Month: April 2015

Naked Empowerment: Why redefining beauty doesn’t go far enough

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The Huffington Post reported Sunday morning on a photographer who is fundraising for “A Beautiful Body Project” to show real women’s bodies—nude or nearly nude—along with inspiring stories about their bodies and their lives, in order to encourage healthy self-esteem. I understand the benefits of women getting to see what other normal, un-photoshopped bodies look like so that they have realistic expectations for their own. I understand the danger of being exposed to countless images of flawless models who embody cultural ideals and who exercise/starve themselves for a living. Most of the time, we don’t see bodies that we can relate to: the bodies of other women working, studying, raising kids, or generally just living life without the supervision of a personal trainer and a nutritionist, or the “luxury” of working out during half of their waking hours. I remember a very liberating and helpful experience during university when the primitive village stay conditions during our semester abroad meant that many of my female friends and I had to live in very close quarters and take “bucket” showers in the same room together. Seeing each other naked resulted in all of us becoming a little less self-conscious and little more accepting of our own bodies as we saw a broad range of body types and physical quirks that were apparently normal, despite never being featured in mainstream media.Still, I have my doubts about this photography project. There’s a big difference between private, interpersonal interactions and public, impersonal displays.

The intentions behind it are good, but after looking through some of the photos, I thought, “This is still women putting themselves on display for the public to scrutinize and discuss. It still feels like female bodies being treated like public property.” Men don’t have to pose naked for photo projects in order to be seen as more than just sex objects, or to have their worth affirmed to them by others’ approving gaze. Maybe trying to reclaim our portrayal in media—by replicating the very kinds of images which have exploited us all along—is not an effective tactic. Maybe the problem with how women are treated in our culture goes deeper than redefining beauty—it goes right down to questioning why it is so important for women to be beautiful in the first place.

There have been photography projects depicting breast cancer survivors (naked), and mothers with their post-partum bodies (naked), but my question is why any of these women need to take off their clothes and have the public declare their bodies beautiful in order for them to feel valued, or in order to be able to accept themselves? Ironically, these campaigns seem to reinforce that the most essential part of one’s being—or of a female’s being, at any rate—is her body. Can we not recognize and honor the whole person without seeing them naked? Does seeing them naked bring us any closer to seeing the most unique and intimate parts of who they are? I’m not convinced that the fascinating complexity of a woman’s mind and heart, all of the experiences and decisions and determination and courage and vulnerability and creativity and whatever else makes her who she is, can be captured in a photo—with or without clothes. I worry that these photo shoots are not empowering enough because they do not question the socially-constructed idea that women must be physically attractive to be happy.

I’m still waiting to see the naked photo shoots of men who have survived prostate cancer, or dads whose bodies have changed due to stress, sleep-deprivation, and missing their morning workouts because they’re busy being parents. Actually, I have no desire to see those photos, but the point is this: I highly doubt that any of these campaigns are forthcoming, because men don’t have to be deemed physically attractive (within a narrow, cultural definition or otherwise) in order to be taken seriously in society. No one assumes that a man will have lower self-esteem because of his sagging chest or pot belly or graying hair or wrinkled jowls. Though I realize that many men do struggle with physical insecurities in the hyper-sexualized advertising wasteland we all inhabit, they do not face the same blunt message that women do of needing to be physically attractive to matter.

That is why, although I applaud the spirit behind what this photographer is doing, these bare-all campaigns to redefine beauty will ultimately fall short of garnering respect for women as whole people. They fail to bring us closer to gender equality because they play along with the unchallenged assumptions that physical beauty is a prerequisite for female self-esteem, and that it’s the most important aspect of a woman’s identity.

Faith in food

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A wolf in sheep’s clothing: Monsanto’s public relations campaign. In North America, farmers often find themselves bullied into buying Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds or else sued for growing copyrighted Monsanto crop varieties after accidental cross-pollination from neighboring GMO fields. In India, the cycles of debt created by reliance on the company’s GMO seeds have led to a dramatic spike in farmer suicides in recent years.

