Body Wisdom
Our bodies are sites of pleasure, pain, gender, sexuality, joy, shame, and celebration. Here we’ll give links to some important body wisdom on subjects like loving your body, health, fat acceptance and living body positivity. These blogs, articles, and galleries have particularly inspired us on how to live body positive. We start with the stories women shared on our blog, as they reclaim their bodies for themselves.
Our Voices:
My Body, My Soul, My Arm, My Heart A Carleton woman shares how she began to think of her body as part of her whole self.
Another Funny Story A Carleton woman shares her story about an experience she doesn’t want to call sexual assault, but wouldn’t want to happen to any other woman either.
A Road to Body Positivity A Carleton student courageously shares her journey to appreciating her body, through dance and disordered eating, to the joy of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. We thank her for sharing her story.
Do it for Yourself: Overcoming AnorexiaApproximately seven million American women and one million American men suffer from an eating disorder. Ninety-five percent of these people are between the ages of 12 and 25. In this guest post, a Carleton woman tells her story and offers some thoughts about an issue that affects so many young men and women.
Your Body Cannot be Ruined A friend of Happy Bodies reflects on a body positivity aha! moment she experienced after the birth of her son. For many of us college-age women, childbearing seems like a far-in-the-future event, but her wise words should resonate with us now. We thank her for sharing her story.
Eight Years Old Jess, a friend of Happy Bodies, reflects on how her experience of her body has changed over time.
serious about dancing Adam, a friend of Happy Bodies, writes about how dancing makes him feel about his body.
Amanda: Thoughts on Running
Carolyn: The Maze
Jacque: Mothers, Moons, Masculinity and Mulan
Nikoleta: My Belly, My Best Friend
Emily: On Scars
Jill: Talking with My Mother
Lisa asks Carleton students the question, What Makes you feel Great About your Body?
Our Bodies:
Happy Knees: A gallery of our knees and how we feel about them.
007 Breasts’ Breast Gallery has images of normal, average, non-sexualized bodies.
Betty Dodson’s Genital Art Gallery has viewer-submitted pictures of their genitalia along with short essays about their relation to them.
Beautiful Cervix Project has pictures of the cervix from various stages of life, days in the cycles, and pre- and post-coitus.
The Rebellyon has pictures of all kinds of bellies in support of singer Amanda Palmer, whose record company told her her belly was “too fat” to appear in a music video.
Carleton Resources:
“I decide what is sexy to me” campaign for V-Day
Body Positivity discussion group advertisements.
Pledge Against Sexual Violence, a student created list of expectations to take a stand against sexual violence on campus.
The Gender and Sexuality Center at Carleton is a great resource for any student with questions or in need of support.
Beyond Vaginas!: Sexual violence prevention initiatives on campus.
Other Resources:
Big Fat Deal has some great posts about accepting and loving your body. Here and here commenters give advice on how to love your body. Here are ten ways to be a body positivity advocate.
The Rotund describes ways to answer fat haters.
Kate Harding of Shapely Prose gives her take on fat acceptance by focusing on the at best tenuous connections between size and health and The BMI Project is a great illustration of how our culture tries to quantify them.
Jezebel, though not always the paragon of pro-womanity, has a great post on raising body-positive daughters. Read the comments, too.
The Basics:
While we don’t all share one viewpoint on the blog, there are certain assumptions we make and terminology we use based on shared definitions. Here are some of the basics on these issues, if you are looking for clarification.
Racism: Racism 101, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Body Positivity: But Don’t You Realize Fat is Unhealthy?
Feminism: Feminism 101: gender, male gaze
Womanism: I am not a Feminist
LGBTQA: Terminology, Heterosexual privilege, on being an ally, Terminology and the Transgender Umbrella
Ableism: Some Terminology, disability 101, more 101
Sexual Violence: Statistics, Carleton/Northfield resources
