Melanie Klein
I felt like shit about my body most of my life.
From age 10 through my late 20s, I resented and battled my body. My body didn’t compare to most of the teeny-tiny women in my family. It didn’t measure up to the mainstream culture’s utterly ridiculous and one-dimensional beauty standards. My body represented weakness, laziness, a lack of self-control, and getting the short end of the stick in the genetics department. Early on, I learned that beauty was a beast, one I had to conquer in order to feel good about myself. And I had to conquer it no matter the costs because, hey, baby, you’re worth it.
Roots of Shame
It didn’t help that I inherited my stature from the paternal side of my family. I sprung up early and was always the second-tallest girl in class when our teachers would line us up according to height (and I was always relieved that the other girl remained on average an inch taller than me all through elementary school). Not only was standing a head above the rest of my classmates awkward, it was like an unwanted spotlight cast upon me at a time when most kids just want to blend in.
My mother and the women on her side of the family were all diminutive with small feet, tiny hands, birdlike shoulders, and itty-bitty waists. They were “delicate flowers” who liked to remind people that they were “petite.” I don’t think any of them ever weighed more than 110 pounds (and they happily advertised those numbers with fervent regularity), and they all stood under five-foot-two. From the time I’d entered fourth grade, I was referred to as “big-boned,” “solid,” “big like the other side of her family,” and in need of “losing a few pounds.” Already measuring five-foot-three and weighing 130 pounds, I was an “Amazon,” that poor freak of nature who had inherited the wrong set of genes.
I knew none of these comments were compliments. In fact, most little girls want to secretly flip someone the bird when an annoying aunt or family friend hovers and croons, “My, she’s gotten to be such a big girl!” “Big” and “girl” don’t go together well in our culture. But I didn’t have the confidence or wherewithal to say, “Whoa, whoa, back the hell up. Don’t you all know you’re talking about my body right in front of me? Don’t you know your tones are either derisive or filled with worry about my size? Don’t you know this kind of body talk objectifies me and makes me feel like shit?”
Nope, I was too deeply mired in my own shame and guilt about my body. Why oh why wasn’t I born short with a delicate bone structure and “naturally” thin? I wanted to be short. I wanted to be skinny. I wanted to disappear.
The Body Project
Like too many girls and women, the body was a source of anxiety and shame for the women in my family. The success (“I lost 10 pounds!”) and failure (“I gained 10 pounds!”) of their “body projects” were a testament of their willpower, a measure of their self-worth, and a barometer of their self-esteem. Like the Plastics in 2004’s Mean Girls or Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte from the Sex and the City series (Samantha had no problems with her body and she made that clear), the girls and women around me would openly, routinely scrutinize their bodies (and the bodies of others in hushed whispers) as a bonding mechanism and rite of superficial sisterhood.
Body snarking and “fat talk” were a kind of rapport talk, uniting them in the eternal “battle of the bulge.” And this kind of rapport talk is not unique to my family. It’s a common theme among many girls and women in contemporary culture. While weight is not the only aspect of our body projects (we can lament the size and shape of our breasts, the pimples and wrinkles on our face, and the color and volume of our hair, etc.), it certainly is a focal point.
I remember going to a classmate’s birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese pizza and family entertainment center in the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. Extra-large silver trays were strewn about, the aftermath of a raucous pizza party for an 11-year-old. Jennifer and I had frosting smeared across our Rainbow Brite T-shirts, and our small, rounded, prepubescent bellies pushed against the waistbands of our wannabe designer jeans, full of pizza and cake. My friend’s mom, a former beauty queen who loved diet pills and martinis, pulled each of us in to her bony chest. She squeezed us tight with her thin, bejeweled arms as kids zoomed past us hopped up on birthday cake. With genuine sadness in her voice, she said, “You two will always have to fight your weight.” Talk about heavy!
You Must Suffer to Be Beautiful
Being a girl seemed daunting. I don’t recall hearing the women I grew up with say anything positive about their bodies. There was no sense of wonder or gratitude when it came to their bodies. I never heard them appreciate their health, able-bodiedness, or physical capabilities. What I did hear was a lot of dissatisfaction in the form of griping and nagging.
They openly complained about their flaws and mocked the aesthetic shortcomings of others. From “thunder thighs” to coveted “thigh gaps” to “washboard stomachs” and “wasp waists,” every part of the body could be sized up and prove to be a potential hurdle in the pursuit of beauty. And beauty was no easy feat. You had to work for it.
I remember wincing and whimpering one morning as my hair was pulled back too tightly, brushed perfectly smooth, pigtails fashioned and elasticized. “You have to suffer to be beautiful,” I was told in response to my protest. It was said tongue-in-cheek, but every joke contains a kernel of truth and I never forgot that statement.
You have to be disciplined. You must exert your willpower. Mind over matter (ignore your hunger! ignore your pain!). You will suffer. But if you succeed, your beauty (read: svelte figure) will not only be a testament to your social worth, but it will bear evidence to your discipline and willpower. Only those of superior mind and body, strength and will, desire and execution will emerge from battle as victors.
