Do not sleep with people too quickly, but don’t be a prude about it. Don’t talk about having sex unless you’re being flirtatious and no one else but your intended sex partner can hear, but again, don’t be frigid about sex when it comes up. Joke, but don’t be crass. Certainly don’t ever say “making love.”
Respond to texts in a timely—but not clingy!—manner.
Be a leader at work without being a bitch. Don’t be hands-on or hands-off. Your hands should be lingering over the project like those of a Reiki healer.I
Be warm without being overly chipper. We want enthusiasm, but tone it down. Again, you need to be approachable should anyone—especially a straight white cis man—want to talk to you. But don’t approach him, unless being bold is his whole thing and he loves it when people approach him. Then you should do it. But even if you do approach him and that is his thing, don’t give him the wrong idea. If you’re there to talk business, don’t wear clothes that would make him think about something horny like shoulders, okay?
Not sure what to tell you about nipple appearance. I’m personally confused on this one. If you know what’s “in” for nipples, let me know. Basically: whatever nipples you have and wherever they are is probably wrong.
Be outdoorsy, but don’t go overboard with it. No one likes people who talk about their little weekend camping trips or how many national parks they’ve visited. Boring! Post a couple of photos every month where you look hot (while outside) in your Instagram stories and be done with it.
Know and appreciate art and have clearly formed opinions based on that wealth of knowledge about what is good and bad art. Have conversations but not debates, and frequently concede that the other person is making good points. Make sure your tastes are refined and unique. You don’t want basic-ass Art History 101 opinions, okay? But also don’t show off about how much you know about art. That’s tacky.
Keep your carbon footprint at zero. By accident.
Be interested in sports, but not more interested than your closest male friend or lover. They should know more than you, but you should be an attentive listener if they want to talk about it. Do not correct them or teach them anything. Occasionally demonstrate arcane sports knowledge, but only if you’re agreeing with and building on their point. You may tease lightly if you meet someone who is a fan of a rival team, but don’t let things get actually heated.
Do not watch reality TV of any kind; double no to anything from the Bachelor franchise. The Twilight Zone is fairly universal, but be ready to critique it if need be. Have well-informed, positive opinions on The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men. Do not watch shows with female leads unless the show is universally acclaimed and beloved.
As for film, documentaries are mostly acceptable as long as you aren’t too into them, as are some—not all!—films with Leo DiCaprio in them and some—not all!—Steven Spielberg productions. Don’t get smart about it. You can enjoy classical rom-coms but only the really good ones (ones with male main characters). The Godfather: Part II was the best movie sequel of all time, but you also loved Magic Mike XXL (unless you’re talking to someone who would be threatened by a male stripper movie) and Paddington 2. You’ve never seen Mamma Mia! or Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, but depending on the crowd, you’ve either been meaning to watch it or you don’t get the hype.
Be allergic to something that doesn’t ruin everyone else’s good time because it’s a fun little quirk but we don’t want to all have to stop eating shellfish around you.
Own a KitchenAid mixer, but one you didn’t pay for (again, gauche to spend that much on a mixer!). Maybe you got it when your old roommate died? Her mom wanted you to have it? But if you do say where it’s from, be a little poignant about it. Don’t just say, “It’s my old dead roommate’s.”
Do NOT win too many Oscars!
Do NOT receive too many birthday wishes on Instagram!
Do not complain, ever, about any of the things you are experiencing on any level, other than the occasional nod to your grandmother’s brave fight against breast cancer. Nota bene: you remain upbeat about her prognosis.
Don’t talk about it or anything, but have a cool job title. No one needs to hear about the day in, day out of your perfectly nonthreatening job. Obviously, you don’t want to be too ambitious, so it’s not like you’re at the top of your field, but you are respected. It’s a good job in a competitive market, but you didn’t take it away from anyone who might deserve it more, like someone’s nephew.
Never smell bad, ever. Even after a seven-mile hike in 90 percent humidity.
