Woman on Fire (19 page)

I was traveling for work last year. In my hotel room I flipped through channels to see what was on. Because I do not have cable at home and rarely watch TV, I'm sort of fascinated when I do watch it. All the morning programs were on—which are ostensibly primarily viewed by women. I could not believe how many ads came on for plastic surgery, cosmetic enhancements, and products designed to help us “fix” our looks. The ads were long with testimonials from women who had done said augmentation, talking about how happy they were or how it had changed their lives. No doubt the sponsors paid premium price for that ad space.

OBSERVING THE SELF: SPECTATORING

We are media-saturated and often the framework for our image of sex is visual media. This has impacted us so much that people often behave like they're in a movie and they adjust themselves for the best camera angles in a gross level of self-consciousness that fakes them out of the actual experience they are having. Spectatoring is watching yourself have sex rather than being fully present in the experience. You become voyeuristic in a self-critical way that restrains your pleasure, your voice, your orgasms, and your body. If you have a pattern of spectatoring, you are living sexually outside of yourself. It's time to come home and get present so you can more fully enjoy sex.

We cannot afford to be passive recipients of our media, nor can we make the media go away. What we
can
do is choose to be critical
about it so we keep a realistic view of the diversity of our bodies, of aging processes, of pregnancy changes, and a more honest reality of the images and messages we are consuming. We must actively engage with our media and critique its unreal, harmful standards. And we must teach this skill to our children for their well-being. This is not negotiable. Make decisions about your own media diet. Refuse to watch programs that make you feel bad. Refuse to be a participant in this machine as much as you humanly can. Let people close to you know you are on a media diet just as you might let them know about other health or behavior changes you are working on. Ask them for support. Get the TV out of your bedroom. Throw out the old magazines. Subscribe to more empowering ones that show real women. There are many now. You will have people in your life who buy into the media madness. Set the best boundaries you can with them and refuse to participate in body hate.

FACT #3: AGING CHANGES YOUR BODY, YOUR SKIN, AND HOW YOU LOOK, NO MATTER WHAT.
It's crazy that we still live in a world where we think we can avoid aging, that we can be the one who wasn't changed or impacted by age. Look in the mirror. Do you look like you looked ten years ago? Twenty? Thirty? No. Your body changes as you age. Your skin wrinkles to show how much you've laughed and frowned. Your skin relaxes and with less elasticity, you have looser skin and more cellulite. Gravity has an impact after all those upright homo sapien years. Your hands will look different. Your skin will have more freckles to show how much fun in the sun you had. And frankly, I think most women become more beautiful with age because they become wiser and more secure and at home in themselves. That is sexy. Forever young is not a reality any of us will achieve. Ever.

FACT #4: PERFECT DOES NOT EXIST.
In fact, perfect is boring. Different bodies are attractive to different people. And a variety of bodies keeps our world diverse and interesting. If we all looked the same, it would be boring, and the body that was different would be
the interesting one. There is no universally perfect body. Part of the irony is that it is oftentimes the things that make a woman's body womanly that we are taught to abhor or that women want to change. We have hips and curves, yet we are taught to emulate models who are too thin to have hips and curves. At its core, this is a terribly misogynist idea: get rid of what makes you womanly. Why do we call petite women a “zero”? Strive for zero? We want you to literally waste away into nothing. We are taught a dreary refrain to be smaller and more contained, yet sexuality is so big and we are meant to have huge ecstatic experiences regardless of actual body size. If you want to work toward a goal, strive to make your sexual and bodily experience as expansive as possible with every body or life phase.

FACT #5: MAINSTREAM PORNOGRAPHY DOES NOT DEPICT REAL SEX OR BODIES.
There is no perfect body and there is no “standard” vulva. We all have the same genital parts and, like our faces, they vary widely in their size, shape, position, color, and composition. Because so many porn stars have had labiaplasty and other surgical augmentations of their genitals, and because they are all shaved, women have begun to believe there is a standard way their vulva should look. Mainstream porn has promoted a set of sexual norms around appearance as well as performance. The norms it sets about sexual functioning are typically that clitoral stimulation and cunnilingus are brief lead-ins to jackhammering and that women should have vaginal orgasms that are explosive. Mainstream porn has contributed to thousands of women feeling bad for needing clitoral stimulation, using vibrators, and for the way their genitals look. It's important to point out the contribution of mainstream pornography because it is ubiquitous and so many people have no other window into how other people have sex and what it actually looks like. Thankfully many women and queer people are now making feminist porn featuring real women who are paid well and depicting real orgasms. Shifts are happening.

