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Embrace

I saw the film embrace today. There were four of us in the cinema, staggered through the rows. Four women, aged 20s to 50s I would guess. All different shapes and sizes. All eating a Cinema Nova choc top.

The film is a well curated quasi professional documentary style of work, the protagonist and documentary maker being a mother of three, who went viral posting a post-body builder shot of herself on Facebook, tastefully naked, as her adorable husband says.

I was initially skeptical that I might relate to this attractive, symmetrical, aesthetically beautiful woman encouraging us to love ourselves. I soon felt remorseful for thinking that way.

The film introduced us to women around the globe, struggling with body image. The size 12 model, the transgender woman, the movie stars, the burns ‘victim’ (one of the most vocally audacious women speaking out), the bearded lady, the physically impaired.

It was at times laced with a lightheartedness, at other times beautifully warm and touching. The most striking take home for me, was a tantalising hope that social media will globalise a new message, a new definition of beauty.

Aesthetics is a battlefield and I have long detested the message of ‘beauty within’, because really, to change the way we feel, it is our construct of the beauty without that needs to shift.

Everyone knows that a nice person, a gentle soul, is beautiful. But not everyone sees that outward beauty is actually everywhere. It is not owned by the thin, the tall and the smooth.

If you read to the bottom of this, thanks, you look amazing.

Being here

I would not have reckoned that one of these days talking about the weather would have deep, gritty, horrifying traction. Traction as in gears, as in implications. Real implications, for me.

I would never have thought that tragedy ‘on the news’, in that television set, would be a click away from here. Like suddenly, at the drop of a hat, that person, those bombs, my heart, would all occupy the same space.

Then again, who would have ever imagined this. That this would be it. That all the innocence we bathed in was an artifical, global ticking timebomb, and that truly, the only absolute would be that we are them, are us, and they, or we, are it.

My call to arms

Crush their spirit so they cannot argue. That would be the words filling the edges of my Meme. The meme itself would be a fat white guy, lets call him Trump, on one side of a seesaw. The long wooden plinth would be bulging with the feeble effort to generate sufficient downward pressure on the opposite side of the fulcrum. That side would be an overcrowded seat teaming with minorities, all clammering to force an equilibrium.

You would think that all eyes, and all fury, would be squarely aimed at equalising this farcical and parodic creature grinning maniacally across the way. Yet the over crowded seat would instead be filled with angry ‘others’, engaged in a bitter brawl, the wounded spilling over and tumbling to the ground.
To put it another way, we are all in-fighting, and the beast, that dominant force of self serving capitalist free world jargon fuelled power, is winning. We are feeding the beast. It doesn’t want us to align our ideologies, heaven forbid we just manage to agitate well enough together to effect change.

So lets stop it. Let’s stop hating. Let’s stop whinging about “political correctness gone too far” and “reverse discrimination”. Lets stop screaming at the ignorant about their white privilege. Lets be kind in the face of cis gendered ignorance. Lets allow others to identify however the hell they wish. Lets explain inequality to each other so that nobody feels unheard. Lets be powerful.

If we do not, we cannot break this system. The gnomes of Zurich will keep oppressing us, and if they are lucky, we will wipe each other out for them. That way they will never be accountable for global atrocities, death and devastation.