Episode 72 - Body Image

ASL - https://youtu.be/kYKsLSuURug [transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make the transcript better]

well in case you haven't heard we've tried something new that we're really excited about and that is online video courses and honestly that's a sentence i've never expected to say in my life i mean uh i've gone through some online video curriculum before and i usually find them incredibly cheesy um and like i could have learned all of that much faster in a book honestly so when we started trying to work on this kind of a project we wanted to make sure that if we were going to make courses that they were just as information dense as the liturgist podcast itself but that we utilize the format to go deeper into a topic than we can in an audio only format so that's what we've done that's our goal when we create online video courses is to have the kind of information density that you have in the literature's podcast along with that same relatability and honestly i'm genuinely proud of these courses in fact i think they might be some of the best work that we've ever done so we've got two right now one on meditation and the other on navigating spiritual formation and deconstruction using the enneagram and the reviews we've got back from people who have taken these courses have been stellar so our you know kind of punk rock anti-commercial intent in the production seems to have come across well the the genuineness works and so if you'd like to learn more about how to deepen your meditation practice or learn more about the enneagram including the instinctual centers and how that affects your your spiritual path in life including if you wouldn't describe yourself as a spiritual person head to shop.thelitus.com to learn more body shame i got lots of body image problems tell us about them well that would cause me to have to be vulnerable and i don't want to do that hillary okay this is a safe space william it is it is okay well so this season i'm being very intentional to talk about um how a lot of these topics intersect with blackness and my black identity so to be male and black i often feel that people view me through a lens of pet or threat and by pet i mean like fetishization that is often a perspective that i feel projected on me by my interactions particularly with white men but with everyone to some level and i think it just comes from a lack of knowing the complexities and the multiple different types of personalities that exist inside of black people so for me as a man i often feel like people come to me with a preconceived notion of what my body is and how it's supposed to work and what it can do for you that often gets projected i think as men that can just be projected in general of like you know the size question like what is your size and you're talking about the d yes the d um mine's irish size what does that mean so this is a stereotype somebody's like you heard about those irish guys right um no that doesn't happen okay well it's funny because right even in the 2016 election the size of penis came up that was something in the debates remember where donald trump made that that statement of you know basically suggesting that he had a larger-than-life penis and because his whole body is a penis no people i feel better than insulting the penis no he's like a walking phallus yeah but the notion that uh people carry preconceived notions of the body and of other people's bodies and what those bodies are meant to convey and do for them or you know like or black men are a stud or you know once you go black you never go back right and there's all these stereotypes about blackmail image and blackmail bodies that i think we kind of play into for fun like even black people can play into them for fun because it's one of the few areas where we get to even remotely feel superior um or normal but i think the older i get the more i find how unhelpful those things are and how you instantly feel like you're not living up to a certain standard or you're afraid of what other people think about you which is such a terrible way to live so for me body image often comes up to what do you think about me and how can i either ignore that play into that or dismiss it especially when dealing in romantic or sexual relationships we're talking about body image welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] [Applause] and i don't want this to sound like i have a small penis i'm gonna circle back around everybody knows such a strange thing yeah to be associated with masculine concern is especially the length of one's penis which has a weak if any correlation to uh sexual pleasure or contentment and yet it's like oh oh hillary's no no no i was just thinking because in the construction of masculinity the pleasure of another person isn't of interest the conquest of another person is of interest damn those are fighting words yeah of course and as an instrument of plunder then length is important as a link but i'm saying as a as an as an instrument of mutual pleasure who cares how long your penis is what is strange an arbitrary standard but you're right as filtered through that perspective of course when i'm listening to you talk william about your experience of becoming this trope in a way i think about what body image does to us that although it is so lovely to think well of our bodies and our appearance whenever we're just thinking about our appearance we're often thinking about how it's viewed and evaluated through the eyes of other people it's really hard to have a body image alone without embodiment and not participate in self-objectification where even though we're evaluating our appearance positively based on what where do we learn what is valuable or not valuable desirable not desirable and all of that comes through the social construction of gender scripts and the desirability of a certain kind of body type but then we evaluate our own bodies based on these externally imposed criteria and constructs that actually take us out of the lived experience of being us yeah so as you're talking i can hear you say it reduces me it reduces me to how you see my body and that that creates distress on the inside of you yeah and it's it's everywhere it's in our media it's in pornography it's it's in our social relationships and and that those things being fed into our social relationships it stresses me out because it's i don't know what you're thinking of when it comes to me and then when it does come out it's often very debilitating to go oh i i don't think i'm what you need i don't think i measure up to your expectation of being with me or yeah so the stories that we're told and that we continue to tell ourselves about our bodies impact the way that we relate to others and how we feel about ourselves the way that we construct how valuable we perceive ourselves or others to be and whether we feel like we can have access to other people in closeness or whether we cut that off from ourselves because we feel like our evaluation of our body tells us that we're not going to be desirable to somebody else it's interesting how all of this stuff exists in our thought life but has real life implications for our our well-being for our relationships for our ability to exist with fullness and vitality that's good i just want to be accepted for me all of me and my imperfections and my perfections can you say all of that again without it being a joke that wasn't a joke they just started laughing i was laughing because it sounds like song lyrics that was all i i wasn't joking i really want to be accepted for all of me whatever that is and i think if there's a stress for me in terms of long-term relationships it's it's that feeling of like will will i be enough especially as it relates to how our culture dictates what is enough what do you think the implications in our lives would be if we could accept how we looked and if other people could accept how we looked without changing anything about it but if there was all of a sudden we were dropped into a scenario where there was total acceptance of our appearance no matter what i know of no such construct seriously i i i'm like what would that world look like i don't know your reaction is valuable data right it tells us that we're really far from that but i often say to people how can we even start to create something when we can't even begin to imagine hypothetically what what would that require from us and how would we live our lives and there's something in therapy we often call the miracle question it comes from a brief solution-focused kind of therapy but the idea is that if the things were different then we would behave differently and who says that we can't start behaving that way now so a classic example would be if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn't have any more body image issues how would that change how you dress eat relate act move shop think and maybe a person would say something like well i would wear clothes that actually felt fun to wear not the things that hid my body or i would buy products that enhanced my quality of life and not just things that were used to reduce my body down or to cover things up and maybe i would move in ways that felt free not just to restrict how much skin moved around when i walked so what stops us from doing those things now and you you provide yourself with the answer to the question to do the things that you need to do and because cognition emotion and behavior are often interrelated with each other maybe the thoughts and the feelings will follow if you can do the thing that's associated for you with more freedom and safety in your body [Music] it's an interesting delineation between beauty and pragmatism and body image because when you think about like why why is there a preference for body types like why is that even a thing and those things obviously change as the social tropes change but in human desire we obviously do humans prefer people to look a certain way have a certain type of body what do you mean by that humans prefer like preferences exist or those preferences are innate they exist i don't know how innate they are other than it's pretty universal that there is the beautiful woman in the tribe is has more men trying to be her whatever that whatever beauty is considered to be more men try to impregnate her you know it's like uh is it like some like symmetrical eyes like what is i mean the the three most recognized driven preferences for human attraction are generally agreed on to be one facial and body symmetry which is a sign of both genetics and nutrition two the ratio of the waste to the hips and women again it's not the absolute size of either of those things so if the hip if the waist gets broader than the hips get broader as well to maintain