Grace-Notes #21 - for Sunday 6/4/06

Natalie Costanza-Chavez

Grace-Notes, The Coloradoan

grace-notes@comcast.net

Women’s Bodies and the Fray   

     My son brought a note home from school last year. A girl had handed it to him. “Answer it and give it back,” she said. The note read, “Which of these girls is skinniest?” It then listed five classmates’ names.

     In each girl’s life there is a time before such body awareness. There is a time when going to the beach or the pool means sprinting, and jumping, and hot concrete, and the slight sand-papery scrape of grit in your mouth as retrieve your sandwich from the waxed paper wrapping.

     There is a time when you choose a bathing suit because you like the colors – and for no other reason.

     There is a time before self-consciousness, before tugging at straps and leg-hems to check your coverage. There is  a time before slipping into shorts to walk to the water’s edge, before learning to keep your eyes straight ahead as if it that could help you go unnoticed, unassessed, unevaluated.

     There is a time when we inhabit our bodies completely unaware that they will ever be judged, completely unaware that we will eventually grow to become, at times, an object scrutinized – by men, by women, by ourselves.

      My son was nine when he got the note – in third grade. The little girl who handed it to him? Also nine. 

     He had no intention of answering it. He found the idea that he would judge his friends in such a way baffling. The point was not “Are you kind”, “Are you fun?”, “Are you gentle”, but “Are you thin?” 

     We spoke about how people we love are fat and thin and bent and short and long and round and freckled and tall and large breasted and small chested and bald and white as snow and brown as toast. We spoke about how bodies should be respected at all times, in all situations. They are not to ridicule or judge. They are not to stare at or whistle at or to touch uninvited. Ever.

     This was all self-evident to him, basic childhood rules. We all used to know them.

     Today at the pool, I saw girls like reeds, girls like balls, girls like slips of papers blowing in huddles and threes by the shallow end. They screeched and ran, wet feet slapping on the deck, until the lifeguard told them to walk and they did: toe, heel, toe, heel, exaggerated hips-jut, after exaggerated hip-jut as they slowed themselves down without losing any speed at all. The presentation their bodies made to the world had not yet occurred to them. They were not yet aware of what it feels like to be seen – the good of that. And the bad.

     Over spring break, we were at another pool – the famous Hot Springs in Glenwood. I watched four women move from one pool to another. 

     They seemed to rise up into their bodies as they rose from the water. They did not shrink at the knees. They did not buckle in the middle, trying to lean closer to the wet concrete, as though they wished they could be smaller, shorter, thinner, or disappear entirely into the steam. They were in no hurry like the rest of us, to duck down, scrunch up, unfold safely underwater. They were in no hurry to vanish.

     Their shoulders, wet and straight, swung in tandem with their hips as they walked. They didn’t hurry, hide, hunch. They strode.

     Each was in her eighties. 

     And each had regained the confidence of body that came with birth, that carries us into elementary school, and that is all too often lost or trounced somewhere on our way to Jr. High.

     Between ten years old and high school children become aware of the bodies of men and women. And, into that awareness, our culture brandishes itself like a sword: the beer twins, breasts used to advertise almost anything, Jell-0-wrestling, jokes, objectification and titillation taken to the level of crude and demeaning. And it only seems to grow more crude and demeaning each year. 

     Children busting toward adolescence are trying to step-stone their way into this fray. It’s treacherous.

     How come when it comes to women’s bodies “our culture” has such a hard time remembering the basic rules? We all used to know them: be kind, don’t judge, be respectful. It’s not that hard.