                   This week I had lunch with a human rights activist from Latin America who was forced to seek political asylum in Canada a few years ago because his work with peasant farmers in his home country had put his life in danger. Monsanto came up in our conversation, and although this activist’s work with land rights did not directly concern this corporate giant, he said that Monsanto was very active in his home country and he could see the negative effects of a single company taking control of the food supply. Once someone has power over food and water, he says, they are in complete control: you will either eat and drink what they give you or you will die. He hypothesizes that one day corporations will commodify respiration itself by forcing people to pay for the privilege of air that is clean enough to breathe.Such a situation is not so far-fetched. In polluted cities in Beijing and Shanghai, air quality is already so bad that people are already wearing face masks outside much of the time and clamoring to buy air filters for their homes and offices. And since wealthier communities have more social power to back up their demands of “not in my backyard,” heavy polluters like oil refineries and petro-chemical plants often end up in the backyards of people too poor or marginalized in society to resist. Canada’s “Chemical Valley,” where the population of an impoverished First Nations reservation is submerged in the poisonous haze of the highly concentrated oil refineries and petro-chemical plants which surround them, is a dramatic example. But nationwide across the United States, studies have shown that people in nonwhite, low-income areas are breathing in more hazardous particles than people in affluent, white ones–in other words, air pollution disproportionately affects the poor. So perhaps clean air has already become a privilege rather than the basic right or the common grace provided by God to everything that has breath.The corporations which have the greatest effects on our food, water, and air today are larger than the economies of many of the countries in which they operate. They are also more powerful than the governments of the nations where they do business, and since their bottom line is profit rather than the welfare of the places where they harvest, manufacture, or sell their products, their ability to operate above (or in some cases, dictate) the law is incredibly dangerous. As we speak, seventeen of the world’s top oncologists have just released a report warning that the main ingredient in most commonly used herbicide in the world, Monsanto’s RoundUp, probably causes cancer. Monsanto is fighting to have the report retracted–but this is not surprising, given that the company depends on this chemical for $6 billion in profits every year. One way of resisting Monsanto’s choke-hold on the international food system and their ability to operate at the expense of human health is to sign this petition calling for health authorities in the United States, Brazil, the European Union, and elsewhere to take the alarming findings of this new study into account and to ensure that that the public is not exposed to glyphosate until it can be proven safe.

The dangerous trend in our food system of power being concentrate in fewer and fewer [corporate] hands is something that cannot be adequately addressed by something as simple as signing a petition, though our signature may be a significant, small component of broad-based resistance. It is necessary to start somewhere. The current situation is one in which food travels vast distances along supply chains long enough to prevent us from ever knowing, most of the time, where exactly our food came from, how it was produced, what is in it, and what effect its production had on the people and the landscape of its place of origin. It is a destructive system in which short-term profit too often trumps the long-term well-being of land and people. It is an unjust arrangement in which, to quote author Mark Winne, “the poor get diabetes; the rich get local and organic.”

A few months back, Andy and I took a “faith in food” class at our church here in Vancouver. It was basically an in-depth look at the historical development of the industrial food system, the way it operates today, and its negative effects on people, animals, and ecosystems around the world. We also examined scripture in order to figure out our place as followers of Jesus in this global story that is unfolding. Given the mission of the church to participate in God’s restoration of the world, how are we to respond to the specific social, political, and economic circumstances that we find ourselves in right now? What does it look like to pursue justice and wholeness in the context of an economy in which many people cannot afford to buy healthy food; in which the way that we feed ourselves does not honor or protect our fellow creatures of the natural environment on which all of our lives ultimately depend? What does it mean to love our neighbors when some of them are losing their land or working under exploitative conditions to provide the food on our tables, and when others are literally being poisoned by the food that they eat?

In many ways, the time we spent praying, thinking, and talking about these issues raised more questions than answers and brought us to the realization that the simple act of eating has become fraught with complex ethical and practical problems. But we also reached clarity and consensus around the fact that seeking justice in the food system—which is hardly separable from environmental or economic justice overall—is among the most pressing moral concerns of our day. Responding to it is a task that we as Christians cannot afford to ignore.

Thus, you have this blog before you. A blog will not save the world, but perhaps it can be the start of an important conversation, one that will build community and build momentum around living more justly and compassionately in a world where it is very hard to live well. As Wendell Berry, that octogenarian farmer-poet from Kentucky, has said, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” So in addition to writing, I hope to get my hands dirty growing some food over the next few months, and doing what I can to support local farmers instead of corporate supply chains. These are small acts that will be done imperfectly, but it is a start, and I will not be going about it alone.