This post comes from Caitlin Constantine of Fit and Feminist. Her blog is a never-ending source of inspiration and insight into the issues surrounding athleticism, equal rights, feminist philosophy, bodies and body image. Plus she’s fearless and hilarious. Read on for Caitlin’s contribution to Body Image Warrior Week:

The Danger of a Single Ideal Body

Recently, I came across a blog post by a personal trainer in which she explored the one of my least favorite terms as applied to women’s bodies – the word “bulky.”  Any weight-training woman is familiar with this term, as it is often the first thing other women will say as their reason for refusing to lift weights.  The idea is that lifting weights will lead to the development of big muscles, and the development of big muscles means a woman will no longer be beautiful and will instead be manly, unattractive, scary and doomed to a sex-free, love-free life.

The comments on the blog post illustrated this line of thought clearly, as woman after woman expressed dismay that she had taken up heavy lifting and was horrified to see that her body had developed muscles.   Some even clearly articulated their belief that in doing so, they had crossed a very bright line in which women were meant to be weaker and protected by the men they loved.

The women had set out in pursuit of the slender, compact body most often displayed by female celebrities, and instead they found themselves becoming muscular.  It didn’t matter that they were also stronger and that they were most likely healthier, with tougher bones and a stronger heart.  What mattered was that they were bigger.

As I read through those comments, I reflected on a TED talk given by writer Chimamanda Adichie in which she spoke about the “danger of the single story.”  She described growing up in Nigeria and yet writing stories in which her blonde-haired, blue-eyed characters ate apples and played in snow.  Every book she had read was written by British authors about British life, and as a result she hadn’t realized it was possible to write books about her own life.  She thought the only way to be worthy of literature was to be a foreigner.

I thought about her words and I realized that we as a culture had accepted the single story of the “ideal body” so thoroughly that no room remained for alternate definitions of female beauty.  Take the comments on the aforementioned blog post.  The “ideal female body” – a slim figure with breasts that aren’t too big and thighs that don’t touch and a butt that isn’t too flat and nothing that jiggles too much – is desired with such single-mindedness that the non-cosmetic benefits of weight training are dismissed without a second thought.

I use the example of women and muscles because that is what I, as an athletic woman who lifts weights, am most familiar with.  However, the story of the single ideal body manifests itself in breast augmentation and pumping parties, in gimmicky diets and weight-loss gadgets bought on installment plans, in firming creams and treatments meant to zap cellulite into non-existence.  Fortunes are spent and made in pursuit of the “ideal body,” and yet the only thing that has happened is that the ideal has become even more unattainable than ever before.

It’s not hard to see how this happened, either.  Look at our culture, at the bodies represented on television and in magazines and in movies and in advertising.  Just as Adichie only thought she could write stories about white children in snowy climates, we as a culture have trouble envisioning a standard of beauty that is not tall, thin, able-bodied and European.  Even when we do embrace someone who does not fit that standard, we tend to be very self-congratulatory about it, thus undoing whatever progress was gained by reducing that person into little more than a symbol of our open-mindedness.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of a world in which the only people who are considered beautiful have a specific body type, a specific kind of hair, a specific tone of skin, a specific shape of face.  I find such a world inhumane and cruel, bordering on insane.  Plus, as an aesthete who revels in beauty and sensation, I also find it dreadfully boring.

Consider the natural world, with all of its abundance of living things.  Think about flowers. In my neighborhood in Florida, I can count the following: birds of paradise, hydrangea, plumeria, magnolia, jacaranda, orchids, Confederate jasmine, black-eyed Susans, coreopsis, spider lilies and dozens more whose names I don’t know.

Few of us would look at all of these flowers and say that, for instance, orchids are the only beautiful ones.  Sure, we might have a preference, but most of us would not take our preferences to mean that all other flowers are ugly, and that we ought to rip rosebushes and tulip bulbs out of the ground so they can be replaced with even more orchids.

