by DANI CUGINI
i. Here is a set of words: object-body consciousness. Here is an equivalent set of words: we are taught to define ourselves from the outside. And by 'we' I mean everyone and by 'we' I mean everyone-but-particularly-women. At the milder end of this affliction, girls and women are preoccupied with their exterior reflecting their inner identity, or how they want to project that inner identity; they devote time to cultivating a style, they're self-conscious about attributes that they feel indicate some inner fault or contamination (everything from acne to uncooperative hair to a spilling-over laugh). I call that the milder end, because at the severer end, there isn't an inner identity. Without your exterior, and without feedback, you have very little idea who you are. You are 'taught' who you are by others. Legions of women look at themselves in every reflective surface they can find, and there's a reason sharper than vanity for it: looking in the mirror is how we learn to remind ourselves who we are. ii. Tomorrow, I will go to the gym and do a 90-minute set that includes a cardio warmup and cooldown, banded chin-ups, dumbbell step-ups, military press, back extensions, bodyweight hip thrusts, hip raises and planks ('light' day). I learned what all those things are via YouTube. The gym's usually pretty quiet, though occasionally there's a group of schoolboys who never put away their damn equipment and go at the rower like they're trying to slip a disc. While I'm doing this stuff, I occasionally see myself in the mirror, slumped over a bench after a gruelling set or putting equipment together. But when I'm lifting stuff I can't concentrate on the mirror, because I'll drop the metal thing on myself and have to go to A&E. My existence is not outside-in ('how do I look when I'm pushing this dumbbell off my chest?'), but, rather, how I experience that moment is driven by an action my body has to do: get this weight off my chest and bring it back down, preferably without dropping it. Staring at ourselves in the mirror is a kind of paralysis. How do we combat paralysis? Activity. iii. Lifting weights profoundly differs from cardio because you can't, within reason, use it to punish yourself. You can, regrettably, hate yourself around a running track a few times, but no amount of frustration or worry will make you hate-press a 30kg weight if your arms haven't been conditioned for it. It's a type of exercise that relies on you treating your body well (eat enough, sleep enough, don't overexert yourself), and treating yourself with respect. You have to be present and focused. My relationship with exercise in first year was that it was a punishment for my stupid self eating too much food. Or a safety net in case my stupid self went and ate too much food again. It felt like I was constantly trying to run away from my need to eat. From my body. This is because I learned early on how I was meant to read bodies, and I read mine as wrong: big legs, broad shoulders (according to one of those bullshit 'body type' sites, I am an 'inverted triangle'. Yep, I'm a Dorito.), round face. I have never 'forgotten' a meal in my goddamn life. I eat and talk and read the same way: voraciously. And I was scared of that, and ashamed of that, because I felt like I was too much, too uncontrolled, too in love with life and food and minutiae and it was embarrassing. So I got caught in a cycle of running away from it because I was scared and then running back to it because I loved it too much. (For context, if you have seen or do see my body, you will gain no sense of this intense bodily drama. My body looks remarkably unremarkable and is stolidly situated within normal limits, is white, slightly-above-average height, and is blessedly undefective. I say this both to emphasise that normality is no predicate to undramatic bodily relations, and to acknowledge that if I wasn't white and able-bodied, I'd probably be writing very differently.) Now, I run to clear my head, and I lift weights because I'm enjoying the semblance of biceps it's given me (an improvement on my previous status of Third Worst Sixth Form Arm Wrestler 2k15). But mostly, I'm enjoying the way it gathers and concentrates my energy, the way it takes all this excess energy I have and drives it into lifting something heavy. Maybe there's a metaphor in that. I'm also doing a dissertation on food and life and minutiae. And pain. Because pain, at root, is indivisible from vitality. iv. I do not give a Fuck how big my butt is. I do not mind if you give a Fuck how big yours is. I merely wanted to state the point, because, as it turns out, I'm part of a trend. A lot of Instagram girls my age have picked up on this hey-you-get-toned-and-empowered-and-you-get-to-eat-more selling point of weightlifting. Sometimes this can be used to break down previous ideas of aesthetics and womanhood, but it often just gets used to reinforce them. 'Sculpting' - a term often used by female lifters - becomes a new democratic aesthetic. Lifting is how you can get the Perfect Body, one specific incarnation of which is 'skinny with a sphenoid ass'. I am not saying that is a bad thing to want. I am saying that it's a shame that we're focusing on aesthetics above function again, because that's a complex inherently oppressive to women. The value is found in the aesthetic (looking like your ass is a space hopper), rather than the internal side (I feel like this, and I can do this). Which leads to the unfortunate state of people getting plastic surgery and then selling impressionable girls guides to 'achieve my body'. It's empowering to be able to shape our bodies through exercise. Developing your own body goals is great, but feeling like we have to match a certain chalk outline to be good enough is disempowering. Not to mention that implying that a certain ideal is achievable by everyone is poison masked as positivity, and ignores differences in, well, pretty much everything. Socioeconomic status, for starters. What fucking 22-year-old can afford that many blueberries? Or that much WheyMax Power Beverage?TM v. Lift weights. Don't lift weights. Do cool shit you want to do with your body. If there's anything I'm waging a war on it's the anxiety, the guilt, the shame, the self-hatred women are taught to carry around with us, the feeling that our bodies are sculptures we're doing time in and need to hack away at with the sledgehammer and Try Harder At, rather than dynamic, functional, individual entities that move way past the physical and static and into incredibly subtle complexes of energy and sensation and interactivity. More basically: I would like to shoot any man or woman who has included the term 'guilt-free' on the advertising for some sort of snack-pack. God that pisses me off. I'm imagining guilt being an allergen, having to assume it's in everything that doesn't specifically say 'guilt-free' on the front. There is no specific food that can possess, or be free of, guilt. Guilt is a state of mind brought about by feeling you've done something wrong. Like eaten too much. Or dared to speak. Or suffocated an advertising executive with a snack-pack. If things get bad enough, trust me, everything you eat feels like guilt. Guilt for being weak enough to need. When I lift weights, it's another way of saying I need to eat and sleep and fuck and write and do things to the air, like taking up space. So I take the bench on the right, and I do not let anyone move me until I'm done.
