Pride & Softness

(I’m finally eeking this Pride month essay out before the end of the month. Been feeling kinda bleh about writing and putting stuff out there. I mostly just wish we all could be patient with ourselves as we keep bumping up against ourselves and others. If reading this feels nice to you, please do. Either way, I hope you’re able to find some way to sink into your wisdom today. You already have what it takes. But nonetheless…)

Happy Pride month. Or as I’ve been saying this year, gird your loins for Pride month. The vibes seems slightly off. But nonetheless, here we are.

June always makes me think about the mysterious mix of joy, connection, social stratification, and surveillance I feel at Pride events. Last year at my city’s Pride block party, my brain and body kept toggling between 1) a deep sense of awe regarding the queer people I was celebrating with and 2) a sense of wondering if I “measured up” to the what was expected of me. This year will be the same.

There’s soooo much to explore there, but right now I’m narrowing in a bit on the body norms (surprise, surprise). A while back I read a nightmare of a book called The Adonis Complex. It was written in 2000 about the “epidemic” of body distress among boys and men. At the time it was published, it was groundbreaking. Scholars were shocked to learn that boys and men had body image issues, too. But reading through today’s lens, it all but ignores the existence of gay men, *definitely* ignores the existence of trans men, and only mentions gay men in kinda homophobic, stereotypical ways. I wrote about this last October.

For all I could complain about the book, something that stood out to me was the ubiquity of the stomach as a hang-up for men—and people of all genders—at that time. Nothing has changed. I’ve anecdotally known this through my work in the eating disorder world and conversations with friends (and an awareness of my own body process), but I hadn’t seen it so starkly in an academic sense.

Piece by Keith Haring

I’m curious about why the stomach can be such a hangup. There’s the obvious—models with rock hard abs showing up on everything from underwear ads to pharmacy commercials, on Instagram feeds, on TV… This gives us the sense that the default, correct, and desirable body is one with an impossibly flat stomach and visible abs, something that is famously hard to achieve for the majority of people.

Deeper than the bodies we see on ads, I’m curious why so many of us feel the need to fight the softness of our stomachs. Is there something about that area of our bodies that feels particularly vulnerable? Or is it completely random?

Bringing in an older but timeless book, The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker) is a 1970s exploration of the ways we humans try to deny the reality of our deaths. Religion is of course one of the ways we pretend we’ll live forever. Heaven means that the end of this life is just the beginning of a better life (and one where we’ll all be thin and have muscles, according to the pastor of the church I grew up in).

Becker writes about the ways our bodies inherently remind us of our physical vulnerabilities and impending deaths. The softness of our bodies reminds us that we aren’t statues of stone that will last centuries. Our bodies are soft, animal things that lean towards aging, softness, dying, and eventual decay. Pursuing hard muscles—waging war on bodily softness—may help us feel invincible to the natural order of things.

This resonates with me. The stomach represents more than desirability and conventional attractiveness. It represents the lack of control we have over our bodies, to cram them into social ideals. It represents the physical vulnerability of our internal organs, especially those in our abdomen that don’t have a rib-cage of protection. It represents our tenderness. It often represents the distance between our bodies and the “ideal.” For some, it represents being teased, doctor’s gatekeeping care, social isolation, shame, and oppression.

It’s no wonder many of us are left pursuing flat stomachs and hard abs, fighting the reality of our bodies. It also has us grasping for ways to ignore or distance ourselves from the reality of natural aging and change. Hence, the stomach has a chokehold on many of us, and so much of the “getting ready for Pride” chatter involves shrinking that part of our bodies.

The same could be said about any area of our bodies and any social event. When we bring ourselves to a social space, we bring our physical, emotional, social, and existential baggage—acknowledged or not. At least I am.

A few years back I found myself particularly held back by body concerns around Pride. I thought, “Look at me, trying to shove myself in a tidy little body box, after working so hard to free myself from the tidy little sexuality box I escaped.” It helped me consider that Pride is about liberation and expansion, but that the ways I was primed to embody it was through restriction and shrinking.

In therapy-speak, this “zooming out” is called observational distance. When we observe our thoughts and emotions from a little distance, we’re often more able to have patience and understanding for the ways we try to cope.

Practicing this observational distance has been super helpful as I navigate these silly little Pride events and life in general. We’re just soft little animals trying to have fun at a little queer event, trying to get through the day, trying to feel some kind of safe in our bodies.

Maybe in some way we can befriend the softness of our bodies, or the ways our bodies exist outside ideals of youth, size, gender… I celebrate my queerness because of it’s stubborn refusal to fit into the ideals of my environment, and I’m grateful to continue this process with my body and mind.

So again, happy Pride to all you queers and allies. It’s a rare time for us queer people to celebrate how far we’ve come, to mourn what many of us have had to hold, and to assert our presence—in this world and in our bodies.