our bodies, ourselves

Seeing real people's bodies is the best antidote to the culturally-inscribed feelings of self-consciousness and inferiority that many of us have spent our whole lives feeling. It might sound like weird advice, but seeing your friends naked is really good for you. Since you already love them, you are not judgmental about the way that their bodies look because their bodies are the physical manifestation of the people that reside inside the bodies. And it helps you realize that your body is the same way. I've lately been consumed with love and affection for my own body--not because I have big round boobs or a flat stomach (see Fig. A.) because I have neither of these. Instead, I've become less concerned with the way it looks from the imaginary observer's standpoint (into which I'd formerly constantly placed myself) and more concerned with the way it works and the way that it feels from the inside. My boobs are important and wonderful because I get pleasure from them. My stomach is wonderful and important because it digests the food that I eat and it strengthens and clenches from laughter, not sit ups. If my body does so much for me - from keeping my heart beating, to moving my legs so I can get around, to effortlessly forming on my lips the words that I want to speak - how could I be so ungrateful as to wish it were different?

Fig. A. 50% insane discipline and repression of appetite, 50% photoshop
Nobody that I know actually looks like this, and I probably won't meet anybody who does.

Fig. B. Much closer to the way that I look and the way that the people I know look. She's not dieting or obsessively working out but she's obviously living the life. She's also more womanly than Fig. A. who looks more like a teenage Barbie.
(P.S., who is the girl puking in the background?)

so dance around your house naked even if the neighbors see you over the fence. Fuck it.