Loving Your Body: Taryn Brumfitt and The Body Image Movement

[BainsBane]

Before and After Taryn learned to love her body. She is now making a documentary on the Body Image Movement.




Video here:
https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/938036/video-387064-h264_high.mp4

Before having children, Taryn Brumfitt was a super jacked/svelte body builder.(Not exactly, Taryn tells the story differently in her the video ). After giving birth changed her body though, her self esteem did too.

Brumfitt considered getting a tummy tuck and a boob job, until she asked herself how she could teach her daughter to love her own body if Brumfitt couldn't love her own.

So she's gone all in—posting the above Before and After photo on Facebook, which is a brilliant inversion of what we consider to be desirable bodies, and a powerful rebuke to Fit Mom. She has also taken to kickstarter to raise money for a documentary that examines why it's so hard for women have good body image.
http://jezebel.com/how-one-woman-became-the-anti-fit-mom-1576405774

Both Taryn and the photographer doing the project in my last OP have kickstarter accounts to fundraise for their projects.

[MadrasT]

1. While I appreciate what she is trying to do...

...and it's good to not *hate* your body, I don't understand why it's important to love it.

I don't have an opinion one way or another about mine. It's a vessel that I live in. I don't love it or hate it or have any particular feeling about it.

It just "is".

But I will agree that seeking to love it is better than actively hating it, if you have to have a feeling about it.

[BainsBane]

2. That's more or less where I am

I think the video is interesting because the interviews in which she asked women to use a word or two to describe their bodies, and all but one gave disparaging terms. It shows how strongly influenced woman around the world are by media images of women's body. (I think Taryn is in Australia.) This is the other side of the Sports Illustrated/Vogue type photos some are so fond of.

[ismnotwasm]

3. One good thing about being a nurse

I'm firmly in the "no unnessisary surgery" zone. If I ever get tempted-- I think of some of the infections I've seen, Ick.

That being said, there's a lot of body decorations I do like. Tattoos--I have deliberately rejected them over the years for personal reasons, but I like them very much on other people. Creative makeup or hair on any gender.

I also spent years staying in very good shape, now I just don't care as much, but I enjoyed the strength and health. I might get into it again.

I like the roundness of bodies, we're made of interlocking circles, I like the softness of the woman in the second picture better than I like the hardness of the woman in the first, yet she also has roundness in the muscular shape of her body.

I can't remember that quote, I think it was from IBTP something like "my body is the medium I use to experience the world, the mechanism that takes me where I want to go" and in the end, that's what I appreciate the most, and what matters the most.

[BainsBane]

4. Did you watch the video

and see how women referred to their bodies? I see that as the result of being bombarded with images and messages telling women we aren't good enough. We can never measure up to the ideal and are always lacking. The more women worry about their bodies, the less power we have to engage in the public sphere, whether politics, business, non-profits. That is one of the reasons the mass proliferation of idealized, photoshopped images of women (girls really) undermine women's empowerment.

[ismnotwasm]

5. I did and I loved it

I had a patient once, who struck me with her beauty, she had had a mastectomy-- a procedure the surgeons almost wouldn't do because of her weight.

But this is what I noticed; ever body part tapered down to the next, her upper arms to her lower, her wrists and hands, she was what people would call "morbidly obese" yet, she had a distinct waist, and wonderful wide hips, again tapered thighs to knees to ankles to feet. Almost perfect proportion.

About her breast she said "it fed four kids, entertained my husband for thirty years--it's done it's job and it deserved to retire"

I always wondered if she knew how beautiful she was, not by societies boring standards, but actual aesthetics, shape and rhythm and form. She appeared very grounded and happy, so I suspect, at the least, she was well loved.