When white Christians arrived at America’s shores, they did not stop at inflicting suffering upon the Indigenous people already there. They also brought with them the belief that they, as God’s Earthly messengers and warriors, were duty-bound to conquer whatever they encountered in this “new” land.
The conquering was bound up with the idea of salvation. Converting the “heathens” was a sign of piety and a step toward reaping the rewards for their efforts after they died and ascended to the kingdom of heaven. Any violence during conversion was done in service of and therefore sanctioned and justified in the eyes of God, so it was not a sin. They saw the defiant Indigenous people as pitiful savages trapped in the Plato’s cave of their unenlightenment.
Once there was nothing left worth conquering and the new white order had been sewn into this nation stitched together by subjugation, the only frontier left was the self. Just like how the land and its inhabitants were seen as resources to extract and use up, the body also came to be viewed as a means to an end, not something to be valued in its own right. After all, only the immortal spirit hosted within the body would be able to reach God in the heavens.
However, God did make humanity in His image. Why would He not want to have His followers do their best to emulate Him in his perfection? A pure body was therefore the natural extension of a pure mind.
The white Christians could have kept this to themselves. But hegemony must be spread; this last step had to become everyone’s problem. As a capitalist system fueled by these beliefs became the dominant force in American society, the “ideal body” changed over time, but its core tenet was its unattainability. Because that same ethic of hard work could be turned upon the inherently “flawed” body, there was always room for improvement.
Today, society has convinced us that if we have enough willpower, we can contort our bodies into conformity. We recognize that focusing on what we eat is insufficient, so we also control how we eat through disordered eating habits disguised as things like “intermittent fasting.” These habits are born out of a desire to control, not out of a lack of access.
The internet exacerbates the problem by providing a space for like-minded people to congregate. The hellscape that is #edtwt, the eating disorder side of Twitter, not only promotes and encourages disordered eating behaviors but also mercilessly shames anyone who falls outside their narrow conception of a “goal weight.” The body is reduced to a soulless numbers game that anybody can play; those who refuse to are weak in both morality and mind.
The superiority that #edtwt cultivates is dangerously reminiscent of the moral high ground that the white Christian colonizers took to justify their actions. The superficiality of fixating on outside appearances is excused through society’s approval of the intended result and the reasoning behind it.
There is nothing good in this violence against the self. Attaching a self-esteem level and a warped sense of discipline to something that can change day-to-day is an endeavor destined to fail.
There is no salvation in it and there is no reward for doing that level of damage, no matter how many compliments you get. It says nothing about you except how dedicated you are to hurting yourself in the name of purity and conquest. Unlearn the patterns born from the influence of American Christian morality – you are not a bad person for letting your mind and your body be equals.
