they splashed in the river with their kids. Her friend looked confused. “I’m in a no-pictures era of my life,” she said, laughing nervously. “These thighs don’t want to be photographed.” I watched the three children in their charge, quietly taking in this body-shaming message in the background. Big thighs shouldn’t be photographed. Big thighs don’t get to make memories. Big thighs should be invisible.
How long would it be, I wondered, until they would be repeating some version of this refrain?
Just moments before, I had listened to a whole different storyline unfold. Two girls, each around 10 years old, were sitting near me on a rock ledge out in the water. One friend was tearfully telling the other that there was a girl at school who was calling her “fat and ugly.” The listening friend was outraged and indignant. “She’s so mean! Ooooo…oh, I, uhh! She’s gonna be sassy? Well, then when I see her I’m going to sass her like she has never been sassed before!”
The sad girl smiled. Her shoulders straightened. As the listening friend went on, the sad girl started to giggle. “You know what?” said the listening friend. “Here’s what you do. When she says mean things to you, just remember that she’s actually talking about herself. So you just go ahead and laugh. But don’t tell her why you’re laughing! You just laugh and walk away, because you know the truth.”
“Yeah!” said the no-longer sad girl. What she did next took me by surprise and blew me away. She started running. Running and skipping, back and forth across the ledge, bursting with joy and energy and sing-songing, “You’re talking about you, not me, you’re talking about you, not me!” She was beaming.
I was flooded with admiration for these girls. For their easy intimacy and vulnerability. For the formerly listening friend who went from listening, to preaching, to cheerleading, to spouting wisdom with confidence and, yes, sass. I felt optimistic. Proud. Relieved, even, that such resilience and support exists to counter the message we are flooded with that we are supposed to hate our bodies.
And then… "No pictures!”
It’s a devastating transition. When do we go from helping each other fend off the bullies to being our own bullies? Why do we stop resisting the oppression, and start swallowing it? How does the battle become internalized, when the enemy is really external?
I remember the first time I saw Jean Kilbourn’s presentation, “Killing Us Softly.” It was the first time I became consciously aware as an adult of the impact modern media was having on girls’ body image. She skillfully showed viewers how the media was dictating the parameters of a desirable female physique, and how it was becoming less and less attainable, less and less healthy, less and less true to the real variety in body shapes and sizes. She cataloged how women were portrayed as objects for male observation: sexualized, depersonalized, and disempowered. And she laid out the painful statistics about the toll this was taking on self-esteem and body image, and the rise in eating disorders, depression, and anxiety.
To be clear, these are not simply correlations—this impact is causal. Researchers from the Eating Disorders Center of Harvard Medical School paid close attention as television was first introduced to the island of Fiji in 1995. Within 3 years, in a culture that previously considered higher weight and bigger bodies to be markers of beauty, 15% of adolescent girls reported inducing vomiting to control their weight, 29% scored high on a test assessing the risk of eating disorders, 50% reported feeling they were too big and wanted to be thinner, and 69% reported having been on a diet in the last three years.
As I watched Jean Kilbourne’s presentation, I remember thinking, “This is devastating! But at least we realize the damage that is being done.” I assumed it would stop. I assumed that with this information brought to light, we would course correct. Surely we don’t want to be doing this to our girls, right?
Right?!
Ultimately I was disavowed of this naïve, optimistic idea, of this faith in our media and our culture’s intentions and priorities. The sad and painful truth is that this impact is purposeful. In pursuit of money and power, our patriarchal culture has sacrificed its girls. By keeping girls and women out of their own confidence, self-love, and power, the patriarchal culture protects itself. Who will rise up to defend the rights and needs of women if they have been trained to feel unworthy? No one. Where will the resistance of oppressive sexism and misogyny come from if the girls and women are oppressing themselves? Nowhere. If the patriarchal culture can make women hate themselves and turn their battles inwards, then the patriarchal system is not in danger of being challenged.
Obviously, the more immediate and obvious winners in this fiasco are the movers and shakers in the beauty industry. It’s simple: They make us feel inadequate, so we spend money on their products to try to be worthy. Financial success gained at the cost of girls’ and women’s mental and emotional wellness—it feels like blood money to me. Once internalized capitalism interplays with internalized sexism, self-esteem is doomed.
If our culture at large is not going to make the correction, and if the media is not going to right their wrongs, then how do we protect ourselves, our daughters, our wives, and our friends? How do we fight back?
5 ways to generate self-love and body-positivity
Here are five steps to get you started:
- The first step is to recognize that this is not a “you” problem. If you are struggling with body shame, remember that this is the result of an external problem, the roots of which lie in patriarchy and capitalism, not in the size and shape of your body. This lets you create space to be angry at the actual toxic forces outside of you, instead of being angry at yourself and your body. Anger is a change agent, but as long as you are angry at yourself, you are directing that effort in the wrong direction. When you acknowledge that the problem is external, you can focus your advocacy and activism externally where it belongs. This also allows a sea change in your relationship with yourself: When you stop seeing yourself as the problem, you can connect to your own internal source of power and strength. Instead of being the problem, you become the solution.
- Practice new thoughts. Your self-shaming thoughts may have become brain habits, and it takes a conscious effort to break a habit. This isn’t a one-shot deal. Every time you are exposed to a toxic message about how you should look and how you should feel about your body, practice consciously replacing it with a new, affirming truth. Talk to yourself like you would talk to someone you love (imagine feeling worthy of your own love!), and do it like you are a broken record. You have to lay the neural groundwork for change, so say it again, and again, and again. Help yourself change your thoughts by taking control over what messages you consume. Follow body-positive pages on your social media sites. Cancel catalog subscriptions that don’t utilize models of a variety of shapes and sizes and replace them with ones that do. We think what we see—so, choose what you see.
- Focus on your body’s function over its form. Thank it for getting you through your day. Think of all the ways you use your body and all that it is capable of. Instead of critiquing your appearance in the mirror, look at your body and think of all the places it has taken you, and all the experiences it has allowed you to have. Instead of thinking about how to change how you look, ask yourself what your body needs from you to function with more strength and ease.
- Look through a lens of gratitude instead of judgment, and make a nightly routine of writing down three reasons you are grateful to your body. Does that sound like an unrealistic amount of affirming self-talk? Consider this: How many times a day do you think critical thoughts about your body? If you are like most people, you think a lot more than three negative things about your body in a day. When you think about it that way, a nightly practice of three affirmations is just a drop in the bucket.
- Become an advocate for change; it’s powerful not only externally, but internally, as well. Advocacy, like bodies, comes in all shapes and sizes. Post affirming messages on mirrors in public bathrooms, ask your local department store to consider using body-affirming mannequins, or get trained to offer body-positive programming in schools. On a smaller scale, choose to be a positive, affirming, counter-cultural voice for others. Be the listening friend on the rock ledge for someone you see struggling to know their own body’s worth. Not only can you surround yourself with empowering messages, but you can be a source of empowerment for someone else.
When you work towards cultural change, you actively acknowledge that the change that needs to happen is in the world around you, which frees up your psyche from your own self-criticism. Advocacy also helps deepen your repetition of and practice of the new, affirming messages that you want to internalize. You will hear yourself saying empowering things to others. You will hear yourself calling out the toxic messages around you. You will hear yourself generating hope. Through these actions, you can train your brain to see the toxic messages around you for what they are, and you can turn your attention to the body-positive messages you want to spread. Consider it a grassroots revolution…it’s time to rally the troops, and self-love and body positivity are our radical tools.