Yet this is what we do with our bodies – we say that all bodies that do not fit that single ideal are ugly, and that all bodies must fit that single ideal to be worthy of respect and care and affection. We say that if you cannot force yourself to fit that ideal, then you must hide yourself behind shapeless clothing and maybe even consider never leaving your house because you are too revolting to be seen.

How is it that we can so easily recognize beauty in all of its millions of manifestations in plants and animals, yet our definitions narrow radically when it comes to human beings?   Why do we value diversity in all things but scorn it in ourselves?

It’s clear to me that the expectation that our bodies must be a certain way to be feminine and beautiful is an artificial one, one that is informed almost entirely by the culture in which we are raised.  The bad news is that it is a powerful expectation, filled with privileges for those who conform and punishment for those who do not.

The good news is that we can resist it.  We can resist by refusing to hate our bodies for the way they look.  We can resist by catching ourselves when we think harshly about other people’s appearances.  We can resist by refusing to judge other people based on their bodies.  We can resist by calling out those who make those kinds of moral judgments about other people.  We can resist by refusing to support media outlets who uphold such narrow beauty standards.

We need a radical redefinition of what it means to be beautiful in this society.  We need to pry open the definition so it includes all bodies, whether they are tall or short or average or slender or fat or muscular or disabled.  Enough with this idea that beauty must somehow be exclusionary, like it is this finite quality that loses its potency as more people gain access to it. Such a view of beauty is blind to the core, irreducible truth about us, which is that our existence is nothing short of a miracle.

We do not blight the world with our cellulite, nor do we somehow diminish it through our sagging flesh.  The natural order is not upended by our muscles, nor does the universe gasp in horror when it sees our bellies.  We are just as much a part of the brilliant multiplicity of the universe as the flowers and the birds and the stars in the sky.  We are beautiful because we exist.  We are beautiful because we are.

Caitlin Constantine is a writer, editor, zinester, blogger and athlete based out of Clearwater, Fla.  She writes with the goal of pushing back against a culture that defines femininity as weakness and that seeks to deny women their physical power.  Her writing has appeared in Bitch and Creative Loafing, and she blogs at fitandfeminist.wordpress.com.

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February 27 – March 3 is Body Image Warrior Week. Throughout the course of this week, you’ll read posts from an inspiring group of women who fight hard against body image oppression through their own words and work.

Participants in Body Image Warrior Week are:
Already Pretty
The Beheld
Decoding Dress
Dress with Courage
Eat the Damn Cake
Fit and Feminist
Medicinal Marzipan
Not Dead Yet Style
Rosie Molinary
Virginia Sole-Smith
Weightless

Image via Fit and Feminist.

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This post comes from DeeDee of Decoding Dress. I only discovered DeeDee’s stellar blog recently, but now I count on her for a perfect mix of great outfits, sartorial insight, and brain-bending questions. Read on for DeeDee’s contribution to Body Image Warrior Week:

The Ideal Form of Me, or,
How Plato Turned Me into
a Body Image Blogger

I didn’t set out to become a body image blogger. I just wanted to write about clothes.

Well, that’s not really sufficiently precise. Lots of people write about clothes. I wanted to write about my own clothes. Of course, lots of people do that too. What I really wanted to do was to write about my relationship with my clothes. Back when I started my blog, Decoding Dress, I couldn’t find anyone else who was doing that, which made it seem like the perfect niche for me. And by “niche” I mean “Does anybody other than me actually care about this stuff?”*

It turns out it was the “my relationship with” part that got me into trouble. By inserting myself so intentionally into the mix I pretty much guaranteed body image would become a major theme of my writing, whether I intended it to or not.

To wit: most outfit blogs are, of course, about the outfits (shock-n-awe!). Note, however, that for those of us with the good fortune to have been born into situations of privilege in one of the world’s highly developed nations, the clothes we wear are rarely about protection from the elements or adherence to social norms against public nakedness; they are, rather, the real-world projection of our inner sense of self.** (That’s why we compliment a friend’s outfit by telling her, “That’s so you,” or return a piece we’ve tried on to the rack saying, “It’s just not me.”) In other words, our outfits occupy the narrow frontier separating our real, physical selves from our mental images of ourselves. So you can talk about the clothes all you want, but as soon as you bring up why you chose them, what you loved or hated about them or how they made you feel, you’re talking about body image.

