Your imperfect body was born into 'woke' Original Sin. Abhor yourself and your detestable healthy body because misery loves company. How dare you be happy in your own skin, sinner!
In the mid-’90s the speculation began: Did teenage Britney Spears really get a boob job?
Britney denied it, or wouldn’t talk about it, but Rolling Stone revealed in 2008 that her mother allowed her to get implants even though her breasts were still growing. Later, allegedly, Spears regretted the decision and had them removed.
Beautiful, talented, and deeply distressed Britney Spears thought, and was probably told by soulless music executives, that she wasn’t ‘good enough’.
Maybe it was a good career move, but often body modifications are a signal you’re not happy with the body you were born in; that it’s imperfect, not good enough, even when it’s healthy and not nearly as unattractive as mass and social media tell you.
We fail to appreciate just what a ‘miracle of life’ we truly are. How wondrously human we were born, how marvelous our complex bodies, and especially our magnificently evolved brains. How amazing it is that we were ever born, regardless of the circumstances of conception.
I learned a fascinating tidbit about how my brother and I came to be on this planet that I didn’t know until he told the story at our mother’s funeral last year. I knew Mom and Dad met on a blind date but what I hadn’t known is the extrapolated story Dad told my brother: Mom was a ‘third string’ and last-ditch choice!
Dad needed a date for a boating trip with some married friends. They set him up with a woman, but she cancelled as the trip approached.
“Don’t worry,” the friend told Dad, “I’ve got another one for you!”
And that was set up and—she bailed.
“Oh man, I’m sorry about this,” the friend said. “Listen, I’ve got one more gal I can think of. I hope she can make it.”
She was, and she didn’t bag on my dad.
My brother and I exist because two other women cancelled!
There’s an additional challenge to my own existence.
Mom and Dad had a hard time conceiving. Three years into the marriage and no pregnancy. The doctor said everything was normal; finally a highly frustrated Mom conceived and my parents rejoiced. Then, Mom lost the baby. She was devastated.
“Keep trying!” the doctor told them. “Your hormone count is really high! It’ll be easy to get pregnant again!”
They did.
I have long marveled at how, in a sort of sad sense, ‘lucky’ I was to be born when another was conceived before me. I might not be here if Mom hadn’t lost the first baby.
Or would I?
Ajahn Brahm, a teacher and monk with the Western Australian Buddhist Society, (he’s hilarious!), tells the story of a young couple he once counseled who wanted a baby, and finally they got pregnant. They were so excited; so was he. But their darling, much-wanted baby boy was stillborn.
They were near-inconsolable but they were going to try again and Ajahn Brahm told them to take a ballpoint pen and draw a mark on the lifeless baby, which they did. They drew a line a few inches long on one of the baby’s tiny heels, and then they buried him.
A short time later, they got pregnant again and, like my mother, this time they delivered a strong healthy child—this one a baby girl.
And she had a curious birthmark on one of her heels—a thin line a few inches long.
The baby came back, said Ajahn Brahm.
It was a revelation to me.
I don’t know whether I believe the story or not but I don’t think he’d lie. It could be coincidence that the baby had a birthmark resembling the line they drew on the first one’s heel. But now I wonder: Maybe that was me Mom miscarried, and I came back.
I relate these stories because it’s deeply disturbing how many critical mental health challenges Gen Z presents as they strive to be anyone other than who they were born to be. Are they really any more disturbed than previous generations, or are we simply obsessed with children?
Every human being with a functioning brain has their dysfunctions and demons, and not everyone’s life is easy enough that they can still be glad to have been born. I’ve heard a few wish their mother had gotten an abortion.
But I don’t know that any generation has ever been as guided, pushed, or pressured as much as later Millennials and Gen Z to fix the false notion that they were ‘born in the wrong body’.
Is there any idea more destructive than that you’re defective at birth? That nature is so stupid it’s forever sending you into the world incorrectly?
Not just, “You’re not pretty/handsome enough,” you’re not good enough from birth.
Especially if you’re ‘cis-heteronormative’: The woke Original Sin. Or white birth. Or male birth. So many damned at birth.
The toxic message you’re ‘not good enough’ has been with us since Cain slew Abel after a slight from God. (God is not a vegan!)
My mother’s generation grew up watching beautiful sirens on the silver screen they could never match; although Mom, a beautiful woman in her own right, only ever expressed jealousy over Shirley Temple, whom she resented for being prettier.
I grew up knowing I would never be as beautiful as The Love Boat goddesses and still, in some shameful secret place deep within me, want to be as beautiful as Barbi Benton, Judy Landers or Morgan Brittany. (No, not Morgan Fairchild, whose nose was too pointed for me and who looked like the bitch she always portrayed, although I understand she’s a very nice lady in real life.) Plastic surgery though, was now available to fix that, first for women and their tragically normal-sized breasts, then it came for the men (“Build up your pecs! Masculinize your jawline! Chisel that manly waistline with rib removal! Buy a penis so large you’ll have to cart it around in a wheelbarrow!”)
I eschew plastic surgery, and laugh at women who spend huge sums of money and harm their bodies to please men, and those incels who fantasize or raise the money to do the same for women (shallow losers aren’t only female!)
But I can’t laugh at ‘sex-changers’. It’s just too, too tragic, even when it’s emotionally disrupted adults rather than innocent lambs led to the slaughter by so-called ‘responsible’ adults.
‘Be authentic’ is what the Boomers and Xers told each other. ‘Be yourself!’ Strip yourself of society’s ideas of what you’re ‘supposed’ to be. Challenge the stereotypes and roles you’re ‘assigned’, especially when you’re male or female. Subvert the dominant paradigm!
