Honoring the Body

/ cjwhitt

This past weekend I led a women’s retreat for a Sonoma County congregation. I brushed off a topic I’d used as a retreat theme in 2008: “Honoring the Body.” Much of my inspiration came from Stephanie Paulsell’s book by the same name, a book drawing on Christian resources to develop a faith-based practice of honoring the body: cherishing our bodies as the amazing gifts they are, and countering the corrosive cultural messages that make us forget we are created in God’s image.

Since I visited this topic 15 years ago, some things have changed for the better. In 2008, there was no body positivity movement to speak of. Now, in stores from Target to Victoria’s Secret, you can find “plus sized” mannequins as well as the usual size 2 mannequins. Fashion magazines and retail catalogs include models that look more like real women, both in dress size and age. We’ve figured out that BMI – body mass index – is medically meaningless. The recent “Barbie” movie populated Barbie’s world with women of all shapes and colors, and the doll itself has evolved. In 2016, Mattel released a line of dolls called the Barbie Fashionistas that came with various skin tones, eye colors, hair textures, and body types (“original, curvy, petite and tall”), as well as a Barbie in a wheelchair.

But some things have stayed the same or grown worse, and by “worse,” I mean people, and women in particular, are not cherishing their bodies but rather, spending time and money, and even risking their health to alter their bodies to meet a supposed cultural standard. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of cosmetic surgical procedures undergone went up 19%. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of annual Botox injections increased by nearly 459%. Eating disorders are on the rise. While the Center for Disease Control recommends that kids ages 6 through 17 be physically active for at least an hour a day, only about a quarter of U.S. kids achieve that. What are they doing instead? They’re on screens. Studies show that kids ages 8-18 now spend, on average, a whopping 7.5 hours in front of a screen for entertainment each day.

And what they see on their screens is terrifyingly toxic beauty advice, advice that normalizes unrealistic and narrowly defined beauty standards, promotes potentially harmful beauty practices, and suggests that the key to building self-esteem is physical “perfection.”

15 years ago, I stumbled onto a short video called “Evolution” made by Dove – yes, the soap company – as part of the Dove Self-Esteem Project, and I showed it at the 2008 retreat. It shows how a model’s appearance changes dramatically with makeup and hair styling, but then photos are edited to achieve so-called “perfection.” In other words, what we see in ads isn’t even real. You can see “Evolution” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCNEIwxkPlc.

Dove has continued to make short videos, and I showed a handful of them at the retreat this past weekend. Some are heartbreaking, while others are hopeful. Some deal with toxic beauty advice. I recommend the following, but there are many more wonderful videos:

I encourage you to watch these and other Dove videos, and to let your friends know about them, and if you have sisters, wives, partners, daughters, or granddaughters, let them know about them, too. As a woman at the retreat put it, in her mother’s Cherokee tradition all the women are “aunties” to all the kids, and to each other. Let’s be aunties. Because when 53% of 13-year-old girls report that they are unhappy with their bodies, and by the time they’re 17, it goes up to 78%, something is broken. We are not honoring our bodies. We are not cherishing the glory of God’s diversity. We are not looking in the mirror and seeing a beloved child of God.

Resources:

https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2022/cosmetic-procedure-trends-2022.pdf
https://www.elitetampa.com/blog/botox-statistics-you-need-to-know/
https://nutrition.org/eating-disorders-are-on-the-rise/
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/physicalactivity/guidelines.htm#:~:text=Children%20and%20adolescents%20ages%206%20through%2017%20years%20should%20do,to%2Dvigorous%20physical%20activity%20daily.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/physicalactivity/facts.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/getmoving.html.
https://now.org/now-foundation/love-your-body/love-your-body-whats-it-all-about/get-the-facts/#:~:text=One%20study%20reports%20that%20at,the%20time%20girls%20reach%20seventeen.

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