Trigger warning: This post contains mention of body image, disordered eating, fat shaming, slut shaming, purity/virginity culture, rape. Too many of us find those things triggering or, at minimum, upsetting. If you choose not to read this, just know my heart loves your heart and I understand your need to protect yourself. If you do choose to read, go into it knowing that you are loved and you are safe.
I have never liked my body.
From the time I was in third grade, I endured merciless teasing. The most common insult my peers used was “fat.” It wasn’t about whether or not I was actually a fat child; it was about finding the thing that would upset me the most. After enough time, I internalized this lie—I saw my body as unacceptable. I did everything I could to cover it, to hide under too-large clothes so that no one would see my fat. If no one, including myself, could see it, it didn’t exist.
The sad thing is, the church didn’t help. When I was older, I was still being told to cover my body. This time, however, it was because it was important that boys be blissfully unaware that I possessed hips and breasts. I learned that boys don’t have an interest in girls for their minds or their spirits. My post-pubertal body was just as unacceptable as my childhood body. The only difference was, now there was slut-shame in addition to fat-shame.
Since I already hated my body, I was only too happy to comply with the Purity Rules.
It wasn’t going to be hard for me to remain a virgin, since I was convinced that my body made me unlovable to potential boyfriends. I was terrified that a boy might ask me out, and then find out that my body was ugly and worthless. But as long as I kept myself under wraps, no one could see my fat and no one could touch my vagina. I was safe, on all counts.
I bought into the lies—all of them. Fat-shaming and slut-shaming are two sides of the same destructive coin. Both tell girls that they are no more than their bodies. What the church likes to call “the world” (media, culture, whatever) tells us our bodies aren’t good enough because our thighs are too big, our breasts are too small, and the scale reads too high. The church tells us our bodies aren’t good enough because our beauty holds the key to leading boys and men into sin. Either way, we become nothing beyond our bodies.
As an adult, I’ve faced much of the same body-shame. Every time someone I haven’t seen in a while says, “You look good, like you’ve lost some weight,” I die a little on the inside. It’s not a compliment. It means those people thought I needed to lose some weight, that my body was substandard before. It means those people had little interest in me beyond whether or not I am thin enough for their liking. And it hurts.
It makes me want to run away, to cover my body and tell them they can’t look at it.
But I refuse to do that. I refuse to compliment anyone on her weight loss, because my friends mean more to me than what they look like or what the scale says. I refuse to send dear ones into a crisis of disordered eating because I made them feel ashamed of the good, beautiful bodies they live inside. I refuse to see the ones I love as merely a body.
I refuse to see myself that way.
I refuse to insist on some unattainable standard of purity, including shaming girls and women into covering up their bodies to keep men from lusting after them. I refuse to confirm the lie that rape is about sex or lust or a woman’s failure to keep men from desiring her body. I refuse to teach my daughter that she needs to fear boys or her body or sex or her own sexuality.
I am more than a body.
My daughter is more than a body.
You are more than a body.
We are more than the fat we possess or don’t possess or wish we didn’t possess. We are more than hips and breasts and vaginas, more than objects of lust (because we’re told we should be or because we’re told we shouldn’t). We are more than the clothes with which we cover our shame.
We have souls. We think, we love, we laugh. We weep. We cry out in anger at the injustice done to our bodies: the ways in which culture, the church, our families try to own them. We fight back, demanding to own ourselves, to end the cycles of shame and violence done to us.
I don’t believe I will ever be fully beyond the struggle to accept my body. Perhaps that’s why I fight so hard for those who have been shamed for who they are. Deep inside, I will probably never see myself the way God sees me. I will always be, in some way, that little girl crying in her bed at night because another classmate called her fat and ugly.
But I’m learning. Every day, I tell myself that those words are lies. Every day, I remind myself that God doesn’t need me to look just right or wear the right clothes or hide inside myself or pretend that the feminine parts of my body don’t exist. Every day, I fight back a little harder against the power of those lies. Every day, I win back a little more of my soul.
What lies do you need to deny in your life?