the ratio that's consistent about across both cultures and history and the shoulder to hips ratio in men those are the three most agreed upon that appear to have much less cultural influence most other things we consider attractive or unattractive appear to be very much driven by culture and socialization uh but those three seem consistent across cultures but still that that's within a that's within a pretty accepted norm i would imagine because open pustules is not on that list what fair point yes or four legs or or whatever all sorts of things that end up people end up having beard on women what like that's not part of that list but most cultures probably want their women beardless but what i'm saying is like it the preference exists it sucks i think it kind of sucks that it exists even when you look at couples and you occasionally see a couple where like one of them's way better looking and you're like what how did you get her or whatever but that means everybody kind of at some point of their development figures out like i am about this good looking in our society and this is about the range of person that i could hope to be with that makes me sad i have a theory about that and hillary's not going to like it but um my theory preemptively yeah my theory is when you see a really good pers looking person with a not so good looking person usually two things have happened usually it is they marry that person as a high school sweetheart or they like childhood crush or they're gay and that's their beard [Laughter] i'm sorry that those two things are generally true i'm not gonna say it's always true but they are i have generally in my life in my experience found those things to be true and obviously in heterosexual relationships so just a reminder that anecdotal evidence go ahead do you want to finish it's not the plural of data thank you oh i know i know they're high-fiving now and you go do you go do a representative sample study and you come back with your results yeah and i'll entertain a conversation i just got served right there one notion in there that is true is people tend to approach people and engage in relationships with people who they estimate is about as attractive as they are yep so that there is a normative function there i knew i was smart the problem though is when we associate attractiveness with moral value or social worth right so what even is attractiveness except that we are more drawn towards someone and how how that's constructed socially for whatever reason has given us a sense of being more valuable or having more worth so i don't think it's a problem but part of that like our economic system makes them actually more valuable you're more if you're good-looking you're going to get paid more taller people are paid more yeah objectively yeah yeah no i'm not saying that it's not an existing reality but from a critical perspective i'm saying that it's problematic and it's reductive yeah so it does happen which reinforces why we continually seek to attain a sense of attractiveness so that we feel like we belong and we have social value because that's part of our human need to want to be a part of something and know that we're going to have a place in the tribe so what about plastic surgery is it wrong is it right is it gray is it like there are people who feel like parts of their body don't match or they want to change that in their face or their bodies or their size sizes of whatever is that a sign of an health is that a and then doubling you know maybe let's throw on just for fun like gender reassignment surgeries too like because that's about body image too so we've supported our film like this organization called smile train it does surgery for cleft palates for kids with cleft palates and gives them a smile that is more normal and before lucy i never even thought twice about like why why do they have a smile all right maybe there are other health risks and stuff um but at first i just took it at face value oh gosh yeah let's give these kids smiles and didn't realize the implications of the you have to have this certain kind of smile for society society for in society you do uh to be valued that sucks so i don't think that i mean assigning a term like right or wrong i that doesn't apply to me i would hope that somebody that has something they have a big nose whatever in their mind they have something that they want changed i would assume that they have something internally that would be good to look at and deal with and come to terms with themselves but i'm not going to say them getting a surgery is a bad idea because you could even if you have a great relationship with your big old nose it might actually be better for you in society for you to get your plastic surgery if you're an actress or whatever i'm not gonna like judge an actress that's gonna get more work for getting a nose job let's clarify that when you're saying plastic surgery you're saying aesthetically driven plastic surgery not the burn victim who's getting skin grafting um no i i'm not talking about uh a victim of trauma um as much as i am talking about exactly what you said uh or what michael said aesthetic um as well as even referencing the trans argument a little bit too like what is you know what then what is gender reassignment surgery if not an aesthetic thing is not a biological necessity or is it i don't know so i'm asking that question also you mentioned noses let's throw it in for fun quincy jones just did an article uh with vulture i believe and he talked about that was crazy yeah and he talked about how you know michael jackson did not have that skin disease that he claimed he had which caused him to bleach his skin uh if the disease starts with aviv i'd never pronounce it right but um anyway um but you know michael did the nose thing and he did the the face thing and you know claimed he had a disease for that um or whatever i don't i just bring these things up because it seems in in the kardashian culture world that we have uh it seems very normal to to do that and i've talked to moms who say they feel their kids put so much pressure on them to get them surgeries for their body yeah because of social media and like it like that's why i used right and wrong on purpose because i'm going or what does it speak of if not right or wrong like what what is this and is is that ever appropriate and i know people who've had the breast augmentation surgeries and that changed their confidence and that made them feel more confident in the world or you know or any of that stuff you know i think so much about the clinical work that i do and how often when we don't know if we have worth and value then it's really easy for us to get sucked into a system that says if you do these things you're valuable and that it comes from a place of a lack of inherent self-worth that makes us want to go for the checklist to do the things to make us feel like we matter and so i think that the person who gets the breast augmentation and feels better about themselves is just as valuable as anyone who does or doesn't do that i don't think that our value or worth changes but the problem is that the confidence might come from the fact that there's a social reinforcement from that being a valuable thing and so she is being reinforced as being a more valuable member of society so is the confidence coming from a sense of i have innate worth or is it coming from a sense of well now i'm seen and my body is being valued and so often for women our worth and our value has been reduced to either our fertility or appearance and our use as a sex object so how do we not participate in our own oppression and our own objectification and also still feel confident about about ourselves and our bodies in a world that tells us that our bodies are the only thing that makes us valuable [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists it's really hard for me to cast any sort of judgment at all on people modifying their bodies surgically but i would say in the case of many cosmetic surgeries you are dealing with the sort of external pressure and an attempt to respond to and alleviate that pressure through modifying the body and that's definitely not true in gender reassignment surgery for trans people who are frankly undergoing something is medically difficult expensive complicated that's that's endemic of a true misalignment of internal identity and external reality and isn't necessarily imposed from the outside because the culture is generally transphobic and is uncomfortable with that modification so if you kind of imagine the post-surgery social reinforcement for breast augmentation it might be like a little bit of slut-shaming but a lot of people going wow you look great whereas for gender reassignment surgery uh you have your family refusing to use pronouns you have you have people who are confused about what gender you are if for now your primary and secondary sex characteristics don't match well so there is this this component of like when we're changing ourselves what's the motivation and i actually think this goes far beyond cosmetic surgery and into most of the things we do like when we i think there's there's a healthy place and an unhealthy place for example to approach something as simple as weight loss and if you are your primary motivation for weight loss is the acceptance of other people and fading into a social mode hey it makes your weight loss attempts not terribly sustainable b it's much healthier to want to lose weight for heart health and for longevity and quality of life than for external appearance and that's that's a a rubric i've tried to apply over and over in my life my whole life i've struggled with intense body shame i was a chubby kid now i'm a a thinning hair middle-aged man and each come with their own their own pressures and when i'm looking at things i want to do for myself or do to myself i'm always trying to look at where's this intrinsic motivation is this something i feel the culture pushing in on me or is this something i'm trying to do for personal empowerment and betterment isn't it interesting we don't even have a word for judging someone based on their looks like we don't have a racism or sexism word like lookism there's nothing well size ism yeah for specifically obesity though right but just somebody that doesn't look very good up to our culture's standard of beauty is is constantly judged and doesn't have a chance in our society to thrive what's that quote infinite jest guy david foster wallace david foster wallace who says how can you tell the fish that they're in water right something to that effect why do we need a name for something that is so prolific and integrated into our very experience of understanding the world it just seems like it's so everywhere that how could