Have a hairless asshole. Your butthole doesn’t even need waxing. It’s hairless?? Somehow?? (Unless hairy buttholes are hot to the person you’re showing your butthole to. Then, well, it’s butthole wig time.)
Like music. When confronted with new music, you reply, “Oooh, I really like this. Who is it?” and let someone introduce you to a new artist. Everything that you’ve already heard before? Love it. Unless it’s bad, of course.
Love yourself, but don’t go nuts, okay? And don’t hate yourself out loud. No one wants to hear that.
Sorry, Dove, but I Am Never Going to Love My Body
When I was sixteen, I lost a bunch of weight. That is the easy, painless baby-shoes-never-worn way to tell the story. The truth is that when I was sixteen, like pulling the emergency brake on the highway, I switched from one eating disorder (food addiction) to another (anorexia). I would love to show and not tell you what happened then, scenes of how I counted calories and starved myself into submission, but I don’t think what I did belongs on a page. People describing their weight-loss efforts—both healthy and unhealthy—still often triggers my brain; it makes me think, Hey, you should probably not eat for a while. And I don’t want to put anything like that into the world. I don’t want to make it seem cool or okay or even effective. It was painful and awful. I couldn’t concentrate at school a lot. I fought with my mother constantly. I missed my period. I was tired all the time and hungry even more often. But being thin felt like being good.
Everyone around me, with the exception of my mother, loved my weight loss. Doctors congratulated me on a BMI that was finally “healthy,” relatives were proud of how little I ate, friends told me how good I looked, I got better roles in the school play. I was still larger than most people my age, so it was likely difficult to see from the outside what was really going on, and what it was was self-harm. There’s no other way to put it.
Right in the throes of my own anorexia, my cousin died from the disease. She was ten years older than I was and had been anorexic for many years. No one knew it was coming and no one thought her situation was that dire. After my cousin’s death, my mother became fanatical about my health, understandably, if not helpfully. What had been concern before turned into a full-court press against the disorder. Of course, while she did everything out of love and desperation, no one can decide for you when you’re done with your eating disorder the same way no one can make you be less depressed.
I would love to tell you exactly what helped me recover from anorexia, but mostly I think it was just the passage of time. My inclination to starve myself tapered off slowly in fits and starts. I saw mental health experts who may have helped and ones who certainly didn’t. I hope dearly that if you are experiencing any kind of disordered eating, you seek out the help of professionals, because disordered eating is deadly. But I cannot tell you specifically what worked for me. What I know is that I went from fat to average-size and I did it in an unhealthy way and everyone was happy for me. I still hated my body.
* * *
“Learn to love your body to boost your daughter’s self-confidence.” That is the title of a real page on Dove’s website. (Dove calls their campaign the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which makes me want to crash a board meeting and projectile vomit on their CEO.) The company that also owns Axe body spray wants to remind you that stretch marks are tiger stripes or some corny shit. Click here to learn how to love your fleshy con
tainer.
Someone over at Corporations decided that the best way to help women to not feel like shit about their bodies after years of making them feel like shit about their bodies was to simply tell them to love their bodies. Sometimes this is also said as “Love yourself!” Because as we all know (and love), women are their bodies. Where men are allowed the nuance and grace to be any one of dozens of things—a pilot, an asshole, Christopher Walken, sensitive, the best third baseman of all time—if you’re a woman, you are your body until proven otherwise. Corporate America said: we know you’ve been taught to hate your body, to obsess over it. We’re not going to change that fixation. We agree. You are your body. But we can’t tell you you’re ugly anymore (it’s not the ’70s), so instead, we’ll put the onus on you to love your body. With the help of our products. Remember, ladies: you are not a person with a body, you are a body with a person inside.
