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.

Sick with (the idea of) love

Recently two of my girlfriends have gone through messy breakups from poor relationships. As I have listened to them (emphasis on the trying to listen and not trying to advise!) deconstruct their actions and emotions, I have noticed many similarities. So many similarities in fact, that since friend B has been slightly 'behind' friend A in her journey, I have been able to use friend A's experience to make awe-inspiring insights into friend B's situation.

Talking with these friends recently, and many friends over the years, I have noticed a worrying pattern. Of course there are probably only a few common paths relationships can take, and I don't know anything about the psychology of it all, but this is something I've noticed, and I wonder if it applies more often to women than to men.

What I've noticed is that some friends of mine, otherwise intelligent, savvy women, have a habit of behaving like idiots when it comes to men. And I'm not talking about hamming up their ditz credentials. I'm talking about a cascade of poor decisions that only end up hurting themselves. I know love is meant to make you crazy, but they're not sick with love, they seem to be sick with the idea of love. It sounds cliched, but they love being in love more than they love the guy, who more often than not turns out to be a dud, because they didn't have their brains on when they started seeing him.

This is how it goes, over and over again, and I'm sick of watching it happen: Boy meets girl. Girl is fantastic (all my friends are fantastic, that's why I'm friends with them). Boy likes girl. Boy has some kind of cool factor - maybe he's really hot, or plays guitar really well, or is a tortured intellectual. Or maybe girl's self esteem is low and just the fact that he's interested is very attractive to her. So girl likes boy, they go out. At which point, girl becomes infatuated with the idea that there is some magical wonderful powerful connection between them, and proceeds to lose any capacity she once had for character assessment. Boy, inevitably in these situations, turns out to be a dud for whatever reason, but girl just can't, or won't, see it.

So there our girl is, stuck in a relationship that is going downhill, fast. Her ability to attempt to salvage the relationship (if it had any potential to begin with) is utterly hampered by the fact that she has now lost herself in the idea of being with him, lost her sense of self, lost her belief in her own judgment, and is totally scared of being alone.

The key sign that your friend is in a relationship like this? She takes every opportunity she can to tell you just how fan-fugu-tastic her man is. She'll elaborate, ad nauseam, on how wonderful the connection they have is. She'll tell you over and over again just how fucking happy she is to be with him, how centered she feels, how it's not perfect but nothing is and she wouldn't want to brag but - you know - they're soul mates. Then when she gets drunk she'll cry to you that it's just not working and she doesn't know what to do. Then the next morning she'll pretend that conversation never happened, or that she was just being silly, that it was the wine talking.

The wine doesn't lie, take it from me.

It seems to me that what all these women have in common is that they are so attached to the idea of being with someone that they lose themselves. What they desire is a genuine, loving, intimate connection, but really, deep down, their lack of self esteem is telling them that they're not quite good enough. So when they get something that looks like it could be that relationship-that-is-meant-to-make-you-a-whole-person, they grasp on for dear life, and bugger the consequences. They refuse to a) use their judgment to assess whether the relationship and/or the man are right for them, and b) assert their own needs in the relationship.

What makes these two cognitive actions possible, it seems, is a) the pervasive idea that a woman is not worth anything until she is in a relationship, because sexual attractiveness is the marker of worth and also because she will never be happy unless she has this relationship; b) a discourse that women are physically unacceptable (we're never pretty enough, thin enough, tall enough, boobied enough etc etc) and emotionally neurotic or needy, which degrades women's sense of worth, and c) a discourse where women are obliged to give ourselves to men, physically and emotionally, so when a woman asserts that this relationship or this man isn't working out for her, she's seen as selfish.

So we have women who feel less-than to begin with, who are told they will only be worth something when they have a boyfriend, and that if they assert their needs in that relationship they are selfish bitches, thereby confirming that they were worthless in the first place. And no wonder its always such a cluster fuck.

I want to tell these gorgeous women that, hey, they're gorgeous. I want to tell them that it doesn't hurt to be a little critical in your appraisal of men before you get into a relationship with them. I want to tell them that it's ok to assert their needs in a relationship, and that if he can't take it he wasn't worth it. I want to tell them that it's ok to be single.

But you can't save people, same as for everything, people need to figure it out for themselves.

