Sexy Is As Sexy Does

In middle school health class we briefly touched on drugs, sex and STDs, but the curriculum skimmed these hot topics in favor of more tepid ones like wellness, emotional control and, in particular, body image.

Our intrepid instructor was Ms. Rankleve, cruelly and obviously renamed Ms. Mankleve by a gang of pre-pubescent boys who were in direst need of health class. She had a long silver mullet, and legend goes that she actually lived in her basement classroom, pushing the desks together at night to form a makeshift cot. As a current middle school teacher, I schedule regular haircuts in hopes that such a rumor never circulates about my living situation.  It was both perfectly fitting and absolutely horrifying that Ms. Rankleve was taxed with our early health education—a job that, if you think about it, should require a stringent screening process.  Then again, our middle school DARE counselor was busted for cocaine possession that same year, so perhaps screening had fallen out of fashion in Portland Public Schools.

I wonder now how Ms. Rankleve wound up a 7^th grade health teacher, a vocation most would just as well avoid. She had no particular talent for straight-talk or compassion, yet was required by profession to spend her days relating life’s most sensitive issues to life’s least sensitive age group.  Short straw or karma, this poor woman never came out on top. 

Lucky for me, my mother had already gifted me a dozen books—mostly illustrated—on the glory of becoming a woman, which I kept on a discrete section of my bookshelf.  Particularly compelling (not to mention instructional) was a cartoon of a smiling tampon lost somewhere deep inside, wondering via thought bubble, “where am I?!” That, and a set of exaggeratedly uneven breasts, the larger one demanding of the smaller one: “catch up, will ya!”  Yes, girls, your lopsided chest is perfectly normal even if you’ve only seen symmetry in Seventeen Magazine. Thanks to such gems from my personal library of womanhood, my carnal education was not solely reliant on Ms. Mankleve’s wealth of knowledge. In high school, I took health by correspondence.

Body image was paramount in the dungeon of health. In particular, we learned an inordinate amount about female body image.  After all, everyone knows men never struggle with such animal insecurities and so have no such need to overcome them.  Looking back, I have the sense we learned more about body image than we did about actually caring for our rapidly-developing bods. One could get the misimpression that it’s okay to be morbidly obese as long as you feel good about it (the technical term is Large and in Charge).  You could leave middle school thinking that a positive body image trumps healthy eating, good hygiene and regular exercise. Though overkill, the discussion of female body image was more important than our little minds could grasp: eating disorders were quickly becoming fly like flare-leg jeans and boys made innocuous comments about our curves that turned out to be forever damaging. 

At this point, though, I’m pretty tired of talking about female body image.  I’m as much into female empowerment (via body, via whatever) as the next women’s college graduate, but after a certain point we’re only rehashing more of the same. Talk comes easier than action; more is said than done.  

Women are obsessed with their bodies—slaving away to perfect them, leering at our shapely peers like creepy homeless men to see how our fleshy parts measure up. The story goes like this: Popular media feeds women unattainable versions of themselves, young men come to expect this, and young women seek to carve the vision through any means necessary.  Unless you’ve been living under a mossy rock in Central Wyoming, you’re probably hip to all this, but it’s a true story nonetheless.  In college every third woman had an eating disorder—the gym and cafeteria the breeding grounds for such perilous behavior.  Thin is in, obviously.

I’ve never had significant body image concerns, and I’ve also never been remarkably thin. The correlation here is rather evident.  I’m content saying yes to more gummy bears and dating men who prefer curves to angles—3D to 2D vision.  It might be because I’m lazy, but I’ve never even almost developed an eating disorder.  This is not to say I’m entirely healthy about all things corpus: I strive for smaller sizes, compare my breasts to my friends’ and miss the point by spurning yoga that doesn’t burn calories.  So sue me; I’m the product of a flawed society.   

Last weekend, I went to the West Indian Parade in Crown Heights. It was all sparkles and plantains and public pot smoking.  Each West Indian nation had a float followed by dozens of smiling, scantily-clad women shaking it down Eastern Parkway. And I mean really scantily-clad.  And I mean really shaking it. Rhinestone-encrusted bodices made for modest attire, while tiny sparkling stickers smacked on unmentionables were more daring.  My thin white girlfriends and I gawked at the unconcealed sexiness of our West Indian counterparts. Perhaps because of Ms. Rankleve’s heavily-focused curriculum or perhaps because of the “I love my body” temporary tattoos available in my college dorms, I started thinking about body image.  Here were these women whose bodies were far from the variety I see on glossy pages, and yet the level of confidence and sexiness was unparalleled.

I’m in no place to draw any racial or bodily conclusions here—surely, the topic is endlessly nuanced—but the parade made me think about who exactly scribes the Book of Sexy.  Middle School taught us the importance of body image and confidence, but its ingrained structures quickly cut us down to size (pun intended), leaving us to rebuild well into our twenties.  The cultivation of a positive body image is taxing work, but look no further than the West Indian Day Parade for exemplar.