we even that's my that's my point yes and we're all get but it's as destructive to the people that are on the bottom rungs of that as any other system of prejudice yeah well it's fascinating to come back to this argument about plastic surgery and when we look at things like aesthetic labiaplasty i did a research project and some writing and publishing on on aesthetic labiaplasty and what shows up in the data is that women are taking these images still images or magazine images from porn magazines or from pornography to their plastic surgeon and saying i want to look like this and then great if you feel better after i'm really glad that you feel better but you're participating in your own sexual objectification based on the pornification of the vagina oh i should say of the vulva and of the labia so yeah you feel better but we have to consider the role of media and pornography in particular in shaping how we feel about our bodies and what's considered sexual what's considered ideal valuable and and worthwhile in our culture particularly for women's bodies but increasingly so for men's bodies it's interesting to me that our move to a more egalitarian culture has not been to reduce objectification of women but to increase objectification of men like that's been the strategy it's like well no we should also oil up men and put them on magazines too not honor anybody's holistic identity as a person but just everybody is a thing to use and consume well i guess if there is a great equalizer in this discussion it's entropy it's that everybody brad pitt's going to end up an old fart wrinkly fart that nobody looks at sexually nobody wants to know i don't believe this matters modern medicine's changing this old people have sex oh yeah they definitely have sex of course i didn't nobody was an overstatement i mean the culture is not going to sexualize you 96 medicine is going to make it easier to look younger longer now we think you're right for the most part because ageism tells us what we know from ageism is that people are more valuable socially if they're younger there's kind of a preference for youthfulness and that's connected to fertility and the ability to to have children and what that means for us evolutionarily speaking but what's interesting is that because sex is so often associated with power and who is considered sexy and attractive is connected to what we've defined as being valuable socially i wonder if people will still want to be with him even if he looks not like he looked previously exactly yeah exactly the cultural trope of the silver fox is denoted to our conception of masculine versus feminine norms like a media constantly normalizes overweight men older men in some way deviating from most attractive with gorgeous women to reinforce you know this notion that the primary value of women is their fertility and their sexual objectification i just think there's i just think that there is a for everybody maybe a few narcissists and hugh hefner's as an exception that don't have to ever think much about this but i think for pretty much everybody at some point of your life you have to come to terms with my body is not what my culture most values like that i'm not the prime i'm not a i'm not a 10 on the prime on the value of society you know how when i think of how do i interact with body image there's the there's the external how do i act towards other people that reinforces those um harmful stereotypes and and models and levels of perfection and beauty that that keeps people that don't meet up to that feeling less than you know how do i contribute to those harmful societal norms um and then how do i interact with society's view of me of my body and i think everybody has to get to that point where you can i mean to be happy in the society that judges your body constantly every time you have an interaction with somebody they're judging your body whether they think about it or not you got to like learn how to be okay with wherever you're at on the scale of society literally and that's that's hard that's hard to do yeah well that's actually a great component what you're saying of where body dissatisfaction comes from is from the appearance ideal actually being different than where we perceive ourselves to be or where we've been told that we are so this space or the gap between how we perceive ourselves and what we think we're supposed to do creates a correlation in how ex how we experience the distress related to our body so the closer those align generally the more people are satisfied with their body and so if you've got a cultural and appearance standard narrative that's unattainable then you have a lot of people feeling really crappy about their bodies all the time and we see that's part of where the emergence of body dissatisfaction issues and all of the money going into body management and appearance management procedures and eating disorders comes from is that the standard of appearance is unattainable and in fact when you look at side-by-side images of people before they're edited and after even the people that we're comparing ourselves to don't even look like that so we've got pretty good evidence that after viewing images in the media of particularly ideal bodies that our life satisfaction goes down that feelings of worthlessness go up depression goes up anxiety goes up and the sense of shame or dissatisfaction with one's body goes up just by looking at images in the media and living in los angeles yeah i know right gorgeous people everywhere and so it's important actually to find yourselves as part of a community which says our standards for worth and value are different than just this high bar for appearance or this particularly dysfunctional bar so how do we align ourselves with people in our community and can our community and the things that we value about them be about having a value system in common or engaging in political action or having intellectual conversations or activities that bring you together instead of feeling like the thing that connects you is looking the same way or that those people validate how you look or constantly reinforce that you should look a certain way [Music] does anybody remember that website hot or not calm yes yeah i was in high school and that came out and i remember putting my picture on it and like hoping to god i got like oh that's a wow they voted but you've uh yeah you vote so like you just like it was kind of the early like tender uh matchmaking yeah it was just literally is this person hot or not whoa yeah yeah and like you know based on however many hot or not you get like it i think it judged you like through numbers if i remember correctly uh but but even that was some of the first internet culture things that were going on back in you know the early 2000s was uh body objectification and and obviously porn but like i just remember doing that in high school and all of us like jumped on that you know and we yeah we just participated in that that type of culture um okay so that leads me into something i wanted to tell you about which is what we call the tripartite model of influence which has shown us empirically that the three main sources of influence in terms of how we shape our body image our peers parents and media and there's different loader loading on each of those factors and how they relate to each other but those three together work to shape how we feel about our bodies but actually when you look at it those three are just the conduits of information that we're getting from sociocultural narratives so what is it that peers and parents and media are saying to us so peers aren't bad parents aren't bad media isn't bad but what are the messages they're funneling towards us and how do they reinforce how we feel about ourselves but then if you think about it and you step back we are the peer for somebody else we are the parent for somebody else we are creating media for somebody else and so it becomes this web of influence where we are both taking things in and funneling things out and creating this sphere of influence around us where we also need to be responsible and accountable to the things that we communicate about bodies because we are in someone else's tripartite model back to being interrelated interconnected and individual yeah and how we don't realize that we are reflecting i guess back to people worth and dignity um and telling them who they are not just on a spiritual level or an emotional level but also a physical level well think of the comments that people often get when they start dieting this is a phenomenal that's shown in research regularly when people begin engaging in eating disorder behaviors is that often their community says to them you look great which provides a sense of social reinforcement that what they're doing is working and that they're more valuable and that it's being noticed and that creates a good feeling that likely they've been wanting all from from the beginning so how does one create a more positive body image for yourself i don't know like i've done it i'm not really sure how i did but i i've always hated hated my body completely identified with my cognition starting with a mystical experience a few years ago and then through subsequent spiritual growth experiences i've accepted myself more and more and then got to the point where i actually kind of delighted in myself and i was trying to like filter that through the model you were just talking about i don't consume very much visual media i wonder if that's a huge part of why i have a lot a lot of self acceptance 75 plus the media i consume is textual so i consume very very very very little visual media and the visual media i do consume i tend to be deeply skeptical of that includes outdoor boards and kind of things that are painted everywhere which can i add media literacy and thinking critically about the images that you see is a protective factor in body image so would help you actually retain a more healthy version or narrative of your body if you are consuming images yeah cause i'm like well that's a model who's a professional occupation is looking good who then a team of lighting professionals and camera people and post production people have all sort of worked together to create an idealized version but even if they i don't know if they didn't i just wouldn't care anymore i just like my body um i always say now that i wear clothes for other people's comfort and not mine because i just i'm fine with my body except i walk around airports watching men's hairlines ceaselessly and every time i see a great hairline on a middle-aged man i'm like you son of a gun tell me your secret well tell me that's genetic probably but it's just it's it's the one thing i'm like not at peace with myself oddly enough of all the things on my