All vulvas look different. The only “normal” to compare your genitals to is
your
normal. You should know what's typical for you and how yours looks, so if something is off or looks or smells different, you know to get it checked out in terms of your health. Otherwise, embracing the normal variation of genitals is essential. Women are now spending thousands of dollars to have surgeries on their genitals—cutting their labia because they think they are too big (imagine men wanting to cut down the size of their genitals!),
tightening the vagina to produce “more pleasure” (For whom? For male partners, not us), bleaching around the anus, and hair removal. This is madness. And it is largely because there is no knowledge of the genital diversity that is normal. I am fortunate that between my work and my personal sex life, I have seen a lot of “real” women's genitals and I am privy to this diversity. Every time I teach about female anatomy, I show images of real vulvas in order to debunk the staid ideas about what a “normal” vulva looks like. Hint: It looks like you.

Educate yourself about real female genitals! This is the fastest way to bust through any shame you might feel and to embrace your unique genitals.

HERE ARE SOME RECOMMENDATIONS:

• Check out Betty Dodson's vulva drawings, all drawn from real women's vulvas, at: http://dodsonandross.com /blogs/carlin/2010/05/bettys-vulva-illustrations. This whole series of drawings is also published in her classic book
  Sex for One.
  
• Betty Dodson's genital art gallery with photos of real people: http://dodsonandross.com/gallery/genital-art
  
• The book
  Femalia
  by Joani Blank is a collection of beautiful full-color photographs of vulvas done by various photographers.
  
• Cunt Coloring Book
  by Tee Corinne is also a fun way to enjoy the variety of beautiful vulva shapes in the world.
  
• Visit the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, or look at her work. Heck, just look at nature: there are vulvas everywhere.
  

I know the cultural tide does not support what I am saying. It's like swimming upstream in a huge river into a powerful downstream current. Every time you make a little headway and start to like and enjoy your body a bit, more water is rushing at you. You grab for a root or branch to hang on to, but the rush of unrealistic expectation and pressure keeps coming.

We are deeply impacted by messages we get about our bodies from our family, community members, peers, and partners. I have heard many women talk about harmful comments from family and partners about their bodies and how that affected their sexual self-concept. For example, being told they were too thin or boyish and therefore unwomanly and unattractive, or that they were too curvaceous, big-breasted, and fat and therefore slutty. It's important to remember that your mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunties took in the cultural messaging too, and they often will spit it back at you without realizing how damaging it is. Notice how body talk was modeled for you in your family and with your friends. How did your close female role models relate to their bodies? What self-criticism did you hear in the women you were close to? This body talk can be toxic, and you will likely reproduce those patterns until someone breaks the cycle. Let it be you. Let it stop right here so you don't indoctrinate your own daughters and nieces into feeling distraught about their bodies. Be a healthy role model.

FULL-BODY LOVE RITUAL

Here is a ritual you can do in order to release some of the body negativity you have and bring in more acceptance and love.

• What body lament are you ready to end? Ask yourself what messages or expectations you are ready to let go of about your body. What would it mean to really accept your body as is? To step into that place of radical acceptance?
  
• Write down the messages that you have taken in about your body and how it should look, feel, perform, or function that are no longer helpful to you. Write down every thought about your body that you have internalized, every harmful message you are ready to let go of. Get it all out. Scrawl across the page.
  
• Read it over and acknowledge the painful ideas you've been carrying and believing. Decide to let these messages go. When you are ready, ritually burn the paper and verbally state that you are
  releasing these ideas about your body. Watch them go up in flames.
  
• Then take a ritual bath or shower to rinse those ideas away. If you choose, you can prepare some mud or create a mixture of milk, honey, and flowers to anoint your body with. As you spread it onto your body, enjoy the process with great intention. Take time to anoint and then rinse. Appreciate running your hands over each part of your body in the water, and give gratitude and blessings to each part as you do. Include the scars, the stretch marks, the rolls, the blemishes. What do you appreciate or embrace about each part of your body? How will you treat it from now forward?
  
• Finally, when you find yourself lamenting again in the future, what will you do to snap out of it? Make a list of five to ten tools you can use to help yourself feel better and not get stuck feeling bad about your magical temple. Keep that list in a place you can easily access when you need the reminder.