Imagine a world in which no one spoke about appearances, clothing, acne, and physical beauty.
What would that look like?
This summer I no longer had to imagine what a world like this would entail, when I worked at Eden Village Camp (EVC). This small, Jewish, pluralistic, environmental sleep away camp in the hills of the Hudson Valley holds many values dear; one of which is the rule called “No Body Talk.”
Before expanding on the definition and parameters of this radical camp guide-line, it is important to offer some background to the overall goals of EVC. At EVC, the entrepreneurial administrators wish to create a “culture of kindness” in which all of the campers and counselors alike can feel safe, loved, and free to be themselves. This value goes hand in hand with the other main goal of the camp, which is to provide the campers with the forum in which they can live as naturally as possible, with daily environmentally conscious and farming activities.
On the first day of each session, the camp director, Yoni Stadlin, speaks to the entire camp, telling the newly arrived campers that there are three rules at camp. The first is no lashon hara (speaking badly of others), after which he explains why this is so important when building a strong, accepting community. Second, to have fun; a classic camp rule. And third, no body talk. Whilst returning campers understand this protocol, younger campers struggle to conceptualize what this really means. Yoni thereafter explains the details of this rule: No negative, positive, or neutral comments about another person’s or one’s own physical appearance (including clothing, hair, makeup, lack of makeup, etc.), thus preparing the campers with the mindset that this is one of the fundamental pieces that contributes to our wish for communal acceptance.
As this rule contradicts many of the mainstream values to which we are accus-tomed, counselors and campers alike often slip up on this rule and are expected to re-mind each other when a comment is promoting any kind of body talk that the camp wishes to avoid.
As a counselor, this often becomes an interesting ethnographic experiment, ob-serving the interactions of campers, treading especially lightly with my 14-year-old female campers who struggled with this rule far more than my younger campers had. Body talk had become a thriving virus in our bunk and my co-counselor and I were very concerned about how to approach this issue carefully and effectively.
To confront this issue, we held a bunk meeting, during which we discussed body image and ways that it prevents us from feeling comfortable in our own bodies, after which we announced that we would be covering the mirrors in our bathroom for an undecided amount of time. We anticipated that this would upset some of the girls, but we also knew that it represented a larger issue that needed to be addressed.
At first, the reactions we received were to be expected: About half of the girls were moderately opposed to this idea, about a quarter neutral or interested to see how this experiment would develop, and about a quarter were devastated. An especially insecure camper of mine began to cry and asked, “What if I don’t look pretty and I don’t know?” The other girls tried desperately to comfort her. My co-counselor and I knew that this one camper would be the representative of how constantly our culture relies on external affirmations for internal comfort, and this was exactly the problem we needed to target.
Although it began with a rocky start, this story produced a positive outcome. After one week, we reconvened as a bunk to discuss how the girls were feeling and they asked us to leave the mirrors covered for another week. We did as they asked and soon after this, the girls began decorating the construction paper covering the mirrors with positive affirmations such as “Warning: Reflections in this mirror may be distorted by society’s idea of ‘beauty.’” This struck my co-counselor and me profoundly and when we eventually removed the paper, the girls told us that it was a very important challenge for them and that they no longer felt as much pressure to focus on their physical appearances.
Recently, Stern College hosted a workshop to discuss the importance and power of having a positive body image. Before the event there were promotional posters in the lobby of the Stern school building, located at 215 Lexington Avenue, on which students could write what they love most about their bodies. When reading what the students had written, there was one quote that caught my eye, “[What I love most about my body is] That I don’t let it define who I am.”
Today’s culture of commercializing and overly sexualizing the human body has extreme ramifications on the egos of young adults. Recently, the New York City Organization created a campaign called “I’m A Girl” in order to build the plummeting self-esteem of elementary school girls. As quoted on the campaign homepage, Thomas Cash and Thomas Pruzinsky write in their book, Body Image: A Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice, “By middle school, 40-70 percent of girls are dissatisfied with two or more parts of their body, and body satisfaction hits rock bottom between the ages of 12 and 15.” This is yet another representation of the problematic state of materialism in our culture (while it is also a promising step towards repair).
Considering the techniques we as a collective society could implement to coun-teract these problems, the concept of completely discarding “body talk” may seem a bit radical, but the sentiment still rings true: Yes, our bodies can be tools for self expression, but should we constantly rely on this material version of ourselves to feel whole?