body is my hair because i think to that cultural model uh we so strongly associate thick hair with worth and vitality across age ranges right so the one thing that that a brad pitt in his 20s and uh some attractive man in his 70s share in common generally is a thick head of hair and i've been puzzled why like i'm able to not feel shame about my belly or my back or other parts of my body but i can't like get to peace about arguably the part about what i have the least control over the percentage of follicles on the top of my head that are active and my own blindness to my body shame journey means i can't like prescribe a solution to myself to deal with like baldism internalized baldism i think most people are stuck in that rut only only more so you know the thing that i'm always amazed at is people who i sort of estimate as more attractive than me or even much more attractive than me tend to struggle even more with body shame and to have more things about their bodies they obsess about i used to work for a pr firm and a lot of the women that work for that pr firm if you if we did like a a legitimate double-blind study where people were rating strangers they would all be eights or nines or tens right there was very attractive women so many of them were just crippled by shame about their bodies which just like blew my mind and actually was extremely therapeutic for me to hear them talk about their struggles with their physicality but this is i think one of the hardest things and hopefully i'm not just externalizing my own experience i think it's one of the hardest things for people to struggle through body image because even as you start to understand the social factors contributing to that it doesn't necessarily illuminate a path towards improvement yeah i've got it on pretty good authority that the closer that you get to the ideal you're not actually likely to feel better about yourself although we assume that we will we assume that if we get closer that we're going to feel relief and a sense of satisfaction but what we know in populations who are approaching the ideal is that there's actually more preoccupation obsession and hyper vigilance about appearance related factors so the closer we get actually the more entangled we are and there's a population of women particularly middle-aged women who've been through menopause who sense this sense of invisibility actually as a freeness so they're not perceived as being sexual objects anymore by society and they notice that people aren't looking at them which is sad because we've reinforced to people that women are only valuable if they're sexual objects and so these women are now being perceived as or perceiving themselves as being invisible but actually that they state that there's a sense of freedom that comes with that of knowing wow i don't even have to worry about being in the game i can just do whatever i want and no one's going to notice and that liberates me from all of the things that i internalized that i had bought into i like people watching in airports i find most people to be like just genuinely stunning and beautiful even like i don't personally really categorize like hot not you know like i i have a very i've been attracted to a wide range of people um even my own personal life and that just just even that alone has been an interesting journey to walk as it relates to like body image so when i look at someone i don't look at simply features but i feel like i look at essence i don't know does that make sense am i being weird i find the same thing happens the more i get to know someone the less i feel like i actually see them in through the lenses or the evaluative criteria i feel like the more i get to know someone the more they become an essence or an experience that i have with them that's coded and correlated with a felt body sensation for me of knowing that i feel safer i feel good and i can see the real you mm-hmm yeah that's interesting like we were lisa and i anomaly were talking the other day about lucy and now lucy we have a really hard time seeing the down syndrome features anymore like you know you can normally see the almond eyes and whatever in a person like oh they have down syndrome we're like oh yeah it's easy and almost like it's really hard to see that and lose it like it's hard to see it at all it's interesting how the yeah the more you love somebody and see their essence like you were saying the little distinguishing marks as it relates to cultural norms disappear well and that's partly neurological the part of your brain that's responsible for facial recognition is uh distinct from the part of the brain that would evaluate physical features what i mean is in your brain a face you know is a pretty simplified set of data points that's really like the distance between the eyes and the nostrils and the nostrils to the center point of the eyes and the shape and width of the mouth and so as you know someone well you don't actually have to expend any energy to recognize their face by uh paying attention to their complexion or their eye color or any of these features that only happens with faces you're seeing and haven't seen very often so you literally use different parts of your brain to evaluate familiar and unfamiliar faces it's making me think about the difference though in terms of how i perceived myself when i was probably at the peak of my illness about your illness your eating disorder eating disorder yeah so was currently in treatment for an eating disorder and went shopping with a friend and pulled out a pair of jeans off the shelf that i thought fit that were obviously about six to eight sizes too big and i said oh i'm going to try these on and she said are you joking is this a joke and i said no no these fit me and i couldn't actually perceive myself as being the size that i was i had lost the ability to know that my body didn't look the way that i thought that it did on the outside and yet i actually felt like i accurately perceived other people's bodies and didn't see like we were talking about didn't see those features i just felt the sense of being with that person but there was such a disrupted perception of my body that it was pathological it was it was disordered but that was such an obvious moment for me of pulling those genes up and noticing that my perception was delusional but it felt true it felt real is that the same a similar phenomenon that happens when people lose a lot of weight dramatically or in a short period of time like i've just heard stories of like i know jennifer hudson shared her own story of when she sees herself in the mirror she did weight watchers and like lost a bunch of weight but then she still talks about seeing herself as that bigger size that she was from american idol and how she still like will wrestle or struggle with is that the same phenomenon that you're talking about of like it's hard for you to picture yourself as you are versus like the way you see yourself in your head my sense when you talk about them is that they're overlapping but distinct overlapping as in having the felt sense of our body not match the visual that would be the overlapping but one is dysfunctionally disordered and trying to continually erase more of you to match or to compensate for the image you have in your head where the other one sounds more like shock and confusion and just a sense of needing to adjust your autobiographical visual yeah memory yeah yeah so have you ever noticed like if you don't see a child for a while they seem unbelievably tall the next time you see them you've experienced that phenomenon recollection of someone is not the most recent exposure you had to them but a set of memories formed over time and so like your sort of mental image of a child you know is an averaging over a time period the memory is not an objective function anyway but if we could imagine that if you were to uh estimate or draw out how tall a child was like on a door frame you'd actually likely draw it shorter than they really are because your memories are slightly time delayed um so that's why it's shocking when you see someone different size so or they're tall now uh and this happens when people have weight loss as well if you're losing weight yourself it's a gradual process you don't really notice uh because you're you're kind of rolling average most slowly but if someone hasn't seen you in a while it's quite dramatic and so often one of the things that happens with any situation we call disordered or body dysmorphia is emotional trauma is impacting memory formation and you get a radical divergence of internalized imagination features or regulation features and actual features so one thing that happens to me consistently is uh i experience some degree of body dysmorphia if i gain muscle mass or lose fat so it's i start to get this strange alien like this is not my body sensation if my waist starts to get smaller or i start to exercise enough that my chest and shoulders get larger you know i don't think it's disordered i don't think that i think it's just a matter of if my body moves faster than my mental map can accommodate it feels strange the difference i think that causes it to move into disorder is the original expectation is unrealistic and so no matter how fast or slow the body changes the idealized or internalized physical form is impossible or unhealthy to manifest you see that with anorexia people suffering from anorexia get incredibly small and still feel like they are overweight overweight which objectively is not the case at all so any sort of body change is going to trigger that kind of uncanny effect but in a in the case of a true disorder the perceived rightness is unattainable or would be unhealthy if attained it's almost if i could argue different than that because the motivation often in eating disorders is partly towards image but is often towards illness and is away from something that is perceived as being correct as a mental representation of the physical self but that is the thing that people are trying to get away from so the disordered perception is the problem most people that i know this is in clinical work this is in research this is in my life experience with anorexia aren't just trying to be skinny that's often how things start but often the thing that comes up for people is i i want to i want to be sick i want you to see that i'm sick and not feeling a sense of satisfaction in the appearance but the satisfaction in the illness as a way of acquiring some sort of support but also a perceptual disorder or distortion where the perception of how the body really is looks markedly different than how it actually looks [Music] what were some of the things that help you get a more accurate and positive body image for yourself yeah you know it's really cool