So my musings on this issue got me to thinking about my own relationship, and the relationships of my other girlfriends who don't have this pattern. I was reminded of something my Mum said to me a few years ago...

My parents split up when I was two. Mum had a few boyfriends when I was a kid. There was Spike, with his red beard. There was Alan, god he was sweet, he gave me rides in the laundry bucket and had a big garden. There was PK, the trendy Indian guy who took us on cool holidays to Sydney and took me for a ride in a water boat. There were a couple of other dates in there, I don't really remember. Then she met my stepdad when I was 9 :-) All in all not that many over a 7 year period! Yet she said to me once "God I used to worry when I dated men and we'd break-up, you'd take the break-ups so hard, I was so worried I was giving you a complex about men."

It's true that when she broke up with Alan, and then PK, I did take it pretty hard. Well, I cried once or twice, if you call that hard (I was happy when she broke up with Spike, I didn't like him lol). But I did not get a complex about men. In fact, what I think I got, was a healthy attitude towards relationships. My Mum's example showed me that the only reason you stay with someone is if it's working for you. You don't stay with someone to be with someone. You don't stay with someone out of guilt. She showed me that it's ok to break up with someone when it's not right, and that while it's hard, you get over it. And all of these things have made my relationship stronger, because I know I'm not with Mr T for any other reason than it is where I want to be, and that it's right for me.

(I don't want to make it sound like my Mum taught me to break up with someone the second it gets difficult, because that's not the case.)

I don't think that without my Mum's example I would have ended up where Friend A and B have ended up. I don't think that is my personality type at all, and I have plenty of other friends who aren't like that. But I have found all these musings on attitudes towards relationships interesting. Peace out.

Why I always wear high heels when I visit my mother

A hint, not too much, of cleavage, under a v-neck top which slims the hips. A belt, or a cross-over top, all designed to emphasize the smallness of my waist. High heels, to improve the width to hight ratio, and tone the legs and butt. Strictly smooth lines over the hips and butt, its all about the silhouette. Clear but not overdone make-up. Hair styled. Long earrings to emphasize the statuesque qualities of my neck.

I've turned my sex on baby. I haven't turned it on for my husband, or to aid some sort of career goal, or even just to get some damn service in a jewelery store. I've turned it on for my Mum. Because if I wear enough flattering (read: slimming) clothing, and dazzle her with enough male-gaze pleasing sex appeal, she forgets for a while that she lies awake at night worrying that I'm fat, or not slim, or whatever she thinks. If I turn it on enough we can have a proper conversation, about something other than the calorie content of what she assumes I had for breakfast, or about how to fit the exercise she assumes I'm not doing into my schedule.

It didn't work this time unfortunately, she saw through my efforts. Should have worn higher heels.

The scene: dinner at my folks' place, after dinner Dad brought out some cheese, a risky thing to do he knew, later "I shouldn't have brought out the cheese" he lamented. As the cheese is slowly devoured by the four of us, unbeknown to the men, Mum and I play a perverse game of voyeurism with each other. I let her take a piece first, then I take a piece; I would never appear too eager, it gives her too much angst. I only eat the cheese at her pace, one for her, one for me. She watches the size of the piece I take, modest of course. Despite my careful efforts she eventually decides that I've had too much. "No more cheese" she declares, as she pulls the board away from me and towards herself. "I've only had as much as you, you know" I reply. Her face is a little shocked at this, usually I don't bite back. She has an almost embarrassed look, who knows what it means, the more cynical part thinks it means "yeah well I can afford to have more cheese than you".

I finally crack. The wine had more than a little to do with this. Mr T wasn't shocked, not one bit, after years of threatening to tell her off himself, I think he was actually glad.

"Why?" I demand, nasty, not how I would have preferred to have this conversation. "I'm sick of my body and everything I put in it being under constant surveillance!" Shit I've jumped in too quick, its a more nuanced argument that she probably won't understand at this juncture. I'm right, she goes on the defensive "Oh darling you've had too much to drink" as she rolls her eyes at my melodrama. "Well then so have you, I've been drinking you drink for drink as well!". Ha that got her, and she knows it too.

"Well weight watches says a match-box size piece of cheese" ... "Do you think I need to go to weight watches?" ... "I didn't say that" ... "Yeah but you think it, we all know you do, and I'm sick of you being obsessed with the size of my butt!".

