{"id":37600,"date":"2011-09-03T10:11:21","date_gmt":"2011-09-03T15:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=37600"},"modified":"2015-09-20T00:04:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T05:04:54","slug":"body-therapy-for-your-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/09\/03\/body-therapy-for-your-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Body Therapy for Your Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent interview at The Consensual Project<\/a>, I was asked if I’d ever seen any “…videos, images, or sound bites that have provided [me] with valuable sexual health information.” I recounted this experience:<\/p>\n

There is one video I saw, when I was about 21, that stands out in my mind even today… \u00a0The filmmaker asked about 40 women to stand naked, side-by-side, on the edge of a stage.\u00a0 The camera captured the appearance of their bodies from about the neck to the knees, no faces, just bodies. (I don\u2019t know if it was ever publicly available, but if anyone can send it to me, I\u2019d be\u00a0thrilled<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Think about how rarely you actually see a new (near-)naked body that is not a model or the equivalent (actress etc).\u00a0 With new sexual partners, perhaps.\u00a0 And if you\u2019re straight, this is (probably mostly) going to be the body of the other sex.\u00a0 At the gym perhaps?\u00a0 But you\u2019re not supposed to look, so you probably don\u2019t look closely.\u00a0 I realized when I saw this video (it probably lasted all of two minutes), that I had never really seen women\u2019s bodies outside of the mass media. I didn\u2019t know what women\u2019s bodies looked like.\u00a0 And I had been comparing my body to that of actresses and models.\u00a0 I realized that day that things about my body that I thought were horrible deformities were completely normal<\/em>.\u00a0 Even though the bodies in that video were all different, they were also very similar, and my body looked just like theirs in some cumulative way.\u00a0 From that point on, I knew I wasn\u2019t gross.\u00a0 A simple lesson.\u00a0 And so important, but a really hard one to encounter in a powerful way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was reminded of this story when I saw a photograph by Spencer Tunick<\/a>. \u00a0Tunick specializes is getting large numbers of naked people together, arranging them, and taking pictures. \u00a0Most of them seem more polished than raw, but this one, featured at BoingBoing<\/a>, seems to reveal bodies in some of their variety and similarity simultaneously. \u00a0It’s worth a good long look at each body; each is a precious point of push back against mass media’s representation of the female form.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent interview at The Consensual Project, I was asked if I’d ever seen any “…videos, images, or sound bites that have provided [me] with valuable sexual health information.” I recounted this experience: There is one video I saw, when I was about 21, that stands out in my mind even today… \u00a0The filmmaker […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8070,218,55,2103,129],"class_list":["post-37600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-artliterature","tag-bodies","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37600"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67963,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37600\/revisions\/67963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}