💬Weekly Discussion: The body comments you'll never forget
For better or worse.
Good morning, Body Typers. Time for another Weekly Discussion. Here’s the last one, which got a ton of comments! I love love loved reading them. Thank you for contributing to the conversation.
If you’re new here — and many of you are, yay, welcome! — these posts are a place for you to talk to each other (and me) about topics that are more chit-chatty than full post-y. This is a space for you.
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This week’s discussion:
What is a comment someone made about your body that you’ll never forget?
You could share a comment that made you feel good, bad, or something more complicated. You could share a few. Anything goes. The idea is to consider for a second what comments about your body have stuck with you and why — and, maybe, give yourself a chance to shake off any painful ones once you realize you’ve been carrying them around. That’s not easy (I think the shitty body comments people say to us when we’re young, especially, tend to stick with us forever), but I find it easier when I’m able to say them aloud and commiserate with other people. Do that in the comments, if you like. I’ll drop mine there as well.
Have a great rest of your week, and stay tuned for a new full post from me soon.
Mine:
The bad: I was on a boat trip with family and family friends, and one of the drunk older men who was on the boat made a remark about how my boobs were bouncing as we went over some waves. I was like 13, and this man said I needed to "Get those things under control!" or something like that. I was already so insecure about having hit puberty earlier than my friends, and I was taller and bigger than everyone and had big boobs. To have a man call me out like that and suggest that my body was "out of control" was one of the most humiliating things I've ever experienced.
The good: I went to the gym in my apartment building and then walked over to pick up a package at the front desk. I suppose I was looking especially swole since I had just finished my workout. The front desk guy looked up and said, "Whoa, you are SO strong. What have you been doing in there??" I'll never get over how fun it feels to have a man, especially, remark on my physical strength :)
As with so many of your topics/prompts, I could write a book of essays on this one. Body comments, the painful ones at least, burn into memory as indelibly as anything that happens in states of high arousal (in a fight-or-flight sense), much in the way that trauma is etched. Though as trauma goes, this hardly ranks.
First comment: I was a thin, athletic kid, slow to develop and incredibly self-conscious about it, though I gave it little voice. One summer evening I was outside with my parents and the next door neighbors -- a couple I adored, babysat for, borrowed books from, etc.. The husband was talking about meeting his wife very young. "She ran track in high school," he said. Then, nodding his head toward me, "and was about that 'built.'" (As in, flat as a board, not 'built' at all). I shrunk into myself, burning with anger and embarrassment. The conversation moved on.
Thinking on this as an adult, I feel a sense of betrayal, less from the neighbor than my parents. (Great, supportive parents, for the record). I have sons, but in today's world, had someone made a comment on my young daughter's appearance of sexual maturity (or lack thereof), I'd have curtly and coolly interrupted to tell them they were out of line to comment on an adolescent girl's body. Comments like this are far more rare today, thankfully. But that remark was the first time I became aware that people were evaluating me through a lens of sexual attractiveness and availability. I hated it.
The other comment that stands out was a few years later. Senior year of high school. I was a cheerleader with an eating disorder. I had initially been more anorexic, but as I matured and my unfed body started to panic, I gained weight. Nothing extreme, but the swing from underweight to slightly over was brutal, especially in my role as a kind of perky performer, appearing before crowds weekly in skimpy uniforms. There, my shame and failure was exposed, no baggy clothes to hide behind.
One day I overheard one of the sophomore cheerleaders -- one of those enviable types who got boobs while remaining girlishly skinny everywhere else -- talking scornfully about how I'd gained weight. I seethed. She wasn't wrong.
We were never friends, but years later I ran across her at a playground. She'd bypassed college, had kids young. I was a park designer with a degree. In just a few years, her body had turned matronly. Mine, after recovery and more normalized eating, was trim and athletic, a slightly older version of my thin high school self. I felt a sudden sense of (albeit shallow) victory.
When I think on this, it's not the comment she made (rude, but not untrue) but my years-later experience of Schadenfreude that bothers me. As though I'd won -- emerged victorious from a competition she hadn't even entered. And the intensity of the Schadenfreude, the 'now you're fat and I'm not" turnabout, seems so ugly. Unnecessary. Small. It makes me cringe, but is such a window into my head at the time.
I've moved away from that now. I've never had much control over my body size and believe most people don't. If they do seek rigorous control, I feel compassion. and concern. Rigid self-monitoring and restriction is hardly a way to live well. But it's so hard to let go of thought patterns that caught us early.
It makes me sad to think there must be wonderful comments and moments from my past I don't remember because I was so focused on body size, eating behaviors, and my belief in thinness as a dictator of self worth. Such a waste of energy and attention.