It took me a while to figure that out though. It wasn’t until I dragged the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428-c.348 BCE) into a post about miniskirts and red lipstick that the extreme to which my entire blogging project was going to revolve around body image started to become clear to me:

The lovers of sights and sounds like beautiful sounds, colors, shapes, and everything fashioned out of them, but their thought is unable to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself […] In fact, there are very few people who would be able to reach the beautiful itself and see it by itself. Isn’t that so?

— Plato, The Republic

See what Plato’s doing there? He’s drawing a distinction between the things we perceive as beautiful and beauty as a thing in and of itself. This is his way of introducing what has become known as his Theory of Forms.

This all may sound abstruse or even arcane, but you employ this theory all the time, probably without even being aware of it. How do you know that an apple — this particular apple — is an apple? You know it because you have in your mind the image of an apple — not of a particular apple, in this case, but of a general apple with a set of characteristics common to all apples. Students of platonism have traditionally referred to this general apple as the Ideal Form of an apple (after Plato himself) or as “Appleness.” (Seriously.) Platonism holds that this ideal form of an apple isn’t merely an image, but actually exists (though not in any way that can be conventionally perceived by our senses). Every particular instance of an apple, then, is understood as just an approximate expression of its Ideal Form, inherently flawed. The same goes for everything you experience or imagine…including yourself.

And that’s where the problems start.

This framework, which has come to govern so much of how we understand and experience the world, tells me that there must exist an Ideal Form of DeeDee — DeeDeeness, as it were. And what are the characteristics of DeeDeeness? For some weird reason,*** in my mind the Ideal Form of DeeDee isn’t characterized by the wrinkles that seem to be multiplying exponentially around the corners of my real mouth. It doesn’t include the flab around my midsection or my size 11 feet either.  DeeDeeness is hourglass shaped, smooth skinned and wears a size six shoe comfortably.

In other words, with alarming frequency, the characteristics I use to recognize myself aren’t necessarily characteristic of the real me. They represent someone that I not, have never been and likely never will be. It’s like trying to recognize myself — judging the validity of my own claim to be DeeDee — based on some other person’s attributes. In doing so I treat an image of some other body as if it were the platonic Ideal Form of my own — only acknowledging myself to the extent that I embody the characteristics of this alien image. Where I do not embody them I consider myself flawed, approximate.

What. The. HELL? Where does this even come from? It’s the syllogistic equivalent of judging something to be an apple by the extent to which it is small, round, blue and goes well in pancakes. I’m way too smart to be doing this, way too smart to be doing it to myself.

But I am doing it. After nearly a year of considering these issues critically under the glare of a flaming introspection fetish and far more education than is generally good for me, I’m still doing it.

The dirty little secret of Decoding Dress is that about 90% of the time, the answer to the question upon which I’ve based the whole project, “Why do I wear what I wear?” is simply “So that what I see in the mirror might more closely approximate this Ideal Form of me.” But unless and until I can acknowledge the irrationality of the Ideal Form I’ve chosen and embrace in its stead one that actually has some significant essential connection to who I am, I will never see myself as more than an approximation. I’ll never actually become myself.

And so I think (and write) about my body image, my mental projection of myself, in the hope that someday the image will fall into line with the reality. Perhaps, if I am diligent and do not cease from my self-exploration (as T.S. Elliot might say), then “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I wish the same for you.

*Apparently a few people do. The really cool ones.

**If that sounded like I was riffing off a Matrix quote, that’s because I was.

***I’d love simply to blame this on patriarchal culture, but I’m pretty sure it’s more complex than that.

DeeDee is a yearling fashion and beauty blogger endlessly fascinated by why we wear what we wear. She’s still not sure where all this is headed.

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February 27 – March 3 is Body Image Warrior Week. Throughout the course of this week, you’ll read posts from an inspiring group of women who fight hard against body image oppression through their own words and work.

