Loving Bodies

Yes. it is beautiful. But not exclusively important,
and that's what took me a regrettably long time to learn.

It has long been an interest of both feminism and religious groups to foster an understanding of human worth that's not just skin-deep.

As a 20th-21st century woman, I consistently learned from guardians, mentors, and no small amount of media (or counter-media) that I should find a mate who would love me not only for my body but also for my mind.

This, I think, has been a good thing. But even good things have their limits.

Part of me may have always known this, but I really began to think about such standards for love in earnest a few years ago when my grandfather was dying.

He had Parkinson's disease, and by the last years of his life the capabilities of both his body and his mind were irreparably diminished. He was a strong, smart man who eventually could not recognize his loved ones or find his way home or feed himself.

It was not a love for his mind (what it was then or what it once had been) that made my grandmother and the rest of my family continue to care for him until his final moments.

This tangible caring may have stemmed from emotional connection, but they understood what we understand when we care deeply for any human being. They tended to him and gave him every dignity they could. Not just because he had done the same for his parents and children, or because he was once a hardworking and self-sufficient intellectual. They did it because they knew and loved a human being, regardless of circumstance.

When I experienced grief and depression around that same time, my partner and friends and family loved me not because they were in love with my mind (as it was then or what it once had been), but because they loved me, the whole me, no matter what changes I faced, and they were determined to show me that as best as they could.

(Circumstances never define the human being we love, just the ways in which we might show love to them.)

And that's when I knew how beautiful it could be to love a body.

So I'm not willing to let measures of beauty - even ostensibly honorable measures like in the image above - strip me of any amount of my humanity. And I'm not willing to privilege emotional love and mental love so consistently over physical love, whether that physicality is sex, or snuggling, or caring for someone when they're ill, or massaging someone's aches and pains.

For those who know that I'm demisexual, someone whose attractions depend almost solely on an emotional connection, this anti-hierarchy of love may come as a surprise. But the commitment to owning our own reality and affirming others' realities, whatever they may be, is marvelously compatible with seeing oneself or someone else as a whole person. In fact, many of us on the asexual spectrum appreciate physical acts of love as part of our own everyday reality, and our personal values will vary as much as in any other group.

For those for whom this is not a matter of innate preferences but of spiritual edification, consider what "loving bodies" looks like at its best in your religion. For Christians, even traditional marriage vows have included "to have and to hold" and "in sickness and in health," and remember how consistently that incarnate Jesus fed bodies, washed bodies, healed bodies. If we disembody our partners and our communities, we risk losing significant portions of what it means to be people of faith in relationship.

I'd like to challenge anyone wrestling with the merits of physical love to take note of it when you see it over the next few days. It could well be platonic or familial or neighborly, but notice some tangible interaction of profound caring between two or more fleshy humans. Notice how some acts are inextricably interwoven with mind and emotion, and how some are the embodiment of love in their own right.

Will you love some-body?