Thoughts on CalmBirth - Trusting your treacherous body

'Trust your body' is the goal.
It's hard to trust your body when you've been told your whole life that your body is unacceptable - too big, too awkward, too saggy, not feminine enough.
It's hard to trust your body when you've been told your whole life that your body is unattractive, and being attractive is the only way for a female body to be valued.
It's hard to trust your body when you've been told your whole life that your body is unhealthy and functioning sub-optimally because it is too fat, and fat is unhealthy and THE DEATHFATZ ARE RUINING SOCIETY AND WILL KILL US ALL!!!!
It's hard to trust your hips to birth a baby when you've been told your whole life to wish your hips were smaller.
It's hard to trust your breasts to feed a baby when you've been told your whole life that your breasts are too big or too saggy or just plain gross.
It's hard to trust yourself to be a mother, when all the issues outlined above come from your own mother, and despite years of good self talk and feminist intellectualising, at 27 you still can't get the fuck over it.

It's hard to trust your body.

The CalmBirth people think there is too much fear associated with childbirth. They postulate that this fear largely comes from the narratives around birth in our culture - representations of women screaming and begging for drugs, and a medical system that sees birth as an emergency that needs to be 'managed' by doctors who can't seem to stop themselves from inferring. All this, they suggest, results in women who are full of fear about childbirth and don't trust their bodies to be able to birth their babies.

I wonder if there is another element going on too. I wonder if the way we value women's bodies impacts their ability to trust their bodies. What we value in women's bodies, in fact what we value in women generally, is how they fit an ideal of feminine beauty. It is powerfully disempowering and profoundly passive. You are there to be quiet and look good. Fearless childbirth is probably the exact opposite of using your body to passively be admired!

It's hard to trust your body when the only way you know to value it is when it looks pretty, and it never looks pretty enough! There is always something to improve on. It's bloody well quintessential to the experience of the modern woman that we hate on ourselves, objectify ourselves into good bits and bad bits, fuss and lament, and judge ourselves and others. "You're so pretty." "No no no, I'm hideous, you're the pretty one!"..."OMG look at what she's wearing, with those thighs!?" This is way we are socialised into being female, by learning to be preoccupied by perceived physical imperfections. It is hard to access your inner female power in conjunction with trusting your body, when virtually all you know about your female body is that it is inadequate. Kind of ironic.