Participants in Body Image Warrior Week are:
Already Pretty
The Beheld
Decoding Dress
Dress with Courage
Eat the Damn Cake
Fit and Feminist
Medicinal Marzipan
Not Dead Yet Style
Rosie Molinary
Virginia Sole-Smith
Weightless

Image courtesy Decoding Dress.

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This post comes from  Margarita Tartakovsky of Weightless. She dedicates herself to finding and creating resources for women who struggle to love their bodies and accept themselves, and never fails to deliver. Read on for Margarita’s contribution to Body Image Warrior Week:

Loving Your Body,
No Conditions Necessary

I used to think that in order to love my body or really just tolerate it, I had to be thin. I had to have a flat stomach, small hips and sky-high cheekbones.

And I had to earn this love, this tolerance. I had to earn it at the gym — punitively pounding the pavement of a treadmill — and at the dinner table — carefully, nervously watching what I ate.

I used to think that I didn’t deserve to feel good about my body or myself overall because my figure didn’t fit the above criteria.  Instead, there was softness and curves and rounder cheeks.

And so I wondered and worried, how could I love a body that supposedly didn’t deserve it? I wanted to, but I truly believed — with all of my being — that I wasn’t allowed to. I’m not sure where these prescriptions came from. It was probably a mix of society’s stringent physical standards and my own perspective, a lens colored for so long by a shaky sense of self.

But either way, I felt that I couldn’t enjoy my body until I’d lost weight. Until I did what I came to believe was the exclusive path to body love.

Recently I read a powerful guest post by Rebecca Soule on Anna Guest-Jelley’s beautiful blog Curvy Yoga. Soule wrote a letter to herself on Valentine’s Day. She made the following vow to herself:

“So today, on Valentine’s Day, a day to celebrate love, I celebrate my love for you: for better for worse, in health and happiness, in creaky joints and achy knees, laughter lines and all, this life, this moment, this earth, until my spirit departs from you.”

The part about the creaky joints and achy knees really gave me pause because it refers to loving your body through it all. Through running for miles and through lying on the couch sidelined by sickness. Through losing weight and through gaining it back. Through the roller-coaster of emotional and physical ups and downs. Without conditions. Without specific criteria.

And it makes so much sense. It’s what we do for others. When we love someone — a boyfriend, a best friend, our parents, our kids — we love them unconditionally. We don’t keep track of random criteria that the person must fulfill. We don’t think about them earning our love — whether at the gym or at the dinner table. We don’t think about their qualities, especially their physical traits, as currency.

Our loved ones don’t need a six-pack to gain our respect. They don’t need muscular legs, thinner thighs or chiseled cheekbones to have our appreciation and utmost love.

So why wait to respect our bodies based on a singular, random ideal? A standard essentially set by the very companies that profit from our insecurities, hang-ups and regular body-bashing?

Our bodies are intricate and complex machines and breathtaking works of art. They work behind the scenes on the bare essentials — like breathing, moving, seeing, hearing, touching — so we can go after our dreams. So we can make our art. So we can make babies. So we can give love. Give hugs. Cook a delicious meal. Savor that meal, bite by tasty bite. Dance. Learn something new. Laugh.

Our bodies are vehicles that take us to amazing places, whether we get there through our feet or our hands. Whether we physically arrive at a destination, are able to read about it or compose a story.

We don’t need to wait until we have blemish-free, wrinkle-free skin to respect, appreciate and love ourselves. We don’t need to wait until we shed X amount of pounds. We don’t need to wait until we have a muscular stomach or a tinny tiny waist.

And we don’t need to stop respecting, appreciating or loving our bodies when we can’t do a certain exercise, or when we’re sick or tired or bloated.

Perfection — whatever that means to you, whether it’s continuously performing at your peak or having a sculpted stomach — isn’t a prerequisite for a positive body image, and it’s certainly not a prerequisite for appreciating and loving ourselves as a whole.

If it were, no one would love. No one would be loved.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Love, of course, exists. And it exists in all shapes, sizes, colors, forms and flavors.