Even if you get into Harvard Law School—what, like it’s hard?—people will go out of their way to make sure to let you know that they’ve consumed your body and what they’ve concluded. You could be the most famous model in the world and people you will never meet will still let you know that they wouldn’t sleep with you. I get a lot of messages from people on Twitter that are very kind about my writing, which is lovely, and I can’t say enough how much it means to me. However, about 90 percent of the messages from men include a note about my appearance. I’m not exaggerating at all; I’m probably underestimating. It’s always some version of, “Sophie,I I loved your article this morning. You’re very smart. Keep up the good work! And also, you’re sexy in your profile picture. I thought I had to tell you. If you’re ever in Boston, let me buy you a drink!” What the fuck, dude? First of all, I’m never getting a drink with anyone. Secondly, leave my body out of it. My big honkin’ titties didn’t write the piece; leave them alone. Somehow, because I’m a woman, the way I look is relevant to my work and how much these people support it. It’s relevant all the time because I am my body!!!
Remember, ladies: you are your body and you better fucking love your body.
Well, guess what? I’m never going to get there!
This is not to say that I don’t love other people’s bodies or that I think you ought not to love yours. There is no good reason—not a single valid reason—that any of us have to not love our bodies in theory. The problem is practice. The problem is fighting against all the messages we receive that our bodies are less than, shitty, broken. The problem is European beauty standards, the problem is objectification, the problem is our obsession with thinness, and if not that, then thinness disguised as fitness or thinness disguised as health. The problem is doubled and tripled and thousandfolded if you’re not white, if you’re not able-bodied, if you’re not cis, if you’re nonbinary.
All the “Love your body” messaging leaves absolutely no room for people who have body issues or body-image issues. Just look at the way the movement treats people who have just given birth. It tells them their stretch marks are battle scars and that they have to be thankful for their belly skin because it gave them a baby. Let me be perfectly clear: it’s lovely if you genuinely feel that way about your body post-baby! But what about people who don’t? Imagine going through a process where you gain twenty-five to seventy-five pounds (or more! or less!). Your vagina rips to your asshole, you shit yourself in front of strangers, your bladder never works quite right again, your abs get shredded (and not in the six-pack way), your feet change size, your hair falls out, your boobs sag forevermore, and there is no room for you to talk about how hard that might be to cope with because you’re supposed to love your body the whole time. Even as American society has made it clear that mothers we’d like to fuck are the exception rather than the rule. And God forbid you go through any of those body changes without a baby to show for it!
Well, I’m not going to love my body. I’ve been told too many times in too many ways what is wrong with me (my body) for me to realistically get there. I’ve been told by Target clothing sizes that my rib cage is too big. I’ve been told by Kelly Ripa getting plastic surgery on her earlobes that mine are too stretched out. I’ve been told by ad campaigns that I’m supposed to (I think?) bleach my asshole, even though I have no earthly idea what that means or does and very little interest in looking it up. Loving my body is not an achievable goal. I’ve done lots of cool things with my body. I’ve played ice hockey and eaten an entire pan of Rice Krispies Treats in one day and given a blow job in a bathtub. I’ve had eight surgeries and I’ll probably need more. My body has done cool shit and I still don’t love her and I don’t think it’s a realistic aim. The same body that has allergic reactions to everything? The body that has IBS and chronic UTIs? The body that has bad hips at age twenty-seven? The body with the titty tumor? The body that gets shoulder acne every single time I work out no matter how fast I take off my sweaty sports bra? Not happening! I don’t have the fucking energy!
The reality is I’m allowed to hate my body and not hate myself. I’m allowed to look in the mirror and not like my thighs. Are my thighs beautiful? YES. Is someone else with exactly my thighs hot? YES. Is it okay if on occasion I absorb the harmful messaging of the world and agree that my cellulite is ugly? YES. It’s not my fault. I am not my body—a lesson I learned from a somewhat ironic source: body dysmorphia.
