Your body is an instrument, not an ornament 🌸
A friendly reminder ahead of summer x
Hey friends,
This piece was initially published in Capital Magazine. As summer approaches, it feels like a good time to re-share it.
See you on the beach ;)
Melody x
🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞 🌞
🌸 Your body is an instrument, not an ornament 🌸
Summer is here, bringing a much needed influx of vitamin D, salty skin, and long, warm evenings. But while I’ll sing the praises of summer to whoever will listen, the hot season can bring discomfort too, especially for those doing the hard work of unlearning body shame and negativity.
Warm weather requires fewer clothes, which brings us face to face with parts of our bodies we might have relegated as “problem areas”, and hidden away under stylish layers the rest of the year. Instagram is awash with Ozempic-thin celebs, wellness fads and ads for miracle swimsuits and leggings promising to snatch your waist, lift your butt and flatten your gut. Even if you’ve managed to curate a body positive social media feed, seeing all the babes strutting their stuff in the real world can still bring about unwanted self-comparisons. All of this means summer can feel like an advent calendar where half of the little doors hide joy and freedom, but the rest threaten to unleash a tidal wave of unexpected and debilitating shame. Fun!
Recently, I’ve been learning about the work of Lindsay and Lexie Kite, who through their organisation Beauty Redefined have conducted extensive research into positive body image and ways we might all help to develop it. Lindsay talks about how body positive messaging over the past 15 years has focused on how “all women are beautiful – flaws and all!”, which, while well-meaning, isn’t fixing the problem. Girls and women “aren’t only suffering because of the unattainable ways beauty is being defined, they’re suffering because they are being defined by beauty”.
In other words, the focus is still on the importance of beauty.
Deeply-realised positive body image, Kite argues, “isn’t believing your body looks good, it’s knowing your body is good, regardless of how it looks.”
Through the work of Beauty Redefined I also came to hear about “self-objectification”. This is the tendency for many of us, especially girls and women, to adopt a third-person perspective of ourselves, so that instead of viewing the world through our own eyes, we experience it as if through the eyes of an imaginary person looking back at us.
One of the side effects of this is body obsession, taking the form of an endless internal narrative that sounds something like this: “Smooth your shirt down, suck your stomach in, that person’s looking at you, turn to your best angle, pull your hem down, you need to pluck your eyebrows, shoulders back, check your teeth for lipstick, smile don’t frown” – on and on until you die.
Self-objectification obviously isn’t great – it’s linked to feelings of shame, anxiety about one’s appearance, and negative mood. It inhibits agency and confidence, and just takes a lot of energy that would be better spent elsewhere – studies show that when women and girls are self-objectifying they perform worse on math and reading comprehension, and can’t run or throw a ball as far or lift weights as heavy.
The first step in transforming negative body image into positive is recognising when we are self-objectifying; until I heard Kite verbalise her own body-obsessed internal monologue I’d been pretty oblivious to my own, but now that I know what it sounds like it’s impossible to ignore.
The next step is, when we notice ourselves doing it, instead of responding how we usually do (either doubling down on our shame with disordered eating or other harmful behaviours, or hiding and “fixing” ourselves, for example avoiding the beach while making promises to ourselves to lose weight so we can go to the beach next time) – we confront our discomfort.
We go to the beach and breathe through our anxiety, reminding ourselves as we step into the ocean that what matters is how we feel; the cool water lapping at our skin, the power of our stroke as we swim out to the pontoon. That we choose exercise because it makes us feel strong and capable, not because we want to fit into some dress we should have given away years ago. That instead of judging food as “good” or “bad” we ask our bodies what they need and respond accordingly, be it salad, cake, or both.
All of this takes time. Unlearning messages you’ve heard your entire life about how your worth relies largely on your appearance is a big task, and sometimes it can feel impossible. But we’ve already wasted so much time and energy on these endless, cruel, shaming internal narratives – not to mention the eternal squeezing, shaving, tanning, covering up and shrinking of our perfectly good bodies – that it feels more than worthwhile to divert just some of that energy into rejecting and dismantling the ideas that got us here in the first place.
After all, as the Kite sisters so wonderfully put it, our bodies are instruments, not ornaments.