to think about that because there's a lot of trauma therapies that look at doing neural integration work and when all of the parts of your brain are hooked up and you're also looking at an image of yourself it's easier to see that that's you and to feel okay about that so there becomes neural fragmentation when you're experiencing distress and the things that would normally talk to each other let's just say left and right hemisphere cortical and subcortical structures when they're not actually engaging in communication and information flow like they normally are when you're feeling safe and well all of that stuff breaks down so doing any kind of trauma work that integrates the brain helps automatically for you to realize that the perception is still perhaps your preference or is still where your brain goes but maybe it's not ideal and maybe it's not something that you you really need to engage with in the same way so any kind of i'm thinking about a particular type of therapy called oei observed in experiential integration where you cover one eye at a time and you can do mirror work with that where a person is seeing their image and when you have one eye covered they think ah look at how obese i am same position cover the other eye and the person goes i'm really sick and i need to get help and then over time what you do is you integrate the information between the hemispheres to help your brain create an image mentally that actually more accurately represents how you look so that you can move towards seeking support that helps the version of you that's living but i think for me recovery from disordered eating was an existential endeavor it was about realizing that i could exist and i could take up space and that i could learn to care for myself and that i could learn to be cared for because although there's a correlation with body image and poor body image is a significant predictor of eating disorders it's not the only cause there are lots of other things particularly perran's work says neva paran from u of t says that eating disorders are about restricted or disrupted agency so a lack of agency within the self and the attempt to get agency back through the body so feeling like i had agency helped me feel like i had a sense of worth and value and power in the world and then i didn't have to use my body to try and get that it trips me up so much to think that i can look in the mirror kind of what you were saying from that study and see something that's not really truthful yeah like that blows my mind perception man you almost never see something beautiful in the mirror and what is truthful yeah well never see anything truthful anytime yeah we just hit existentialism for the first time as the four of us there we go it's beautiful that's we always say the literature's podcast we're on the right right right when we hit exit what is truth is the right direction it's interesting for me body image has never been like a direct focus of work for myself but i've noticed that my my body shame and body image has adjusted with other areas of my life that have been changing and evolving and it's funny like i grew up in wisconsin and my family's a thick family we've got plenty of gunger body to go around and i think that was always like a i was i was never like the biggest in my family i felt like i had to hate fatness so i wouldn't get fat i don't know where all that come from someone came from my grandma i know i remember she would like she was a wonderful woman but horrible in that area as far as like she would make fun of fat people all the time and anybody in our family that was getting chubby she would point it out you know um there's always that one family member at least one or two that does that too always so there was always something in me that like hated that i took i remember they have this harvard test that can test your biases on your phones you can do it like with race religion yeah and the one that the test that i failed was the the fat person that's the head of fat bias i was going to say like how do you know like because i just knowing you i know where your shame issues lie on your body and i've made fun of i've actually probably compounded it because i've made fun of you michael has a thing about butts and not getting too big well not well i i had that i mean i grew up with that but then over the last couple years of a few years the more spiritual development and richness that i felt in loving everyone and one like one key for me has been eyes for some reason alan watts talks about how like have you ever have you ever found a jewel in the earth that can even match by any means like the human eye like look at an eye wow and that body grew that eye it's like this amazing jewel with the rich colors and and sophistication of it that body grew that everybody is miraculous and marvelous and a universe of wonder so the more that i've learned to love existence and and be other people's bodies the more i've come to peace with my own and actually in that i i got bigger while i was first like letting go of some of that body shame and i just started like another butterfinger yes please it's like whoa i'm not fighting anything anymore um yeah so how we feel about our bodies and our appearance in fact impacts our eating behaviors yeah what we give ourselves permission to indulge in or not based on how we evaluate size and morally judged size and for the first time in my life this year i'm trying i'm i'm going to the gym trying to eat a little healthier but it's not primarily at least based in body shame anymore it's not like trying to shove down some fat genes or trying to like i'm not gonna be this i'm not gonna look like this it's just i wanna be healthy because this is the body that i have to live my life in why not be healthy so no more fear of juicy booties no more fear of juicy booties how can we discern on the spectrum between the negative impacts of body image on behavior and unhealthy behavioral impulses so i experience very little body shame that's good i have psychological benefits that go along with it that's good the way i interact with other people tends to help free them from shame those are all very good things on the other hand if i'm in the mood for a cheeseburger i get a cheeseburger if i'm in the mood for pizza i get a pizza and that means i'm carrying 45 pounds of body fat on my body means my organs are packed in lipids it means my risk for stroke and heart attack go up dramatically how can we navigate moving towards a more healthy body image while still kind of as you are this year michael engaging in those activities that are healthy and improve quality of life i think that when appearance is the only thing that matters about us that's problematic but we want to enjoy the fact that we have skin and we look a certain way and that means that other people recognize us and that we can express ourselves through how we decorate our skin or dress ourselves but we also need to value the parts of ourselves that are our body that go beyond our image valuing the self like we talked about in the embodiment episode you are your body and so to value you means appreciating what happens on the outside and the inside and seeing you as having worth would have obvious behavioral implications you treat the things that you value better so we don't want to have this disembodied appreciation for an appearance for the skin bag we don't want to like the skin bag but not care about everything that actually contributes to our sense of self that's within that skin bag skin is just the body the body boundary between us and the rest of the world but isn't the most important thing about us so can we value from the inside and not pathologically either because we see things like orthorexia emerge when people have a sense of moral judgment about putting things that are impure or in unclean into their bodies so preoccupation with only eating clean food or only eating green food are only things that are organic and steamed and grown within 10 miles right then we see pathology as well and so we need to value and honor the body while also maintaining cognitive flexibility and gratitude can we think flexibly about our body which means that i do things that are good for the inside and the outside of me because i believe that i matter and i have worth and value but can i know that one of the best things about existing with your friends is when you go grab a good cheeseburger and you have a few good laughs while you're sitting together and eating and so knowing that cheeseburgers aren't bad of course they're not bad there's no food that's good or bad there are just things that we should eat more and probably aren't a great idea to eat as often as we'd maybe like to but so can we have it's complex when you start looking at it can we have cognitive flexibility can we have gratitude can we appreciate the outside and the inside can we see that we have worth and therefore we want behaviors that stem from a sense of worth inside of ourselves so it's really actually quite hard to give you an answer about the way things should be because there's so much individual variability and i would never suggest that you never eat the cheeseburger but if that becomes a way that you emotionally regulate because it's really hard to get a sense of pleasure or satisfaction in life outside of that then maybe we should have a conversation about that but cheeseburgers aren't bad and everyone knows you can experience a cheeseburger in a lot of different ways you can you can be there present eating that cheeseburger and savoring every moment of it you can mindlessly be you know just moving through your day and a cheeseburger happened you barely noticed you can be medicating with it you can be there's all sorts of ways you can have a cheeseburger i think that a lot of this comes to how you engage with these activities are you doing it from a place of trying to repress something trying to escape from something are you moving towards something in love are you moving to exercise because you are loving your body and taking care of your body and and enjoying the experience of it or are you doing it because you think this is what i should be doing and if i don't do this i'm not going to be acceptable i'm not going to be a good person and it's fear and shame and all that stuff involved so i think a lot more of this is like you were saying that the internal experience of how you approach these things more than that well i think it's interesting i don't think of myself as a terribly superficial person but when you say like body image has more than skin it's a pretty mind-blowing concept for me like when i think of body image i think about how i appear externally completely and i don't think about ldl and hdl or resting heart rate but