When I came into college, I was still anorexic. I was better than in high school, but I was not in the clear. I worked out constantly and felt guilty every time I left the dining hall. By the end of my sophomore year, I had relaxed my insane calorie counting a bit—mostly because of the unpredictability of college and how hard it was to keep up with, and also because I was tired, honestly. It’s very, very, very exhausting to use up your brain space knowing the exact calorie count of every type of fruit. I have slowly gotten better and better at labeling unhealthy thoughts, at recognizing when I’m trying to harm and punish my body. I stopped weighing myself three and four times a day; I even went about six years without weighing myself or knowing my weight at all. At the doctor’s office, I would make them not tell me what I weighed. Is it perfectly healthy to know that I might become emotionally unmoored just by hearing the number? No. Probably not. But it’s healthier than checking in on that number every six hours. I stopped working out every single day eventually. Mostly because I got busy and worked about sixty hours a week, not out of any true sense of health or balance. Once I got busier, however, once I had things to actually do and take care of in my life outside of trying to be thinner, I got better at not starving myself. Slowly.
But despite my eating habits stabilizing, my body dysmorphia didn’t abate. I don’t know when exactly it started, because by definition, body dysmorphia is about not knowing what your body really looks like; I don’t know precisely when the two images of my body—the real one and the one in my head—diverged in the woods. If you don’t have body dysmorphia, well, frankly, I don’t even know how you operate. What must it be like? One time someone tweeted—and I can’t find the tweet, or otherwise I would tell you which brilliant angel wrote this—that body dysmorphia feels like they made your whole brain out of the deep shame response you feel after you’ve come and porn is still playing. Like your whole life is that weird, disgusted-with-yourself feeling.
And at its worst, that is how I’ve felt. Now, however, after years of eating disorder recovery and reminding myself that my brain cannot be trusted in matters of personal body shape detection, mostly my body dysmorphia manifests as me having no fucking clue as to what I look like. I think it’s why I’ve always been so fascinated with mirrors. It’s not out of a sense of vanity, which I assure you I would own up to. It’s because before I arrive in the mirror, I have virtually no idea as to what I’ll see. I simply don’t remember what Sophia Benoit looks like. I cannot conjure up an image of myself in my head. In a way, I became separate from my body.
I probably first became unattached from my body when I got fat. When you’re fat, people love to remind you that you are
not really your body. Your real body is hiding somewhere under there, only a few decades of starvation away.II I suppose it was messaging like that that first led me away from my body. Because you’re supposed to believe that you aren’t a fat person, that you’re a thin person waiting to get out of a fat person’s body. And in the meantime, everyone is going to keep reminding you constantly that you are currently fat. It’s like if you were stuck in a well and every single person in the town gathered around the well every morning to shout down, “Hey, you’re stuck in a well!” Fucking thanks! I got it!
My body dysmorphia, and years of weight changes and hyperfocus on my appearance, has made it impossible for me to figure out what the hell I look like. I have a warped, distorted memory of myself where sometimes I completely forget that I don’t look like an Instagram model who has been a size 2 or less her whole life, and sometimes I assume I look like a trash bag full of mashed potatoes that was left out in the sun for six days and then dressed up in clothes that you found in the lost and found of a small-town ice rink. Sometimes I forget that I have (or am?) a body that can be seen by other people at all! I used to beg my college roommate to point out people who were my size so that I could see what I look like; she (rightfully!) refused. I find myself shocked when people recognize me after a few interactions, even if I recognize them, too. I live next door to a pizza place and I walk my dog past the front patio at least three times a day and I still was surprised they recognized me when I dyed my hair blond. I’m never sure what I’m presenting to other people and therefore I assume everyone else is unsure of what I’m presenting to them.
One of the best tools for fighting off my body dysmorphia came from the most unexpected source: selfies. You know in Peter Pan how Peter loses his shadow and has to chase it around so that he can sew it back to himself? Selfies became the sewing needle for me to figure out what the hell I look like, for me to reattach my body to myself. If not completely, then at least a little bit.
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