Body Politics

I have always thought my legs were fat.
Athletic to be more charitable.
Recently I was wearing dark wash skinny jeans and playing with a 5 year old boy.  At some point he exclaimed, "Your legs are skinny!"
I blurted out, "I love you!  That's the BEST thing anyone has ever said to me!"
Oh God help me.  If this had been a girl, I know this would be an issue and a scar for the rest of her life.  At 5, the girls at my preschool are already comparing who is thinner.
As it is, my loss of control did not help this boy in anyway.  The thing is, I didn't know what to say afterward to mitigate the damage that had just flown out of my mouth.
I damaged him. I damaged future society.

I view my body through a lens of a male dominated and patriarchal society.  I grew up consuming the culture of fashion and Diet Pepsi.  I don't even know what it's like to view my body objectively.  Is any woman capable of that?  Is there some magical, mythical land called Body Acceptance?

At 2, I was voted the cutest little girl on Ramona Street in Palo Alto.  They somehow missed the future Nobel prize winner in biochemistry that lay latent within me.

Where is the line?  Where is the balance?  We love beautiful things.  At what point is appreciating someone's physical beauty corrosive?
 And then there is the measure and standard of beauty.  I read a great story by a large (for American standards) woman who constantly had to deal with dismissiveness and sometimes straight up hate towards her because of her weight.  She went to Jamaica and people would stop in the street to tell her how beautiful she was.  It was an eye-opening piece for me, this idea that beauty is a variable thing, based on a society's preference,

I had an experience on a MUNI bus in San Francisco.  I was coming home from working as a nanny.  My hair was up in a messy ponytail.  I had a zipped up hoody on, and I was wearing what I can only describe as really awful librarian glasses.  Three guys behind me started commenting in loud voices how ugly I was.  I casually took my ponytail out and shook out my hair.  I tied my hoody around my waist, I was wearing a tank top.  I threw my glasses into my backpack.  I had to walk past them to get off at my stop and as I did, one of them jumped up and followed me off the bus.  He began apologizing profusely for his friends as the bus drove away, saying they were drunk.  I didn't answer.  I didn't know what to say.  I just looked at him and walked away.

To this day, I don't know how to think about this event.  Why did I feel compelled to make myself  "prettier?"  What if I had been the age I am now?  What if I were 70?  If that would have happened now, how would I handle it?  I don't even know how to look at my body objectively.  I don't know what that is even like.  Is any woman capable of that?  Is there any woman out there who sees herself beautiful no matter her size or shape?

It starts so very very young for us.  I don't think I will ever get away from this damage and critical thinking.  I often tell girls how pretty and beautiful they are.  I feel they will not believe it of themselves if I do not tell them and reinforce it.  Am I helping?  Or am I hurting?

I have another troubling story to admit here.  I never thought that my mom was beautiful, or even pretty.  She would make disparaging comments about her own body and looks and I internalized that.  She said it was more important to be smart.
I did not believe her.

Soon after she died, I was in my Menlo Park business photoshopping a picture of her for my dad.  A co-worker wandered by and spontaneously exclaimed, "Your mother was beautiful!"  And suddenly I saw it.  My mother is beautiful. 
By anyone's standards, she was beautiful.  She was beautiful and I never saw it.
 Because of her words, I could not see it.

We can damage each other.  We can hurt each other.  We hurt ourselves by mutilating our bodies and risking death to obtain some elusive and unobtainable goal.

Acceptance.
I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how that feels.

All I know is I have to be careful with my words.  I have to be aware of what I say and how I speak of others and especially of how I speak about myself.