those are absolutely all very valid essential parts of your body experience and a healthy holistic body image well can we we also back this up and say that body image is a construct it doesn't exist it's just a way that we've conceptualized how we evaluate our appearance if the construct of body image isn't a real thing because it's a construct then really what all of this comes back to is can i be loving in my life towards myself and others whatever self and others are if we look at how those are actually constructs as well that we create delineation between them can i be love in this world and then what is it like to be love and have that return inward within the thing that is expressing love also [Music] a little bit ago you had mentioned how we use clothing to this effect of in our own experience of our own body image and how we communicate that body image to the world i remember there's this we went to these hot springs lisa and i but it was it was a clothing optional hot springs out in the mountains and just meeting people out there you know the interesting sort of people that go to hot springs out in the mountains clothing optional places and we ended up meeting several people and like you're just out there hanging out in the wilderness and meeting them without clothes on and it was fascinating because you're just there through the day so then at the end of the day there's like a campground and you can go down there and cook food and stuff so a lot of people from the hot springs you're they're down there and so we met people there that we had met in the hot springs naked and there was this very strange it was like how wait who you're not that's not how you would dress there's like it was like that i had a totally different idea of who you were and the feeling of seeing them in their clothes was a different feeling it was like you could feel like how they see themselves in the kind of clothes they could wear and then realizing how much i judge somebody based on the clothes that they're wearing and what kind of person they are and what and those clothes become part of their image to me and how much of my world is that that i'm judging everybody based on all these things including their clothing and their style and the music they listen to and whatever it is that becomes part of their body becomes part of their essence i just found that fascinating well if you take that as a little experiment and you see how much energy it took from you to notice and all of the work cognitively that goes into sustaining those judgments it leads me back to a really popular feminist argument which is that the greatest tool of oppression for women is to have them become preoccupied with their appearance and appearance management which takes all sorts of resources away from other things like how can i change the world how can i what what am i going to do with my energy if i'm not so focused on feeling like my appearance is the only way to get my enoughness in this world so we've got just a ton of cognitive energy that's going into maintaining and creating and sustaining these judgments that we have about ourselves and other people and i love to ask kind of like with where we started what would you do with your time and your energy if you weren't preoccupied with your appearance it's meant to be rhetorical and to imply that there is so much energy that we put into what should i wear how does it go with this no does it what part of my body does the highlight what are they gonna think what are they wearing when they're there and not that clothes are bad just like not cheeseburgers aren't bad but when we think about the amount of energy we're putting into focusing on this thing that is actually just a construct that often keeps us stuck in our own oppression think of the things that we could do if we allow our brain to go to different places or if we had the freedom culturally to do that i mean i recognize that as a wonderful theoretical thing to say yeah but i mean i i told you yesterday i wonder you ever see yourself reflected oh yeah wonder if i should ever look in a mirror maybe i should once in a while look at the mirror i caught my reflection on glasses like ooh probably should have checked a mirror today i don't put a lot of energy in i also i also think so too just to push back a little bit like some of this stuff though is really fun like clothes are fun you know like or at least we've made them fun like what you wear and the patterns you piece together and it's a it's a type of expression like in a way that music is and uh and so i think some of these things i maybe it's just about having healthier better relationships to them versus being unconcerned completely about them because so i can be shallow in that way like i like to see sometimes not all the time but like who's wearing what on the red carpet at an event like obviously you know jim carrey does the whole like bit where he's like it's not a bit it's true like knowing this matters what are we you know why are we even here sure yeah but it's also fun like we like to get dressed up and see what other people are doing and be inspired by what they're doing and i think that's like a good thing of the like memetic thing that happens between us humans like the the copying and the like mirror neurons right like that we something you do inspires me and then it makes me want to go back and do something that and that will inspire you and yeah it's hard though when we get into that argument about the red carpet often what women are wearing is used as a way of silencing their work or diverting attention away from their contributions creatively creatively into the arts and so maybe it's from a position of privilege or maybe it's from a position as a male that it's an option for you to be creative with that whereas women often feel like or i could say that the preoccupation with appearance has been something that's been used to oppress women for sure but at the same time i think i'm not a woman so i can't make this argument but uh i would believe that there are women out there who also get enjoyment and fun from that too not from an internalized place of oppression or maybe it is i i don't know uh you're right i'm probably extremely privileged to make that that argument in that way but um i still wonder though is there still is a baby in that bathwater too of of the expression of what clothes are yeah and so it can be fun but that's an interesting question if it was just for fun what would we wear if it wasn't a part of the oppression lady gaga maybe lady gaga right or maybe what we would i would just wear a trash bag everywhere [Laughter] i know exactly what i would do you'd be naked all the time he would or i would wear hawaiian shirts i used to wear hawaiian shirts all the time and then i stopped because everybody gave me shit about hawaiian shirts rightfully i started wearing only only wearing black and grey t-shirts because i was like nobody gives a shit about black and gray t-shirts so that's just what i'll wear okay so dressing again dressing isn't bad clothing isn't bad what's the motivation that's encouraging us to choose the things that we do and if we could extract somehow extract the oppression from our inner dialogue and our preferences which is a whole other conversation because our preferences often are a product of what's socially valuable if we could extract the oppression from our preferences what would we choose maybe nothing maybe what's most comfortable maybe what's most accessible maybe the colors that are fun and we wouldn't worry if they match or not maybe matching is fun for us but extracting the oppressive nature of appearance management from preferences is really really hard to do i'd opt for nothing most of the time most of the time nothing especially in los angeles yeah i prefer i prefer those pants you have one right now michael just being honest what do they call this cool looks like what are those these are thai fishermen pants there it [Music] is [Music] when i think about people who often come into therapy with me and they're preoccupied with appearance appearance management makeup sometimes people will say things like oh god i could never leave the house without makeup to engage in a stretching and growth activity i often encourage them to try it just once to do the thing that they have come up with a narrative about as being bad and just say why do you intentionally do that and see what happens notice the feedback from people and don't assume that the feedback is correct or incorrect just notice it it's an experiment so go out without makeup or go out with the you know the hawaiian shirt on or go out wearing the thing that you actually want to wear not the thing that you think will be most valuable to other people that's what i'm doing today baby sorry so good it's experiential right and see what happens and notice what that's like and maybe no one's actually going to care and that will be really interesting or maybe people will give you feedback that is different but also makes you feel good maybe someone will notice that when you're not wearing all that eyeliner they can actually see your eyes and they say oh wow your eyelashes look so soft today wow i could just reach out and touch them and you'll get different kinds of feedback about your appearance based on you not engaging in the thing that you have to engage in to be valuable i know i always use celebrity analogies i mean we live in los angeles but alicia keys has been doing that uh a lot lately public like i think every time she makes a public appearance now she has no makeup on as kind of a i'm not gonna buy into this appearance management thing and this is who i am this is how i look and i'm i think it's beautiful and i think she's been wildly applauded for that even in our culture of like yeah awesome go for that like do that and then people say things like wow you're so brave and we're like for just being who you are i guess that's an interesting story not painting your face right exactly that's crazy or you went out in a body that wasn't a typical bikini body we would see wow you're so brave which implies that's unhealthy yeah that that's not something that we should do and that they're going against the social code but maybe we can all participate in changing the social code by none of us engaging in those things that we think that we're supposed to do and then it's not brave to do it it's actually just being human and normal to go out with the face that you have looking the way you actually do yeah do you think uh using the red carpet analogy again like i mean at the what was it again was it the go where the women were all black uh for the time's up um it was maybe google globes yeah okay uh but you know like there there was a very active you