And in the numbers game, if you succumbed to a few hundred extra calories, couldn’t shake that lingering 10 pounds, or went up a dress size, you didn’t just deviate from the cultural beauty norm, you were weak, undisciplined, and bad. Talk about one hundred ways to kill your self-esteem. I felt defeated.
If You Can’t Join ’Em, F*** ’Em
Middle school is a cesspool of insecurity, fragile self-esteem, and crises in identity. At least, it was for me. It was as if somebody had cranked up the volume on my body insecurities and shame. What with developing breasts and hips and menses, there were loads of things that could go awry and countless reasons to feel horrible about myself.
I was shy and timid. I didn’t want to be seen, and my body language made that evident. I wore baggy tops and my shoulders were so hunched over that I practically turned into myself. Don’t get me wrong, I made some attempts to conform, but I wasn’t particularly successful. I sprayed Sun-In in my hair to get those sought-after sun-kissed highlights. I began to experiment with mascara, frosted eye shadow, and lip gloss. I started to shave my legs and used skin bleaching cream to lighten my freckles.
The beautiful-equals-thin club was exclusive. I never seemed to be able to get past the velvet rope. At times, I inched close, but I never got in with the beautiful people, the ones seemingly without a care in the world. And because I thought conforming to the beauty norm automatically spelled happiness, I wanted in. I was sick and tired of feeling bad about myself. My lack of willpower and faulty dedication to my body project led to my extra padding—and those extra pounds colored most of my days in less than sunny ways. If I could just lose 10 (or 20) pounds, I’d finally be happy.
Instead of finding the holy grail of weight loss, I found punk rock. It was 1985 and I was 13, full of resentment and repressed anger. My angst was so enormous and stifled that I was bursting at the seams. I immediately resonated with the message, sound, and style of the vagrant, cast-out youth who wanted to turn mainstream society on its head. Unable to join the shiny, happy people I envied, I joined the scuffed-up, angry throng at punk shows and parties across southern California. From Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach and the Country Club in Reseda to backyard parties and abandoned buildings, I’d found a crew of rabble rousers where I thought I belonged. When I couldn’t join the ranks of the trendy popular at school, I just gave ’em the middle finger.
Emancipate Yourself from Mental Slavery
Shaving and dying my hair, decades before Gwen Stefani’s son, Kingston, was sporting a blue faux-hawk at age 4 without turning too many heads, was liberating and anti-mainstream. But within a couple years, the thrill and satisfaction of aligning with this rowdy counterculture grew stale. It started to feel anything but transgressive.
Ten years ago, as I was finishing my first year as a college professor, a student handed me a film. “Professor Klein, for some reason this movie reminds me of you.” I looked down at the copy of SLC Punk he’d placed in my hand. I came home and settled in for an incredibly funny and introspective ninety minutes. Set in Salt Lake City in 1986, Stevo and Heroin Bob are one of a few die-hard punks in highly conservative Mormon country. What struck me was that the fictional characters featured in the film were real-life characters that I had met in my own life, albeit a couple thousand miles away. They wore the clothes, or the uniform, my friends and I wore during that same time period. From the music, the behaviors, and the hairstyles down to the black socks, my life and my friends during that period were identical. Not only were we identical to these characters, or tropes, but we were identical to one another. And this was exactly why the punk scene and the “alternative movement” at that time seemed so limiting.
We were drones and slaves to conformity within our own, alternative counterculture. We may have given the finger to the trendies and the jocks that we despised for complying with mainstream expectations, but we set limits on ourselves and the members of our community. We wouldn’t dare wear something that might be considered uncool by our punk comrades. Two years in, I stepped back and saw that we all looked, sounded, and acted the same. We were just trapped inside another cultural box.
This was the pre–Riot Grrrl era, before an incensed group of sassy young women grabbed their own mics and instruments and challenged the ways the punk community reproduced mainstream sexism and misogyny. I didn’t have the language to speak about those issues in 1988, but I did notice that not only were we replicas of one another, the mainstream beauty standards I had so enthusiastically rebuked were present in a group of people I thought had rejected mainstream propaganda. The punk girls who were the most popular and sought after were also the thin, petite girls described as “cute” and “pretty.” Aside from their shaved heads or Mohawks, they looked awfully similar to the cheerleaders prancing on the football field and models I saw in ads.
At the end of SLC Punk, Stevo’s love interest, a rich girl named Brandy, questions him about his blue Mohawk. She asks him if he’s trying to make a political statement because, to her, it’s much more of a fashion choice devoid of any deeper anarchistic philosophy. She tells him that liberation and freedom aren’t authentic when they are dictated by the external world. The film’s ending just confirmed what I had felt decades earlier. The punk scene wasn’t the answer to the liberation I was seeking.
The F-Word
“It’s not you. You’re not an isolated case.
It’s systematic and it’s called patriarchy.”—Pat Allen
In 1994, I landed in “Sociology of Women,” a class offered as an elective at the local community college I had enrolled in after an extended stint living in Hawaii. When I didn’t find the freedom I had longed for in the form of running away by high-tailing it out of Los Angeles with $50 to my name, I flew home on the morning of the Northridge earthquake and went back to school.