To some degree, that’s what the trans/queer movement has done—challenged those roles, questioned whether we need to define ourselves as binarily as we were raised, and that’s a good thing.
But Big Surgery came for the kids since authentic people don’t buy anal bleaches and pec jobs. Big Pharma had run out of pill-popping adults.
Kids were groomed to become lifelong medical patients, for both Big Surgery and Big Pharma, told they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Not even that they weren’t photogenic enough, but nature fucked up and made everyone the wrong sex!
And gay kids became anathema. The left continues to damn Christian ‘gay conversion therapy’ while they themselves mutilate, sterilize, and ruin the ability to orgasm because they’re terrified of children happy in their own skin.
So much for Barney the Dinosaur’s positive, affirming message in the ‘90s. Sure, it was maudlin, but don’t you wish he’d return?
No, I can’t possible love you, you’re not good enough!
The woke left needs more hugging and kissing and a lot less judgementalism and sourpussed guilt trips over how imperfect everyone else is.
Of course we’re imperfect; we’re human beings. Religions, philosophies and self-improvement regimes focus on what we can and should change: The way we act, think, talk and behave. We harm others far more with our behavior than how we biologically exist.
Each one of us should acknowledge, if even only to ourselves, that we must try harder to treat others well, not obsess about our mostly silly-ass problems (which leads to us acting like assholes). What would Jesus do? What would Gandhi do? What would Superman do?
We’d be better off without scrutinizing ourselves in the mirror and blaming all our problems on a conveniently scapegoated meat package. The body positivity movement, for all its obvious health-denying bullshit, does have a point that it wouldn’t kill us to accept ourselves and our wonderfully varied bodies for what they are. Especially if it functions more reliably than your car.
Heart beating okay? Lungs drawing air in and out without a lot of phlegmatic drama? Legs support you and walk great distances? Eyes seeing the beauty of a sunrise or your child’s brilliant smile? No frightening weird lumps anywhere? Congratulations! You have a functioning, healthy body! Rejoice!
Not everyone does, and life quality takes a hit when you can’t do what others do, go where others go, live the life you see others living denied you.
People who choose sex change surgery buy into a lifetime of medical industry dependence, are further tormented by unaddressed psychological problems, and a heightened risk of suicide.
What troubles me is how much children are taught almost from birth that they were born imperfectly, ‘in the wrong body’, and that if they don’t love the right people (anyone except the opposite sex unless those people are properly not-cis-heteronormative), they’re bad, awful oppressors.
You’re no longer ‘free to be me’. Be anyone other than yourself, because you were born inherently wrong!
The hell with authenticity. The far left hates it.
Isn’t this the message from the Christian Right we Good Liberals have been taught to eschew? Original sin is bullshit! Adam and Eve never existed! And if they did, more power to them for rebelling against the White Patriarchal Supremacist Oppressor in the sky as they yelled, “We WILL partake of the forbidden fruit! How dare you prohibit us from seeking knowledge! Who are You to colonize it all for Yourself?”
(I actually kinda like this myth for its rebellious spirit. Also I like the Jewish addendum of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who refused to accept Adam’s demand for a constant military sexual position, and wouldn’t put up with his lord-and-master patriarchal bullshit, so she went off on her own. God then created Eve, but he still fucked up the submission function.)
Original sin is now whiteness; maleness; cis-heteronormativeness.
The way we were born. In original left-wing sin.
Authenticity is for right-wing jerks, I guess. (Which it’s not; inauthenticity is an inalienable human fault.)
If there’s one thing we all have a problem with, it’s living comfortably in our own skin.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. - Corinthians 6:19-20
The New Testament abjures using the body for ‘harlotry’ and other sexual sins—whaddaya expect, the famously misogynist and sexophobic St. Paul wrote it—and it’s pretty well established in the 2,000 or years or so that followed that restricting sexual activity is a fool’s game. It doesn’t work for society, and it doesn’t work for many individuals. But there may be a modern lesson for us still: Be grateful for what you’ve got and stop longing for the other side of the fence, which is never as beauteous and problem-free as you imagine it.
Yeah, we all aren’t happy with our bodies for one reason or another. Nor were the patrons of the Photoshoppers of centuries past: Court painters, who depicted their patrons as handsomer, more beauteous, than they actually were. We have no idea who was ‘the fairest one of all’ because they all painted themselves with toxic white lead and vinegar like kabuki players. Women wore bustles to make their hips and asses bigger, and corsets to make their waistlines smaller. Men availed themselves of painful high heels and wore whalebone corsets to keep them straighter and taller (I remember Vincent Price complaining about this when he was a guest speaker at our university; I think he portrayed Prince Albert onstage and the whalebone corset caused him much discomfort).
Transgenderism or transsexualism is merely another form of body modification, and should be legal for grownups, just like tattoos and boob jobs (unless you’re Britney Spears’s mother). Humans alter their bodies for many different reasons, not always because Snapchat shows them they’re not pretty enough to be an influencer.
But please, force the schools to tell children the truth: That it’s okay to be you. You were born in the right body. Teach them the evolution science that offends and terrifies the woke: That we evolved sexually dimorphically to reproduce, whether we choose to do so or not, because life seeks to perpetuate more life. That you can’t change your immutable sex and that there’s nothing wrong with being a boy or a girl! There’s nothing wrong with boys who like girls and girls who like boys! Or who like both!
Most of all, teach them to be deeply grateful for their healthy bodies, and for all the wonderful things it can do (even if some parts of it don’t work like everyone else’s). And be grateful for the gift of life.
I love you, you love me. Be free to be you! Be yourself!
As I’m fond of saying, “I have to be me. No one else would take this stupid job!”
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