know as part of the me too thing like there was a an active discourse between women in hollywood that said we are going to we're all black to stand in solidarity with uh women so it'll be less about our dresses and more about that and then a lot of them brought feminist activists to the red carpet and then gave their time to uh these activists to share the message of equality and feminism and times up and what and to also get donations for a legal fund for women that want to speak out against sexual abuse and assault i think there's something changing in the culture too that is at least i mean you would i wouldn't have imagined a year ago even five years ago that that would even happen that's something that an award show that celebrates vanity to a level a major level uh would even do something like that where it wasn't about the dresses or you know it wasn't about it was about women and supporting women and i don't know do you think there's a changing titan culture right now with body image for for women as well as men it'll be interesting to see how that trickles down to the real lives of women in middle earth middle america and across the globe yeah and even in hollywood yeah because on some level is that the trump administration all wearing black lives t-shirts one day i don't know if that's fair in terms of perpetuating unrealistic body standards hollywood is at least as complicit as the trump administration is in white supremacy it's yeah i i think i agree with you i i also think it's been more responsive certainly more responsive and also broader too like there's so many different types of industries as as well too that um i think the trump administration we can i can put that many people like in the palm of my hand i think hollywood's so much bigger and broader and expansive in the industry so i think it's hard to paint that broad of a swath with hollywood that's good um that's all i yeah well i think about andrea shaw's work who wrote a piece something related to black fat women and political resistance about being fat and black as being something that was pushing back on hegemonic narratives of femininity and black bodies and what's valuable socially and so i think that we can use the things that we do with our appearance and our body to make statements about our culture and engage in shifting the tide and moving the needle on what is valuable that's good but i think that the personal application of that is think of how many people right now are holding their smartphones as they listen to this podcast and what do we do with those powerful tools of communication what kinds of media are we engaging in but also what are we proliferating what kind of images about our lives do we post on social media do we only post the ones where we look like the ideal and then creating this you could call it like a visual echo chamber of images that only reinforce the things that are socially valuable yeah and what about posting photos of ourself when we don't look like the ideal as a way of reminding ourselves and other people that there is so much more to us than if we meet appearance standards or not it's crazy with that editing software now it's like i i see i'm sure guys do it too i see but i see it way more with girls that will thin their faces you know to post a picture on social media you know like or like i don't like you could change the hue of your color like all those things you can thin your face oh absolutely there's apps like yeah yeah there's apps that do all this stuff now so even some of these images you're seeing on social media that look like oh somebody just pulled out a phone and took that photo they probably you know i'm not just talking about visco filters right i'm talking about like thinning out your face and taking fat away and like image manipulation and image manipulation purely uh yeah it's it's i mean it's a very it's it's a phenomenon happening right now i was griping a few months ago it was time to go somewhere i was ready because from shower to door for me is like nine minutes i was i was hoping that we weren't gonna say a round number uh that was about nine um and jenny's is closer to plus whoa and uh i said why do you spend so much time on your makeup and she said no one looks at your face the way that they look at mine so like nobody care like of course i don't pay a lot of attention to my clothes i don't pay a lot of attention to my face and even as a guy insecure about balding i don't actually pay that much attention to my hair because if i am articulate yes if i am funny confident if i am confident then society will put accolades on me in fact if i literally went back to hawaiian shirts and and merrell shoes on stage the fallout in my life is like three to five people an event cracking a joke about it because you're a man because i'm a man and the degree to which body image is projected differently onto different genders really can't be overstated [Music] i just feel an incredible amount of frustration and rage and sadness when we're talking about this because it's not okay that this is the reality that dick takes what makes a human valuable or not and we are all participating it we can't say culture is over there and then not look at what we do on our own smartphones and so i feel full of fury that this is our reality and i think it should make us angry and i think that we should be outraged and i think that we should feel a sense of responsibility to participate in changing the tide in what images are seen and viewed and proliferated because it impacts our experience and it also impacts the experience of everybody who's viewing those images and what we perceive as being normal and valuable and it is not okay if someone sees an image that isn't even real and feels bad about themself how do we do that because i i know that we can there's there's lots we can do i think about how there's a really beautiful renaissance happening in hollywood over inclusion uh about representation of images for uh women and people of color even women behind the cameras there's a real renaissance happening where uh studios are starting to hire and trust more women uh to direct and to produce uh like big budget films um also like black panthers coming out and then that's that's a real image thing too uh in terms of you know in african society untouched by colonialism um and what that even does to the imagination of like representation uh for black and brown people but so like what do what do we do like i agree with you it's disgusting so how can we change those images of our bodies and i mean is it changing who like for hollywood right it's like what who's getting what roles right like you're right like remember i remember matt damon and you know and ben affleck or any of those guys you know they start gaining weight and then there's all these articles about how dad bods are in hollywood right that would never work for women you know like that saying like you know you know kelly clarkson gains weight and everyone's like oh my god you know how to could you know like she's not skinny like she used to be or whatever and so i definitely know that that double standard or that hypocrisy massively exists but what can we do is do we advocate to change representation in these industries uh uh do we support films that reflect more of our humanness and tell more truthful stories about our complexities and and cast wide array of vis like the way people look uh versus you know the typical beautiful hollywood person or how do we change things all of those things for sure but when i think about it from a phenomenological perspective from existentialism what we see in phenomenology has most power is what is most visible what is most accessible and what is most visible has the most power so we need to change the visibility and that's both an a literal visibility but also an accessibility to narrative to discourse to lived experience so the visibility is our accessibility to diverse stories and images and presentation of appearance and so we have a responsibility to request media that has more diverse people bodies experiences made visible so as the consumer we can't just sit back and think wow this isn't working for me which would be a great start to realize that it has actual detrimental health benefits for us and for our well-being but to advocate for more visibility of people who are different than us which actually in a funny way creates safety for us to be us because the ver the vision of what is ideal becomes broadened and actually at some point dissolves and everything that's visible becomes valuable well i mean did you see the difference one thing i saw striking i haven't seen the film yet but there's these amazons are in the movie wonder woman and they're in the movie justice league one was directed and the by a woman by a man and the differences in those costumes between male and female directors are profound so in the in the wonder woman movie they were actually based on historical uh reference and guidance to battle armor right and in the male directed movie they were affected bikinis wow so we can't have a conversation about changing image culture without also talking about objectification theory and patriarchy and how the devaluation of women shapes how we constantly take the self and the person out of the woman's body and we use the woman's body or parts of it for capitalist gain we have to think critically about all of the existing structures economic political historical and even our literary our discourse what words we use and what experiences we privilege and think critically about all of those things and how they work together for both the oppression of women and people of color and marginalized stories but also the focus on appearance and also i think that even comes down to our daily interactions i think of my my girls and this is unconscious a lot of times but how often we they come in like you look cute and how much that is the standard for most women that's like you'll hear oh he's very good at this he's with it oh she's oh that she's a very beautiful woman yeah she's like the very first thing we go to is something based on the physical appearance so we're lisa and i are always trying to like intentionally give compliments to our girls that have nothing to do with the way they look right now right or you know oh you're very strong to the hair you know cause that's what we tell boys it's like we tell little boys we're always telling them how strong they are capable and able-bodied they are and with women or girls we always telling them how adorable and cute and pretty and yeah one of the questions that i get asked the most whenever i lecture on body image actually isn't about theory and constructs or research it's about what do i tell my kids so that they feel