The Body Issue

In a previous post I wrote about how much a sunny day can do to whittle away angst and bad spirits. This, it occurs to me, is not always the case. In fact, there is a way in which warm weather can produce a whole new set of anxieties, and they usually have to do with bodies. That is, there is some point every year, as temperatures start to rise, when the masses of people around me in New York City stop being people and start being bodies- long, short, dark, light, thin, heavy, smooth, wrinkled bodies. Walking down the street becomes this giant flesh fest (the kind our tznius literature warned us about) and I can’t help but be absorbed by it. Joining a gym this year has added to the onslaught, and I am constantly in awe of the rich variety of bodies and faces that can be contained within one species (let alone one locker room).

At the same time, mixed up with this sense of awe is the inevitable feeling of inadequacy, as the surplus of exposed body surface makes me measure my own in comparison, and find myself falling short. Of course these concerns pale in contrast to the kinds of things that should be concerning me like pain and poverty and global stuff. But we live in our bodies, and whether we admit it or not, most of us are mildly obsessed by them. My gym is filled with hordes of highly educated, affluent people, sweating and exhausting themselves for hours a week entirely for the purpose of having nice abs. And I don't even care about them, I care about my people (highly educated, not so affluent...) the majority of whom also spend loads of time and energy choosing food and clothing and that will make them as thin as possible. I care because it upsets everything we’ve been taught to think matters in life- namely kindness, sensitivity, intelligence, social consciousness and the like. Weight has nothing to do with these things, and yet it matters, and I’m still at a loss for a way to synthesize that knowledge into the general way I think about people.

For example: Boy meets girl. Boy thinks girl is sweet, smart, interesting. Girl thinks the same. They make each other laugh like neither has laughed in ages, and they both get the sense that if something serious came up, they would be equally on the same page. But girl is rather heavy and this puts boy off. He ends up asking out inferior woman he is attracted to. Girl feels like crap. I could construe this scenario a million other ways (and someone, somewhere is upset that I have used “girl” instead of “woman”), but the point is a familiar one. Looks matter in the cruelest ways. You (all of you) will not end up with the best person for you. You will end up with the best person to whom you are attracted, and who is attracted to you in turn (along with all the other necessary demands).

Perhaps the most convenient way to think about this would be to get away from the archaic mind-body distinction. We are our bodies, hot people have hot personalities, likewise for plain people, looks condition the way you grow up and the way you think about yourself. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and reflects a million other amorpheous attributes (like vibe and attitude) that run much deeper. I’ve heard this line of thought plenty of times before, and much of it rings true. But how can we say, in this age of crash diets, cosmetic surgery, and TV makeovers, that your appearance is at all a stable part of your persona. And even if it is, it can still hurt.

I know because I see it all around me. See it with friends who cannot get a second date no matter how well the first one went. See it with genuinely great guys who would never consider dating me because I am a head taller than them (to be fair, I am not completely guiltless in this regard). See it with people who will always be noticed and paid attention to at parties, and people who simply will not. Hopefully everyone will find their special someone, and I wouldn’t say that successful relationships are even remotely dependent on objective attractiveness. But some are. Bodies are our greatest tools, but they can also trap us, limit our possibilities for love and connection. The gym bunnies at Equinox are probably a little too conscious of this, but they are more honest than we are at our Shavuot Torah learning retreats (which, by the way, was super fun!). The liberal Jewish philosophy I’ve been most exposed to regarding this matter has been-if you ignore it, it will go away. To a certain extent, this is true. If you are given literally no room to obsess about your body out loud, then you will feel ashamed to make certain choices based on that, maybe even feel compelled to give someone a shot who you’d rather not. But in order for this to actually work, we’d have to stay away from movies and television as well, not to mention sweltering New York City streets. Until then, we will continue to occupy this weird space where bodies matter more than they should and we talk about it less than we should. We will make the decision of who we want to spend the rest of our lives with, in part, because of a few inches here or there, or some other genetic coincidence that could have gone a million different ways; and we will go on thinking that what really matters is kindness and sensitivity etc… What other option is there?