Really eloquent. Not.

She cracks it, gets up and leaves the room. I cry, get up to leave, try to drag Mr T with me as he and Dad try to sit me back down.

Dad questions me, if I think she's wrong, why do I care what she thinks? Because she's my Mum of course, and I'm sick of the constant comments. I don't know what he's getting at with this line of questioning, whether he thinks she's right and is trying to prove to me that I do too, or whether he thinks I should just ignore her obsessions.

She comes back. Her emotions have cut through her defensiveness, she feels bad. I'm still too angry to care that she feels bad. I push it, years of saying it in my head all come forth like a torrent. Maybe just because you're obsessed by the size of your own arse you shouldn't expect me to be too! Did you think all your comments about big titty wop wops weren't going to impact your big breasted 16-year old daughter?! You always assume the worst of me! Can't you see the good job, or the academic success, or the happy relationship, or the good friends, or the positive attitude to life - no all you see is the size of my butt!!!

Now she's crying. "I'm your mother, I'm allowed to say those things, I didn't think they impacted you! I don't think you're fat, I think you have a great figure, your body has hardly changed in 8 years!"

Rubbish. Utterly incomprehensible, contradictory rubbish, which we all know is a lie, her opinions on the acceptability of my body are well known, she is as transparent as a window. Even Dad nods in agreement. I point all of this out to her.

She cries. I cry. Dad and Mr T point out that she loves me very much. Which I know she does. We have a hug. Mr T and I leave.

She calls the next day but I'm too...emotional...to talk to her. I don't want to talk about it. Mr T spends the next two days nagging me to call her, he doesn't want this to fester and damage our otherwise great relationship.

I don't want to call her, because I don't know that I can explain it to her. I know if she says I'm too fat then that should be the most terrible thing on the planet. But even if she does say that, my problem is that I just don't care that much. I'm on a path of body love that values how my body feels for me, not how it vainly looks to anyone else. Maybe the fact that I like eating good, healthy food and I enjoy the energizing effects of running and swimming, have fooled her into misinterpreting my behaviour as someone who wants to be skinny, not someone who just likes feeling good on the inside. Maybe I should talk more about just how low in calories my lunch is, or just how many kms I swam or ran this morning, maybe that would make her feel better, I don't know. But I find that kind of conversation so intensely boring, and it sounds like bragging, so I'm just not interested.

And having to explain all that to her, even if I could make her understand, I am afraid it will be taken as an implicit criticism of her - because she values being slim pretty much over everything else it seems. And I want to tell her just how goddamn sexist her opinions are, but I don't think we're on the same page enough for that to make sense to her.

Anyway I finally did call her. I apologised for having the conversation in the wrong way, and she apologised for being obsessive. We then talked a bit about her obsession, and she admitted that it really takes over her mind, like she sat next to a fat woman on the train the other day, and she couldn't stop thinking about it for ages. She said that when she would tell me to stop eating cheese, she was actually also saying it to herself. I said maybe she should cut herself some slack, she's on a constant calorie restriction diet and does like two classes at the gym everyday, perhaps she should just accept herself. I tried not to sound preachy.

It wasn't the right way to have this discussion with my Mum, yelling while we were both under the influence I mean. But I feel better for having had it anyway. There are things that I would have liked to have made a little clearer to her. Like that I don't actually even mind if she thinks I should lose weight, its more that she sees nothing else that really bothered me. And the fact that she sees it as such a central issue to a women's self worth that she couldn't come out and say something plainly, she had subject me to a constant drip of negative comments, almost like she was trying to subliminally make me hate myself slim.

But we resolved things well enough, and hopefully I'll get a break from it for a while (I'm not holding my breath that it'll be forever) and she can cut herself some slack, and give her mind a break from obsessing over fat people for a while.

Objectifiying our bodies drives us from them

There is an idea I've been toying with for a while, its not well developed yet, but the bones are thus: our obsession with physical attractiveness (heck let's just say it - BEING SKINNY) is in a huge part responsible not only for eating disorders that restrict caloric intake, but also obesity and the pandemic problem of not finding enough time to exercise. Yes, I think people are generally fat because we're obsessed with not being fat.

