"We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives."
—
(On why he let Willow cut all of her hair off)
Read more: Will Smith On Allowing Willow To Cut Her Hair: ‘She Has Got To Have Command Of Her Body’ | Necole Bitchie.com
(via larepublicadedet)
(via quixotess)
I know it’s stupid and unscientific and also anti-feminist and so on but most days I just want to be free of the corporeal. be a brain in a jar or a ghost. it’s not really anything to do with body image or trauma or whatever, at least not consciously or directly. it’s more that this whole “having to negotiate multiple layers of experience” thing gets me down. maybe it’s as simple as that I was always smart but not athletic and I don’t like to be bad at things so when I am I pretend they’re not important. maybe it’s tied up with my secret desire to be the universal subject, which is always the disembodied subject; maybe it’s the other way around. probably it’s got a lot to do with persistent and debilitating anxiety, but who knows.
I wish I came from a spiritual tradition with a strain of asceticism. one of those dualist traditions that holds you don’t “have a soul”, you are a soul; you have a body. then maybe I would know what to do with this desire to transcend matter.
but actually I’m pretty sure you don’t have a body. you are a body. I see that every day. I know that if I’m not healthy, my mind is clouded, my temper short, I can’t separate my spirit and flesh. I took up running this year. it takes me out of my body. if I’m fitter then my body does the things I need it to do with less complaint. I haven’t felt less like crawling out of my skin since I was about ten, it’s extraordinary. I still feel like crawling out of my skin most days. it’s so weird to me that I have to think so much about my body in order not to think about my body. I think there may be no experience so thoroughly of the body, so grounded in awareness of the state of the body, as feeling detached from the body. (“the body”. your body, my body, I mean.)
whatever I would like to believe aside, I was raised not to believe in a soul separate to the body, and I think most of this stuff is at some level wired in early. having faith is something you have to learn young, maybe, like speech. I never learnt. it’s probably just as well because I think one of the only ways I could seriously disappoint my parents with a personal choice is to get religion. I went to church a couple months ago because this woman I was dating had a craving for church music. I think the only thing that stopped my mum hyperventilating into a plastic bag was the fact that I went holding hands with a butch and wearing some ridiculous secretary-in-a-porn-flick outfit that was my misguided idea of Church Wear, so it was clear I had no idea what I was doing.
maybe this is the atheist guilt bit. instead of worrying about whether I’m going to hell, I get to beat myself up for wanting something totally ridiculous like existence as a sentient gas cloud. maybe later I can get mad at myself for willfully ignoring the second law of thermodynamics and yearning for life eternal. maybe I can learn to forgive myself by appealing to some mechanistic theory of mind wherein I couldn’t help wishing for something I know to be unreasonable in my bones, because of society or the will to survive or maybe magnetic forces near my brain, that was in New Scientist once. probably that wouldn’t hold water because I’m pretty sure there is no spiritual tradition other than Western atheism more grounded in the conception of pure reason separate from the whims of society and the body, a priori good and righteous without reference to its material effects, and starkly dualist.
when I think about Hell I think of one of those relaxation exercises where you close your eyes and someone tells you in a soothing voice that you have to truly inhabit every part of your body.
"#how do you know she’s beautiful if you can’t even see her shoes #how do you know she’s beautiful if you haven’t even read her blog"
— POP FEMINIST PERBLOG (via novazembla)
(Source: odairses, via novazembla)
my teenage cousin — who developed an eating disorder about two years ago and is really struggling — has finally been spotted on the street by a modelling scout!
thanks for the positive reinforcement guys! I’m sure this will be really fucking helpful in her recovery!
"I am Marie-Céline Dundelle, and I do not need a book contract to reveal that French women are superior in all matters. Our secret lies in an attitude toward life, a point of view that I can only call Frenchy. For example, let us discuss weight loss. …To maintain my figure, I eat only half portions of any food, always arranging it on my plate in the shape of a semicolon. For exercise, at least once a day I approach a total stranger and slap him. And late each afternoon I read a paragraph of any work of acclaimed American literary fiction, which makes me vomit."
— Marie-Céline Dundelle (Paul Rudnick), Vive La France, at the New Yorker
