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body as tool, not object

today my mother threw herself a 53rd birthday party at her suburban town's municipal olympic-sized pool. a handful of her church friends attended and they seemed to have a genuinely good time sipping cool drinks around a shaded picnic table. the weather was perfect--warm and dry and sunny. there was lots of spf 40 and wide-brimmed hats and carrot cake with butter cream frosting.

the demographic at the pool (and of the town, for that matter) was primarily young yuppie suv-driving nuclear families. some of these husbands and wives (with children big enough to be jumping off of the diving boards) are likely my age, and that always makes me feel a profound sense of late-bloomer-itis, because i have no domestic or reproductive ambitions and no means of financial stability nor solvency, and i still think most of the time that i would very much like to run away to a foreign country. looking at the throngs of children wearing fluorescent bathing suits and water wings, i didn't feel some primal yearning in my uterus to spawn one; instead i feel a sense of pronounced nostalgia for the days when i was that little. [complete aside: one of the things that i think is funny about the pool is the sign on the women's changing room that says: "no boys over the age of 3 permitted inside."]

there is very little in life i enjoy more than swimming, so i was in ecstasy being there. i never tire of the cycle of: swim, get too cold, exit water, bask in sun, get hot, enter water, swim.... aside from the stray child who crosses my lap-swimming path, very little gets to me when i am immersed in water.

which brings me to the gripe core of this entry: i am so tired of how every time i am around women in bathing suits all anyone can do is talk about their body insecurities. if it isn't how they deplore the varicose veins, 'cellulite', or unwanted body hair, it's about acne on various non-facial regions. it can even degenerate into highly technical meditations on the strange shape of a birthmark on an inner ankle or the offensive angle of a toe bone.

i feel like this vocal self-scrutiny is meant as some kind of fishing maneuver--like they say these things to elicit a compliment. i.e.: "i hate how the skin puckers over my knee cap. it looks so gross" is meant to trigger me to say "don't be silly. your knees are beautiful. sexy really. you look great." i must note that i particularly hate this body-hate game when it veers (inevitably) into the whole "no your body is so much better than mine...i wish i had your ass...etc..." territory.

today i did not want to play this game. instead i pointed out to those who tried to engage me in this routine that instead of standing there with a magnifying glass to our every inch of flesh, we should take notice of how beautiful it is to be standing there at all in the sun with the warm breeze on our skin and how joyous it is to have these arms and legs and hands and feet with which we can swim through the clean cold water. i tried to shift things back to *being* in your body instead of objectifying it. there is such sensual delight in being, after all, especially in summer. i pointed out to my friend, who complained of veins too visible through her lucid skin, that veins are an integral part of our being alive--that if she didn't have them to pump blood through her body she would be a corpse. "do you think that would be sexy?" i asked her.

if you try not to play this game, try to sit it out and love your own body for what it can do rather than what it looks like, it will not be easy. insecurity wants company. an example of this is how my friend sabotaged my confidence after my speech, while we sat bikini-clad on the pool's rim, our legs dangling in the water.

i was talking about the future, about my goals and passions, and she couldn't seem to keep eye-contact going with me. her gaze kept settling somewhere below my breasts. i tried to ignore it but it eventually got to me. moving my feet in precise spirals underwater to try and gather my strength, i said, "what are you staring at? are you looking at the hairs on my belly?"

she replied: "no actually that--" and gestured to my bikini line, which was sporting some visible stubble. "oh" i looked down "yeah, i didn't really feel like shaving again. stupid ingrown hairs and shit. whatever" i mumbled, suddenly feeling like this patch of skin that i had once deemed barely noticeable and unimportant was in fact so noticeable and offensively hairy that it prevented her from hearing the words i was speaking.

i lost my train of thought and the conversation veered into the realm of discussions about how to shave the bikini line without incurring razor bumps and ingrown hairs. here i had been talking to her about some matter of actual substance, something to do with what is inside my mind and heart, and she had to undermine me.

for a long time i kept gazing downward, assessing how bad the 5 o'clock shadow really was, feeling angry at my body for being so pale with such dark hair, regretting not having purchased 'boy short' bottoms. but her superficial tunnel-vision words were not waterproof, and once i dove back into the pool and felt every nerve in my body register the coolness, the softness of the water, i forgot all about how i might look on dry land.

before = after