Our First and Last Home

We are born in bodies, we live in bodies, and we die in our bodies.

Our bodies are the only true homes we will ever know, homes that are with us from birth to death, no matter where we are or who we are.

This is true for all of us, which is why violations of persons that focus on their bodies are so heinous. We live in our bodies for all of our lives, and our lives are as expansive or as cramped as those bodies permit. Our bodies are our tools for interacting with the world, the means of expressing ourselves, giving voice to our innermost thoughts, consoling loved ones, admiring art, creating art, communing with plants, bonding with animals, feeding ourselves and others... We live in our bodies for all of our days, and life, both metaphoric and literal, is not possible without them.

This is why crimes against our bodies are so horrifying. We speak of feeling violated when a burglar breaks into our car, or our house, or when someone spray paints something on the walls of our office, or when someone cuts down a favorite tree, or when someone leaves shit on our doorstep.

How much more of violation, then, when the home that is desecrated is one that you can never leave? When it is tortured, violated, turned into something loathsome or frightening? You can't sell your body and move into a new one. You can't tear down your body and replace it with a better one. You can't plaster over the lines graven into your brain like you can a gouge in your car.

People try. People carve their bodies, some as a method of transformation, others as a rejection of their physical selves. People starve themselves, pierce themselves, tattoo themselves, color their hair, shave their heads, bleach their teeth, remove their teeth, bind their feet, cut off parts of themselves, diet, binge, and run as if running away from themselves.

They say, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and this is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. This is true for all of us, men, women, children... we are all embodied animals, destined to live and die in these houses of meat and bone and breath and blood.

Women are capable of not only being homes for themselves, but homes for other people. This makes them vulnerable in ways that other persons are not. To allow someone to live in your most sacred of homes, the home you can never leave, the home that gives shape to all that you are and to all of your days -- that is the greatest intimacy a person can offer, the greatest gift that a person can give.

But it must be a gift. The guest will eventually leave, but the person who opened up her home will have to live with the aftermath forever. She will carry her experiences in her home for the rest of her life, unable to leave it behind. This is why it must be a gift, a willing gift, a gift offered out of the deepest sense of self.

Our bodies are our homes. They should be a source of comfort, of shelter -- all that a home should be. This is only possible if the person who cannot leave is the person who decides who is allowed in, and on what terms. To suggest otherwise... that is to be profoundly selfish, to say that it is not enough to make decisions about one's own body, one's own home, that one must also have control over others'.

Today is Blog Against Sexism Day. Because women have the ability to offer one of the most profound gifts an embodied being can offer -- to let another being into their most sacred of holy places, their home of birth and life and death -- others have tried to force them into offering this gift against their will. They force their own bodies into the sacred homes of women, they write laws that force women to house anyone who enters, they argue that everyone has a right to women's bodies except women themselves. They make the body homes of women into prisons, prisons from which women cannot escape.

We as a culture live as if we can escape our bodies, both for good and for ill. We pretend that toxins in the environment have nothing to do with us, that polluted air is an abstract rather than a reality, that it does not matter how our bodies are shaped. We also live as if our bodies were uninhabited shells, carapaces to be manipulated at whim, encasings to be transformed and abandoned and reshaped when we grow displeased with them. We pretend that what we do to and say about our bodies has nothing to do with the people who inhabit them, or, conversely, we assume that we are nothing but bodies, merely walking hunks of meat that defy the tug of entropy and death.

Power in our culture is the ability to exist in our bodies so comfortably that we can pretend that they do not matter. But they do. The lives of women - and of other people set apart and marked on the basis of their physical selves - are the strongest evidence for this.

We should all be comfortable in our homes, and not because we can pretend that they don't exist. We should be comfortable in our bodies because they are ours and because they are valued and because we and they matter.

Our society wishes to believe that we can escape the consequences of being living homes -- and it is women, who throw the possibility up in our collective faces by merely existing -- who bear the brunt of that collective denial and the violence that enables it.

Our society is sexist, but that is a symptom of a larger sickness: the rejection and fetishization of our animal selves. We live in our bodies all of our lives, but we are discouraged from making a home in them, as if that would protect us from injury and death and the responsibility to think about the effects of our actions on others and on our world.

It does not. Such denial instead deprives us of feeling secure in the one home granted to everyone, from birth until death: our bodies. Women are the canaries in the coal mine, the violation of their bodies foreshadowing the violation of us all.

Comments

[Lisa]

This post blew me away--once again you've established yourself as one of the most thoughtful, articulate members of the blogosphere.

[Trix]

Ditto. Very erudite, Rana, and beautifully written.

[Jill Smith]

Gorgeous, Rana. Both the thought and the expression of the thought.

also, (o)

[litbrit]

*Long sigh*

Beautifully said, Rana. Alas, those who most need to read, understand, and get their heads around this philosophy are those who are least likely to read it, least likely to comprehend it, and most likely to forge ahead with their worsening-by-the-day violation processes and fundie agendas. Like the ignorant, power-hungry bulls they are.

[Rana]

I'm glad you like it - especially since it was mostly me trying to lay out something that I've had rolling around in my head for a while. I may have to pick out the three themes and write more intensively on them one of these days.

[Songbird]

That's profoundly and beautifully written, Rana.

[Em]

Rana-
This is beautiful. Your articulation of a woman's right to choose is wonderful, and I was also interested by your point on how people's alienation from their bodies encourages a lack of concern about the environment.
And happy birthday, although I've never met you!

[keda]

beautiful. well said. and a happy birthday. as litbrit says its such a shame that the people who most need to read this probably wont. but we can all do our best to pass it on.
thank you for a this wonderful perspective.

[halloweenlover]

Beautiful Rana, especially the end. Wow.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Very, very lovely.

[Toast]

or, conversely, we assume that we are nothing but bodies, merely walking hunks of meat that defy the tug of entropy and death.

Nothing but "walking hunks of meat". Not the first time I've seen that description -- I'd call it a put-down, but that would surprise me coming from you -- of the materialist position. I do, in fact, believe that we are "nothing but bodies". Wonderful bodies. Flesh and bone are beautiful things. Blood is extraordinary in its own right, without "spirit" to enliven it. And dont' even get me started on neurons. Together, this is what humans are. This is the physical substrate that allows for all of the fascinating behaviors we evince, from the emergent phenonmenon of consciousness to the common fart.

[Rana]

Ah, see, I don't know if we're more than our bodies, either. But what I would say is that just because we don't know that, is no reason to see what is in fact a wondrous thing -- a living, breathing creature -- as "merely" meat.

To me, "meat" implies something that's been reduced to a hunk of matter of no particular value. I think human bodies are valuable things with or without some supernatural element - hence, they are not "meat" -- and they don't require the infusion of God for that.

Conversely, if you take "God" or whatever you want to call it, out of the equation, we're still more than meat. We're amazing creatures, with or without God -- which is 180 degrees from what those in faith traditions aimed at denying or escaping the physical world would tell you.

[Toast]

which is 180 degrees from what those in faith traditions aimed at denying or escaping the physical world would tell you

Exactly. Sorry for mis-reading you. In light of your comments in the God thread above, this makes much more sense.