Appearance obsession is I think, for some people, causing them to hate and flee from their bodies. We constantly dissect and criticise our bodies - my thighs are x, my belly is y, sweet Jesus help I HAVE CANKLES!

One idea floating around is 'The fantasy of being thin', where people image how wonderful their lives will be when they're thin; where when we imagine the future, it always seems to include a better, thinner you. When we attempt to fulfill this fantasy by dieting and apperance-orientated exercise, the majority of people fail because they want to be instantly thin, because they're hurting themselves, physically and mentally, by being driven by body-hate and the shadows of a shallow fantasy.

Our bodies feel neglected, they're not an ally in the change, and they fight back. The more you say "no chocolate", the more your body craves chocolate. The more you say "run you fat ass!" the more your muscles scream for you to stop; I don't think they appreciate being spoken to like that. And finally failure comes, thank god because changing your life based on body-hate and image-obsessed fantasy is cruel to your body and soul.

And with failure we retreat again from our bodies. We're not on speaking terms with our bodies because we feel they're letting us down so devastatingly. And I think, for some people, this is where overeating and sloth take over, cue obesity crisis. Stuffing yourself and lying about for more than a few hours does NOT feel good. But we're too angry with our bodies to listen to them, so instead we seek a quick-fix physical pleasure, and we punish our bodies. It's a nasty, nasty cycle.

Perhaps the only path to good health, for both the individual and society, is through body-love, not body-hate. If we took some time to be nice to our bodies, to listen to them, we would realise they're not actually telling us that they want lard and laziness, but that they want good nutrition and healthy exertion. And in this scenario the same activities - good diet and exercise - are not a painful chore but a pleasurable fulfillment of a physical need. So in order to be healthy we need to stop worrying about what our bodies look like, and start listening to what they feel like on the inside.

I'm touching heavily on ideas of body acceptance, of which there is way more coherent literature than I want to focus on here. However one issue relating to body acceptance that is pertinent here is the power of the fantasy of being thin, where people espouse body acceptance, but in the back of their minds it's still the same - "I'll accept my body with all its 'flaws'....when I've lost 15kgs."

I think body-love makes people healthier, and in some cases that may mean slimmer; but attempting to use body-love to achieve some goal of weight-loss is never gonna work. After all, your body will know the love is shallow, cos your body is you! lol.

Anyway, that's just the first rambling on this issue, I'm sure there'll be more to come.

(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting obesity is caused solely by image-obsession. There are significant issues relating to socio-economic status and access to healthy foods, education about healthy diet, medications and weight, obsessive and compulsive mental illness etc. My musings are based entirely on my own experience, and the experience of my mainly white, university-educated, middle class girlfriends.)

Because feeling beautiful is central to women's self worth?

Jennifer Hawkins, former Miss Universe, appeared naked and unphotoshopped on the cover of Marie Claire. She had a crease on her waist *gasp* and apparently some cellulite. It was meant to raise awareness about eating disorders, and help your average woman feel better about herself. Anyway, not only did the feminist blogosphere go mad, but a large portion of the general public weighed in to the debate. In my opinion they rightly pointed out that the picture didn't really make much of a point because a) she's not an average woman, she's a supermodel, and b) she doesn't really look any different when she IS photoshopped, cos you know, she's a supermodel.

There has been a lot of talk about how they should have put on an un-photoshopped image of a woman who doesn't fit perfectly into the current cultural ideal of female beauty. Part of the problem is that we are exposed to so many images of one ideal, and so few positive images of anything else. A positive image of a fat chick for example, may have had a good impact on women seeing that even though they don't fit the ideal, they are still beautiful.

Marie Claire's actions, and the response, was largely predictable. It's been analysed until the cows come home. But as I've reflected, something else has stood out for me....

The whole argument seems to revolve around how a naked picture of Jennifer Hawkins does not make other women feel beautiful, in fact it makes them feel unattractive, which in turn makes the whole thing deplorable because it was supposed to be fighting eating disorders. A positive image of a 'real woman' ('real woman' - that's a whole other side to the debate) who doesn't perfectly fit the cultural ideal is advocated because this, it is presumed, will make women feel beautiful.

I'm going to assume it is believed that women will feel beautiful if they see a naked picture of an average woman because they will appreciate that the female body is quite beautiful even when it doesn't fit a cultural ideal, and that despite media saturation only genetic freaks fit the cultural ideal, so we should all stop worrying.

