Allow me to share an anecdote from my childhood.
Imagine you’re me. Freshly fourteen, braces, and a haircut to rival Edna Mode. You’ve no shortage of things to be self conscious about, and you’re about to earn another.
You’re in the bathroom after field hockey practice, and two of your teammates walk in to fix their hair in the mirror. They’re talking about the new uniforms.
“They look cute on you because you’re so dainty! But they look terrible with my linebacker shoulders!”
She’s expressing an insecurity she has about her own body. And the conversation between them goes the way most of those conversations go.
“Your shoulders are not that broad, you don’t have anything to be worried about, you’re beautiful!” And so on and so forth.
It’s an insignificant moment. One that happens everyday between young girls. The only thing that’s particularly special about this one moment is the impact it had on my life. Because it is the only time I can remember instantly forming an insecurity.
Until that moment, I had never considered the width of my shoulders. It just wasn’t something anyone had ever mentioned to me so I had never thought about it as something positive or negative. But hey, apparently having broad shoulders is bad. And would you look at that? My shoulders are broad.
I’m not sharing this moment because I want pity, or because I want to be told broad shoulders are pretty. I’m sharing it to remind you of a very important fact, insecurities are learned behavior.
You’re not born hating your nose, or your stretch marks, or your ass, or your goddamn shoulders. Somewhere along the line you were taught that there was a good and a bad way to take up space in the world.
We all know this, objectively. But it’s easy to forget, because these cruel lessons are ones we learn very young, and mostly through subtext. It’s not like I have a core memory for every insecurity. They can feel like innate things, like your nose or your thighs are just wrong, because you can’t remember ever not hating them.
There’s been a movement to try to counteract this in recent years. The Body Positivity movement. It’s attempt is to expand the definition of beauty to include groups that have been stigmatized for a long time. These women are beautiful! I love a movement reminding them of their beauty, I would never begrudge someone the right to feel pretty, hell knows we all want to.
But I do want to pose a question: Why should we have to feel pretty to feel worthy? It is so exhausting trying to frame every part of yourself as pretty. And honestly we shouldn’t have to. So often as women we’re taught that our worth is equated to our looks, and I fear that the body positivity movement often accidentally falls into this thought process as well. You do not have to be pretty in order to take up space in the world as a woman.
Your body does what it has to in order to keep you alive. That is enough; that is its job. This is the focus of the body neutrality movement, taking a step back from passing criticism on our bodies all together.
I don’t want to have to reframe my stretch marks as tiger stripes. Honestly I’m tired of fucking talking about them. I just want to accept the way I look as a small part of who I am, and focus on the more important stuff.
I want to go back to that moment in the bathroom before those girls ever started talking about their shoulders. It wasn’t a thought in my head, there wasn’t a right or wrong way to have shoulders. Shoulders connected my arms to my body, that was their job, and that was all they were. I want to be that girl again.