better about their bodies than i do and you're so right michael we need to change the dialogue and the focus from being the reinforcement of the social construction of gender roles to lived experience and maybe even from a position of self-disclosure i am so happy to see you which has nothing to do with what the person is doing but rather how they impact you which does something really important for a sense of self-worth to say i'm loved no matter how i look or act or how i appear somebody was excited to see me i exist in someone else's mind and i have value another thing to say is you look so happy or i love the way you put your you know all of those different pieces together in the song that you just sang wow and tell me what you're reading right now what was your favorite idea of the day what was the thing that made you feel most alive what did you most long to share with me asking questions about experience that don't have a moral evaluative component to them i love the way the light shines in your hair i see all of these different colors at the same time [Music] this is tricky territory because uh there's a lot of conversation around you know the hormonally but also like the differences between like male and female like it seems and and tell me how much of this is construct that it seems or social engineering that that girls are more aware of that stuff than than boys are like the the image stuff and you know like all the girls that want to be princesses right like and we kind of play like is there something a unique quality and femininity that wants to be pretty i ask that question because i genuinely don't know but i also know that that is a driving force in a lot of this stuff that i mean when i see a little girl that wants to be a princess all the time you know and that's kind of the thing it's like is that bad like i don't know if that you know what is that and am i wrong for partnering with that yeah well first i want to say i'm so glad you asked the question we need to keep asking these questions and i don't want you to feel shame about not knowing or not knowing the right language because i don't have it keep having conversations that i love that you want to know think about the studies that have been done about how we impose gender scripts and interpretation of behavior onto infants who've just been born so there's studies that show if you tell a group of people that's a boy then they interpret the movements as being more aligned with masculinity not maleness but masculinity and if you tell the same people that the same baby is actually a girl then they align their interpretation of the same behaviors of the same baby with femininity and we know that right from the get-go even in utero if you know that it's a boy people will say oh he's kicking he's going to be a little soccer player he's so active so we interpret what the person does based on how we impose our constructs of gender on them which we can't extract from their experience of being in the world we know things like kids have a preference for thin around the same time they start going to child care that they're learning from their peers about what is valuable or not valuable even before they understand what body images as a construct wow so we are being groomed and steeped in a culture obsessed with the binary of masculinity and femininity and what that does for power and privilege and how we think about things even from before we're born [Music] yeah we thought amelie was a boy and i noticed uh in myself like she at least had taken a like a walgreens p test that it said on the thing 90 whatever percent accurate it was not accurate wait a minute test about gender yep i got from walgreens sex thank you sex and uh it failed yes but uh yeah i don't know if they sell them anymore if it was just a thing that they could because it was not not accurate but anyway so i thought we thought emily was a boy and i noticed i talked differently in through the lisa's belly when i found out she was a girl and it was hard for me like i noticed i'm all of a sudden sweeter and gentler and you know so what is the yeah i mean this is such a big conversation how do you not play into these scripts right like how do you not impose gender do you just allow the child to self-identify whenever they so choose to self-identify gender-wise like what do you what is that then because male and female come with baggage and they come with all sorts of ideas do we want to talk about how that relates to body image yeah because we need to do this separate gender yeah yeah so as it relates to body image i think we have to be really careful about how we impose on other people the expectations that we've been given that we haven't really thought critically about and it's interesting when you start to look at what choices and awareness is i don't think it's something you can ever master and i think what we need to do is move towards becoming continuously more reflective and aware over time so that we can think and train and shift our behaviors to match the ideal but i don't think that just because you have an awareness that body shaming someone is bad doesn't mean that you're going to leave whatever you're doing right now and not do that ever again but we can situate ourselves in communities and educate ourselves with dialogue that helps us become more aware of things and we can also practice and rehearse alternatives the more we rehearse a certain behavior the easier it is for that to become accessible for us so if the first words out of my mouth are i'm so glad to see you wow you look so happy can you tell me about your day and i do that over and over and over again it becomes easier and easier for me to start doing that and harder for me to actually say oh you look cute so we need to start becoming aware of the things that we say coming up with alternatives educating ourselves and practicing those alternatives so that those become the most reinforced behavioral patterns for us but i don't think that you ever arrive because i think as we move towards more and more social justice we'll have to continue to deconstruct our narratives of ourselves and other people over time and so if we're actually thinking about making this practical it might be a good idea to pick one thing and try and do it really well instead of trying to be less body shaming across the board think about that run one relationship that you have where you often talk about your body and see if you can think about talking about something different or think about that one situation where you often feel most insecure about yourself and try and put some resources into having more confidence in who you already are when you walk in or think about one thing that you'd like to say more often because we can get saturated with ideas and they can lose tangibility and we can become overwhelmed with the things that need to change so i think start with one thing that you know that you could do different that would make your life and someone else's life better in terms of how they feel about their body and try and do that as much as you can and go to your local korean spa more often yes i seriously think that more nudity in your life oh yeah helps yeah like just go even just going to the gym being in the locker room naked going to korean spa where they have when i go to other countries i just was in japan and there's like the culture in japan is the onsen these these hot springs is a very common thing for the culture and the men split from the women but everybody's naked in there and there's no these old guys that are in there you could they don't give a damn and i don't know i just the in my own personal life the more time i've spent in those kind of places yeah the less body shame i experience the more i'm coming like it's just about it's just bodies it's just everybody's you know that sounds so great but i had a similar experience unfortunately it was in san francisco and i didn't know it was a spot like one of those types of spots i thought i was just going to get a massage and it turned out to be a bath house it was awkward i've had a bad experience too yeah but i think you're right about something which is when other people experience freedom in their bodies it gives you permission to not have to be hyper focused on yours just kind of like vulnerability is contagious when you are vulnerable it gives me the space to be vulnerable when somebody else is okay in their body it reminds me that i can be that way too so looking for spaces where we can actually experience freedom freedom in our body and share that with other people would perhaps counteract some of the shame that we feel by being in spaces with other people who participate in that shame also yeah and we have to be unfortunately selective with those spaces because people's defensiveness is warranted the predatory and exploitive acts that happen with bodies screw it up for the for more freedom for everybody yeah yeah so i may be very comfortable with my naked male body but a woman who doesn't know me rightfully isn't yeah so freedom freedom includes you can't have freedom if there isn't safety then you're not really free i know that you're all people in a hurry and i know that because even though the vast majority of you listen to the entire liturgist podcast without using those skip buttons the analytics tell me that when you get to the outro some eighty percent of you immediately click forward to go to your next podcast episode and i get it there's a lot of wonderful things to hear in the world but we're going to add one piece of information to the outro this week that is not usually there so we hope you've enjoyed this episode on body image and if you'd like to discuss more issues around body image or your response to this episode as always you can go to the liturgist.com podcast and look up this episode you can go to facebook.com the liturgists you can see us on twitter and instagram at the liturgists but new this week are patron discussion forums per episode so if you join us on patreon for as little as one dollar per month you can discuss this episode not only with other patrons but also with the hosts of the program on patreon so to learn more go to the liturgist.com podcast click on that patreon icon or the donate now button of course your hosts this week have been william matthews hillary mcbride science mike and michael conger i'd like to thank all the patrons for making what we do possible for being in this thing with us we want to thank cory pig for project management greg nordine who helps with the production the sound editing i also want to thank tyler chester for some of the musical pieces vishnu dost with executive producing and also scoring mike mccard as managing director thanks for listening everyone [Music] you