Margarita Tartakovsky is an associate editor at Psych Central. She also writes Weightless, a blog that covers everything from building a positive body image to ditching dieting to becoming a smart consumer to recovering from eating disorders. You can learn more about Margarita and her work at her personal website.

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February 27 – March 3 is Body Image Warrior Week. Throughout the course of this week, you’ll read posts from an inspiring group of women who fight hard against body image oppression through their own words and work.

Participants in Body Image Warrior Week are:
Already Pretty
The Beheld
Decoding Dress
Dress with Courage
Eat the Damn Cake
Fit and Feminist
Medicinal Marzipan
Not Dead Yet Style
Rosie Molinary
Virginia Sole-Smith
Weightless

Image via Get Your Mind Right

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This post comes from Mara Glatzel of Medicinal Marzipan. This amazing woman has been a champion of body image issues for years, and her inspiring posts just get better the longer she fights. Read on for Mara’s contribution to Body Image Warrior Week:

It’s like – my body is over there, spilling over into the room around it, and my head is over here, chatting with you and looking pretty. We’re two totally different pieces. Can’t you see? But, I love my body, can’t you tell?

It took me a long time to realize that loving my body meant something quite different than leaving it alone and letting it run the show however it so pleases. That loving the skin that I was in had absolutely nothing to do with “throwing all the rules out the window,” or saying f*&$ you to society and their idealized beauty norms.

It means: you only get one body. One. It is your home, your rock, your ally – and treating it like a dumpster or ignoring it, hoping it will just go away already – is not helpful.

It means: respecting the skin that you’re in.

I get a lot of people writing me emails about loving their bodies, wanting to know please God body love seems so far away when I hate my body so much – to which I reply let’s start with body neutrality.

Yes, body love is the wonderous state where everything is wonderful and you skip around in a field of flowers, blissed out and having nothing but compassionate thoughts about your authentic self. But for many? We just aren’t there yet.

Body neutrality is a state of contentment. It is dead smack between I hate myself with every fiber of my being and I couldn’t possibly love my body any more. It is a white flag thrown into the ring. It is the gauntlet thrown down when you realize that what you’re doing?  It just isn’t working for you.

For me, body neutrality means cultivating a short set of guidelines within which I know that I will feel relatively good – and sticking to them, no matter what. These rules include simple things (the kind we all know that we should do, but never get around to) like starting my day with 32 oz. of water pre-coffee, getting at least seven hours of sleep, buying underwear that fits, having sex with moderate regularity, and trying to fill up half my plate with vegetables of some variety.

It’s not really a write home worthy list, but it works. As someone who is recovering from a lifetime of compulsive and emotional eating – these guidelines keep me in a window of containment where I am able to make decisions that aren’t warped by mood swings or panic. They save me from the very dangerous place of: How did it get this bad? I am so terrified and feel so disgusting I don’t know what to do next.

These guidelines put my head back on my shoulders, reconnecting it with my body – after twenty years of stuffing my feelings down with food. It reminds me that my body is here to support me as I move about the world – and that is something that should be celebrated.

It reminds me that we are on the same team, and that developing a baseline of self-care means that we both win.

And for someone who is just beginning to delve into the world of self-love – it is a perfect place to begin.

Mara Glatzel is a body image warrior and self-love coach. She spends the majority of her time causing a ruckus on Medicinal Marzipan, where she blogs (almost) daily about correcting your relationship with your body and food, creating relationships that are fulfilling, and manifesting your dream life. Catch up with her body loving updates on twitter, Facebook, or send her an email.

 * * * * *

February 27 – March 3 is Body Image Warrior Week. Throughout the course of this week, you’ll read posts from an inspiring group of women who fight hard against body image oppression through their own words and work.

Participants in Body Image Warrior Week are:
Already Pretty
The Beheld
Decoding Dress
Dress with Courage
Eat the Damn Cake
Fit and Feminist
Medicinal Marzipan
Not Dead Yet Style
Rosie Molinary
Virginia Sole-Smith
Weightless

Image courtesy Tor Kristensen

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