#19 - Just 100 years, if we're lucky
On bodies
Hey everyone!
Unbeknownst to them, this photo essay is inspired by my neighbours and Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body. It explores bodies as vehicles – for money and identity, for empowerment and creativity. Drafted almost a year ago, I dusted it off as a reminder that everything passes.
Blessings e beijos do Rio,
Jodi
Though unintentional, the windows in our new apartment have been ignored, creating a flurry of incidental observations and inferences about my neighbours. In a dilapidated penthouse, where pools of blank gunk drip down the balcony, smearing into an incoherent inkblot worthy of a psychoanalytical investigation until it eventually fades from view, an elderly couple go about their business. A woman, in a string bikini sandwiched between cascading, baguette-esque rolls, stands with her hands on her back, gazing into the soft blue sky. Puffy clouds float by. Little birds jump from feeder to nearby branch. A yellow umbrella casts a pocket of shade. She sits for a moment. Eventually, she hangs tea towels on the laundry rack, her butt crack intermittently exposed as she bends up and down, up and down, for clothespins.
A couple of floors down from her stands a topless man with his elbows perched along the windowsill. His exponential chest hair, curling into a carpet-like forcefield, attracts my attention. I’m staring. He lights a cigarette. Like me, he’s alone. I wonder if he too is scanning my features, consuming my appearance?
Whether by sheer proximity or global star power, some bodies consume more of our attention than others. In her eleven-essay memoir, model Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body tells her story as a short, gorgeous, middle-class American trying to pursue life on her own terms. She shares insight into what she knew of her motivations and insecurities at the time, what it feels like looking back, and lets us in behind the scenes of what can easily look like an enviable situation.
I like her bluntness when she writes things like, “I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect,” and her pragmatism resonated with me:
“Money meant freedom and control, and all I had to do to fund my independence was learn to become someone else a few times a week: strip down and get greased up in body oil to pose suggestively in red lace lingerie or brightly printed bikinis I’d never choose to wear, pouting at the command of some middle-aged male photographer.” - p. 29
All she had to do to make money was “learn to be someone else”. That’s one hell of a way to summarize Marx’s theory of alienation. It’s one hell of a way so many of us make a living.
Still, what I most took away from her memoir is something else. At the outset, Emily reinforces an attractive narrative (my emphasis added):
“I’ve capitalized on my body within the confines of a cis-hetero, capitalist, patriarchal world, one in which beauty and sex appeal are valued solely through the satisfaction of the male gaze. Whatever influence and status I’ve gained were only granted to me because I appealed to men. My position brought me in close proximity to wealth and power and brought me some autonomy, but it hasn’t resulted in true empowerment. That’s something I’ve gained only now, having written these essays and given voice to what I’ve thought and experienced.” p. 5-6
Like many others, she espouses the notion that to feel empowered, we must finish something. Contain it, and make it our own. It’s not that I think this is wrong. The writer in me actually wants to take this to heart. It’s that I think it misses the point.
We can say what needs to be said, write what needs to be written, or paint what needs to be painted, then something else happens. We feel small again. It seems to me that whatever true empowerment is, is a constant negotiation with who we think we are, the choices we make, and the circumstances we find ourselves in. As crucially important as these acts are to our well-being, for me, it’s not about the conversation we finally had or the book we wrote. It’s about living with the constraints of our physical bodies, our human condition. It’s about exploring all the things we aren’t, just as much as it’s about the things we’ve done. Like any other virtue, we will never be empowered. But if we’re lucky, sometimes we’ll feel it in our bones.
Like our thoughts and feelings, we are not our bodies.
And like our thoughts and feelings, our bodies show us who we are, what matters, and why.
How beautiful it is that both things can be true.
How tempting it is to make it not so.
Closing on a personal note, my husband has gotten into quite the fitness regimen lately. Me too, kinda, even though he says I do “grannie” workouts. We talk about our bodies – how they’ve changed, improvements we want to make. We look at old pictures, way before we knew the other existed. Laugh at his skinny legs and big ears, giggle at my pudgy cheeks and overall girth. He looks at me, places his palm on my chest and says, “this, this just lasts 100 years if we’re lucky. It’s in here that matters.”
Our bodies are what we’re made of.
Our bodies mean nothing.
How beautiful it is that both things can be true.
How tempting it is to make it not so.
You are Incredible!!! Te amo
Wow, I love it Jodi... There's so much in here about time and materiality, and the not necessarily contradictory fleeting and constant nature of both. Love all the parallels and paradoxes you play with here! Bisous, xx.