strongchick said:
musclebrains...
what then accounts for the change in body perception over the decades? I mean, why is it that our view of what is beautiful is so utterly different now than in the past? Granted, a pretty face is still the same, but certain things such as coloring, body size, body shape, etc., have changed dramatically.
You speak of chemicals and body altering...is it because we CAN do this now, that we do it and appreciate it?
I would argue that there has NEVER been a "natural" body. People have decorated and modified their bodies the world over since the beginning. Sometimes this is in service to a quite changeable cultural ideal and sometimes it is in service to rebelling against the cultural ideal. Compare the Seattle Nirvana body to the gym bunny body. Sometimes body modification is a way the marginalized enter the mainstream. Thus the "collective" gay male body, once idealized as thin, echoes the prevailing cultural ideal of the Greek statue.
Bodybuilding itself is body modification and while people invest it with health claims, don't we all know the reality is that it's more about appearance? The status of the anabolic body has shifted from freak when I was a teenager to the virtual ideal today (though, of course, the radical is still called freaky). And, in this case, the shift in perspective has been accompanied by a basic reversal in the medical establishment's own perspective, though it supplies itself "good reasons" for giving people steroids now. The point, again, is that there is no body without modification. You put on clothes, you modify your body.
You can, like Buddy, pathologize the impulse to modify the body with the term "vanity." That's certainly the attitude of professional psychology -- that you have a body and you have a psyche and that they must somehow be in synch, with the psyche leading the way, valorizing itself above superficial notions of beauty.
In fact, I don't believe the psyche is "inside" the body. You see a rather remarkable split in this. People acknowledge that body modification profoundly affects their psychological state -- and then turn around and say this is wrong, that "self esteem" (whatever that means) should not depend on appearance. And yet the culture and biology modify the body whether we want them to or not. so what should we tell ourselves as we age? "Oh, it shouldn't matter that I am losing my body's beauty because, well, beauty is only skin deep and I am a beautiful person on the inside"?
Fine, try that. What you end up with is avoiding the very real grief that accompanies some transitions of the body (in aging, in chronic illness, in accidents) and then you really cannot find your way to your body. It becomes an encumbrance -- or you become trapped in nostalgia and try to recapture a picture from the past. You lose the capacity to play with your body. We have all seen older men and women whose appearance seizes us, but it rarely is because they "look young." It's because they have learned to play with their status. My grandmother was that way -- a spectacular diva. I see it constantly in the flamencas of Spain -- old women who hike up their skirts and dance with unbridled eros and look like members of an exotic and aged royalty.
One of my more outre writing projects involved my traveling with, um, the last old-style freak show in the country. There, I learned that the beauty of the body is not in conventionality but in playing with oddity, a kind of corporeal counterpoint. Haveyou seen the response of an audience when a freak exhibits himself. It constellates the sublime. The "vanity" of the twisted completely relativizes notions of vanity and beauty.
Summarily -- and I lead seminars on this subject twice a year, and am taking this particular subject up in Feb. -- I think the problem is not self esteem. I certainly don't think the problem can be reduced to "body dysmorphia" and "the Adonis Complex," those most recent pathologizations of pop psychology. I think if anything the problem is our failure to understand beauty in its sublime and monstrous aspects. When we recover the capacity to aestheticize our lives, we'll understand our bodies better.
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