I shared a study recently on Facebook that showed TOO MANY young people would rather get infected with Covid19 than GAIN WEIGHT. (A study done by the Missouri University Center for Body Image Research and Policy.)
We KNOW that this culture HATES BODIES. Period. Notice I didn't say "bigger bodies."
It extra hates bigger bodies. The stories it constructs about productivity and worthiness around larger bodies are some of the worst and most destructive.
But it hates bodies, period. American culture is born of a Protestant disdain for the human form and a belief that only in death can we attain any “holiness.”
Every body is TOO -- too fat, too skinny, too curvy, too straight, too hairy, too bald, too sexy, too fem, too masculine, too sexual, too androgynous, too muscled, too flabby, too soft, too hard, too brown, too pale, too too too too too too too...
We are, one way or another, taught to HATE OUR BODIES. PERIOD.
Why?
Yes... you probably guessed part of it... because people who hate their bodies will buy products.
But deeper than that -- people who hate their bodies will bow to the will of anything outside of themselves that promises they might eventually, some day, maybe sorta feel okay about themselves.
In the meantime, people who hate their bodies enact violence on themselves and then that extends beyond their individual body to the larger bodies of family, community, earth.
One way or another, each of us projects our body hate onto someone/something else, and it's how this whole system in which we live works.
So when I say the work we do to EMBODY is SUBVERSIVE and REVOLUTIONARY, I MEAN IT.
When we embody in a loving way, we then act from love and we project LOVE into the world.
Love is already complete. It needs nothing. And it shares all things.
See how that could destroy power structures?
I'm not here, I'm not doing this work, so you can dance a little and feel some dopamine...
I'm here and I'm doing this work SO WE CAN CHANGE THIS FUCKING WORLD.