Body Positivity Just Scratches the Surface

My reading habit has been FLOURISHING lately, and so this week’s post is inspired by yet again - a book. 

I finished ‘The Beauty Myth’ by Naomi Wolf last week and while this book tackles many topics related to the idea of beauty and it’s long term effects on societies, all of which made me think extra hard about my own self image, there was one concept that I thought was worth discussing here. 

Wolf brings up the idea that society encourages us to view others and ourselves in a purely visual format. Media, and pornography especially, define people almost solely based on image. However, this way of observing others is a handicap that we’ve created for ourselves because vision is just one of our five senses. If you’re meeting someone in person, then the way they smell, sound, taste, and feel can also affect our perceptions of them. 

So often we tie the idea of beauty or sexiness to how people look. Great hair, great butt, great eyes. But if you’re lying next to someone - there are a whole slew of other things that can cause attraction. 

You can love the sound of someone’s laugh, you can find the smell of someone intoxicating, their skin can feel rough or smooth under your hands, and you can for sure define how they taste - but that is personal. The point is just that you can enjoy someone with all your senses so it’s not fair to only be able to define them using one. Why is how they look so much more important than what they smell like or how they make me feel? There’s nothing wrong with being attracted so someone based on what they look like, and we have been taught to think this way over and over again, but think about how ridiculous it is that that’s typically the only thing we pay attention to.

A concept that ties into this is our choice of words when making comments about others attributes. The use of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ adjectives is another self-imposed, superfluous limitation we’ve set for ourselves. 

Take, for example, the word ‘soft’. The word by itself might conjure up images of pillows, or fluffy blankets, or marshmallows. But when applied to a person, your mind will almost always go female. Why? Because we’ve arbitrarily assigned it a gender that absolutely does not reflect reality. Women are not exclusively soft, just as men aren’t exclusively hard. Women are usually described along the lines of soft, small, smooth, delicate, and pretty. While men are described as large, hard, and rough. But these categories are almost excruciatingly limited when you are trying to actually define a real, flesh and blood, person.

And anyone who has ever come into contact with another human knows that everyone is a combination of both - yet we are hesitant to use these words interchangeably in a positive way with each other. 

So I’m setting myself a little challenge - and I encourage you to try it for yourself. I’m going to pick a couple important people in my life and try to define them without using visual descriptions and without limiting myself to gender split words. 

There are a lot of messages out there about how we are supposed to look, but ultimately it’s just a piece of the puzzle, and I hope by doing this, I can expand my thinking, not only about myself, but about others and all the different ways we can be appreciated, not just by visual cues. 

Photos and images have power over us. This photo captures me at a moment in time where I felt good about how I looked. But it completely misses every single other attribute. We know we shouldn’t look too much into images, but we could remind ourselves more often.