I once made the grave mistake of sharing some of my writing with a man I didn’t know very well. A few days later, he teased me: “Do you write about anything besides how you feel about your body?”
Why did that hurt my feelings so much? It troubled me for years — it still does. I’m starting to conclude that I can’t write about who I am — a woman, and a non-white one — without writing about my body.
To write about being a woman is to write about the body, and often what men have done to it. The body that is killed for not being willing. The body that can’t help being racial. The body that is surveilled in public. The body that is groped. The body that is fat-shamed and slut-shamed and catcalled and roofied and raped and victim-blamed and abused and critiqued and measured and objectified and forsaken by healthcare and impregnated and torn apart and expected to do it all while remaining hairless and a size 4. I’m obsessed with my body because everyone else is. But for that man (who, might I mention, once wrote like 2,000 words about having diarrhea in an airport bathroom), my dwelling on the body made my writing smaller, somehow. Gimmicky.
But that’s the one place that women can regain control over our bodies: in writing, where we can imagine what the world would look like if the slate of threats and insults listed above were wiped clean. Or, we can communicate clearly what it feels like to inhabit these bodies and the damage they’ve borne. But it’s increasingly clear that even that realm is still one in which our bodies are subject to male abuse. For example: Perhaps the body that chooses not to have a child deserves to die. Or, the body that doesn’t choose to give sex should be distributed like a toy. Or the body that fears rape should just go to a school with a dry campus and gender segregation.
Why is it considered morally just or ideologically necessary to give a megaphone to men that write about women’s bodies like this? These views are infuriating — but that doesn’t mean they’re new, or different, or even interesting. They’re actually all incredibly antiquated and stale, products of a history that has never treated the woman’s body as autonomous. But the entertainment of these ideas, and these men, just goes to show that our society, and as a result, much of our media, still values the male ego over the female body.
Why isn’t a larger acknowledgement of the daily, constant trauma we experience, and an agreement that we have the right to control our own bodies in an effort to combat that trauma, more important than how well some “talented” “writer” can use them as rhetorical tools to make a “logical” argument? At best, treating these views as acceptable is disrespectful and insulting to women; at worst, it’s just something I’d add to my long list of abusive behaviors above. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be written about. I’m just saying that you can respect our bodies by letting us be the ones who write about them.
— Natalie, who has a body
ROXANE GAY
Roxane is a writer, speaker, editor, and professor best known for her essay collection, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, her memoir. Her Twitter is incredible, she takes no shit from body-shamers, and she recently edited a collection of essays about rape culture and its consequences. She also partnered with Medium to create Unruly Bodies, a pop-up magazine “exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies — the emotional, the psychological, the cultural, and the scientific.” You should read every last piece in it.
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Carmen is a writer, editor, and National Book Award finalist. Her story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is too varied and incredible to define with one genre, and was on pretty much everyone’s “Best Books of 2017” lists. The stories are part fairy-tale, part fantasy, part realism, part murder mystery — and they’re all about the way women’s bodies can be turned against them, or reclaimed. She also contributed to Roxane’s Unruly Bodies series.
MONICA BEVERLY HILLZ
Monica was a contestant on Season Five of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and she came out as a transgender woman during her time on the show. She recently wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in response to RuPaul’s comment that trans women shouldn’t be accepted on the show, saying that “trans women of color specifically have helped shape and elevate audiences’ highest expectations for drag queens and nightlife performers. Trans women of color have put their bodies on the line. They threw some of the first bricks at Stonewall to demand for our rights and snatched national titles in the drag pageantry scene.” Her ownership of her body makes her a role model for all of us.
Token is a project by Ari Curtis and Natalie Chang that celebrates the work and worth of women of color. Subscribe here to get the latest issues in your inbox.