I think this is a fair enough statement. Working in a bikini shop and seeing women's bodies all day, I did in fact grow an appreciation for the beauty of the female body in all its diversity. But what irks me is that the implication coming across, including from those working to fight eating disorders, is that we must do everything we can to make women feel like they are physically beautiful. The goal is to redefine beauty so that more women fit it because 'feeling beautiful' is seen as centrally important to a woman's perception of self worth.

This is a fundamentally counterproductive approach to women's empowerment in general and eating disorders in particular. Sure, attempt to shift the goal posts so more women fit into the 'beautiful' category, there is merit in that particularly when ideals promote unhealthy behaviours. There is merit in expanding ideas about female beauty to appreciate women's bodies with their cesarean scars, womanly dimply thighs and flabby stomachs. But what would really benefit all women - conventionally beautiful, butt ugly and everything in between - would be to reduce the focus on women's bodies entirely.

Only when female physical attractiveness, however defined, is taken off its pedestal will we get somewhere with equality. And as men are drawn into this appearance obsession, we are not only risking equality of the sexes but a general healthy, mentally and physically, society. Seriously is it that difficult to imagine a society where being fat or ugly isn't the end of the fucking world? My sense of humour isn't to many people's tastes, but its not the end of the world, I just tend to consider the people who do appreciate it as connoisseurs of a fine brew.

"But being fat is unhealthy! And a drain on the health care system!" - it's true, it is. But so is cigarette smoking and sodium intake and not getting pap smears. But smokers, fish 'n' chips lovers, and women with creepy doctors do not center their entire self worth and behaviour around these issues.

I'm gonna put it out there - it's more acceptable for a man to fugly than a woman. Some women would say that's unfair and they resent being expected to hook up with ugly guys, and that's a fair point of personal taste. But drawing men into this insanity is not the answer, what a perverse equality that would be. A promotion of a wider variety of female beauty would be beneficial, but more importantly maybe we should all realise that being, or even feeling, like the opitomy of sexual attractiveness is not the be all and end all of existence.

You're taking up too much space

I take the tram to and from work. It's a lovely, quintessentially Melbourne experience. I get on out in the 'burbs, so more times than often score a seat. One thing I've noticed though, and its been getting on my nerves: men just don't move over. The double seats on the standard and W-class (not the 'new' bullet looking trams) trams are not divided, just a double bench. People generally take up a bit more than half the seat if they have it to themselves, but when somebody sits down next to them I've noticed a marked gender difference. Women tend to pull their bag in closer and scooch across the seat and cross their legs, so the other person has ample room. Men, on the other hand, remain sitting wide legged, taking up 3/4 of the seat. And when you sit down, they stay that way! Like do I have to sit on your lap so you get the message? Well that's what I've been resorting to - when they don't move over, I just sidle up real close, bump them a few times and half dump my bag on their laps. I'm being rude, I know it, I'm essentially shoving them, but seriously, get a fucking clue.

(Of course this is a generalisation, I should take a poll or something).

This whole tram seating thing got me thinking about space in general and I've started noticing a myriad of different ways in which men feel entitled to space, and women feel like they shouldn't take up any...

-Men sit wide legged, women cross their legs (this is of course also because we couldn't have our legs open because you know we have vaginas).

-I feel unfeminine when I sit with my legs wide and sturdy...so I try to do it as much as possible!

-Gee I dunno, the whole women-should-diet-themselves-to-nothing-to-be-attractive, but men get to have muscles.

-A woman wants a dressing table - gah she takes up so much space! A man wants a shed - well that's reasonable isn't it?

-The way women with big breasts tend to slouch.

-The way blokes hardly ever move out of the way when you're on a collision course on the street. If I don't move, we bump shoulders. (Yes I know, another generalisation)

-I'm ashamed to tell shoe sales girls that my feet are a size 9. Big feet = man. Doesn't matter that I'm nearly 6 ft of course.

-Trams again - the way men, and only men (ie not tall women) seem to expect you to duck under their outstretched arm to get out of the tram. Seriously could you let go for one sec so I don't have to stick my face in your sweaty armpit?

And I could go on, but I'm off to purchase World War Z :-)