Lucky for me, I had enrolled in Pat Allen’s class. Pat was a radical 60-something woman who commanded the classroom with a “War is not good for children and other living creatures” medallion swinging from her neck. She lectured with more gusto, authority, and confidence than any woman I had ever encountered. I was utterly smitten and completely enthralled, all the while having my mind blown during each and every class. The world was transformed. My paradigm shifted from one that viewed my body image issues as seemingly personal troubles to understanding them as public issues that were (and are) systemic in nature. In short, my soon-to-be mentor, in all her fierce fabulousness, had ignited my “sociological imagination.” And it was distinctly feminist.
My sociological and feminist education included a healthy dose of media literacy, a field of study that was just beginning to blossom at the time. I was offered the ideological tools and skill set to deconstruct mediated images and understand the role of the advertising industry in the creation and manufacture of these endless streams of messages that flood the cultural landscape. This allowed me to examine my tortured relationship with my body in a systematic and structured way, lifting the clouds of shame and guilt that followed my every move.
Maybe there wasn’t something wrong with my body. Maybe there was something wrong with the messages the mainstream media culture proliferated, contorted and unrealistic messages that were raking in profits from my insecurity and from the body image issues of girls and women around me. (The mainstream media’s targeting of male body image issues didn’t begin in earnest until several years later.) The realization that I wasn’t the problem was a relief and ultimately liberating. It also left me utterly pissed off.
Welcome to Your Body
Feminism freed my mind. Yoga freed my body. It’s one thing to intellectualize self-love and another to embody it. Two years after I stumbled upon feminism’s door, I discovered yoga. After years of compulsive and punishing exercise, severe calorie restriction, bouts of binging and purging, and Slim-Fast shakes for breakfast, I stumbled into a challenging but sweet yoga class led by Bryan Kest in an old dance loft in downtown Santa Monica.
The practice and Bryan’s rhetoric rocked my mind, body, and spirit. I was shaken to the core. Everything I knew about my body, everything I felt toward my body, and my negative self-talk were about to undergo a seismic shift. For the first time since early childhood, I was about to learn how to be comfortable and radiant in my own skin. For the first time in my life, I was about to learn how to love my body.
I settled in on my mat in a space that would become the rare and sacred space devoid of competition. A space uncluttered by external chatter, removed from the world of advertising, and one that would quiet and soothe my own self-critic. Bryan began that first class by inviting me back into my body, saying, “Welcome to your bodies. Welcome to yoga.”
Freedom
I know the yoga industry can be pretty whack a lot of the time, replicating images of beauty replete with all the “-isms” mainstream corporations have been churning out and profiting from for eons. But if you can look past the popularity contests in the yoga scene and the yoga industrial complex that has been manufactured in the last decade and recognize the yoga practice for what it is, you’ll see something truly transgressive, if not downright subversive.
I used to think I was giving society a big ol’ black-nailpolished middle finger as I would strut down the streets in my Docs and torn fishnets. I thought I was defiant, straight-up revolutionary. Settling onto my mat has been a far more liberating and rebellious act than anything I did or found in that community at the time.
In a world that is increasingly mediated, with ads telling us what we’re lacking and how to fill that void and gain self-esteem by using our credit cards, ads that are practically shoved down our throats on every available surface where our eyeballs land, what is more subversive than tuning it all out? My sociological and feminist background had revealed these disturbing trends in the advertising industry and the media at large, but yoga provided the practice as a tool to move inward and craft an inner moral compass on my own terms.
My time on my mat allowed me to tune out external noises, the cacophony of voices competing for my attention and consumer dollars all the while reinforcing an already damaged sense of self. And, simultaneously, my practice soothed the inner voice, ever critical of every detail of my physical self. Uniting breath and movement with intention and focus, I learned how to listen to my body, reconnected with its rhythms and moods, and got to know myself in a way I had not experienced since early childhood.
And with time and consistent practice, my beauty paradigm expanded and shifted. I developed my capacity for patience, empathy, and forgiveness on the mat. These attributes stand in stark contrast to the “no pain, no gain” mentality and value of competition in our culture. As a result of cultivating these qualities and the ability to remain present and be (instead of do through force), my relationship to my body was healed and transformed. My body was no longer an obstacle to be conquered or make over on the road to happiness and love. No, I embodied love and I felt joy with each practice (and that has never waned in these seventeen years). And there were no numbers on the scale, no amount of retail therapy or consumer consumption, that could or can match that.
My feminist consciousness and my yoga practice provided me the ability to truly shirk repressive and limiting standards of beauty with a big “f*** yer beauty standards.”
And mean it.
A portion of this essay was inspired by a longer chapter originally published in Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey, eds., 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, and Practice (Chicago: Kleio Books, 2012).
Melanie Klein is a writer, speaker, and professor of sociology and women’s studies. She attributes feminism and yoga as the two primary influences in her work. She is committed to communal collaboration, raising consciousness, media literacy, facilitating the healing of distorted body images, and promoting healthy body relationships. Her chapter on yoga, body image, and feminism appears in the anthology, 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, and Practice, and she is featured in Conversations with Modern Yogis. melaniecklein.com. Author photo by Sarit Z. Rogers.