When your frustrated gestures and missteps and bodily distress signals are read as a sign of your incompetence, not a problem with the world, you’re often being done an injustice
"[H]ow much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" THIS!!!!
This essay makes me think about the concept of "impostor syndrome" for professional women or the "confidence gap" for girls. Is it really some kind of faulty thinking (blaming the victim?) or just a logical response to the lived experience of being demeaned, mistrusted, and doubted by others?
I love this AND I'm also thinking about the opposite-- the sort of "hips don't lie" rhetoric of a woman's body, where her sexual availability is supposed to come from her movements, dress, etc. and not from her conscious words. I wonder how these are related? Like, under what conditions are women's bodies thought to be telling the truth of the world and under what circumstances are they thought to be unreliable narrators? From the examples given here, it would appear that the unreliable narration stems from moments of pain, injury, frustration-- in short, places where women are asking for accommodation or aid. As you write so well in your books, women are morally required to be givers, not takers, and so when their bodies are asking for something, this signal is read as incompetence, whilst their bodies supposed "invitations" are always read as being universally extended.
My spouse and I were super-responsible when she was pregnant about going to the pregnancy classes offered at the hospital where our child was eventually delivered. We were therefore extremely well-informed about the signs of labor. When she went into labor several weeks early, we did everything we were supposed to do to confirm that was the case. We went to the hospital accordingly. Both of us are overweight; we found that what this meant at this moment is that the nurse assigned to us refused to believe she was not only in labor, but well along in the process; she assumed it was a kind of embodied incompetence, a false testimony. (And that I was merely endorsing her testimony as an act of loyalty, rather than as someone who had done the work the classes taught us to do in terms of timing reported contractions.) We had to strenuously demand that the nurse-practicioner do an exam, which she was profoundly disinclined to do, whereupon she found that my spouse was almost fully dilated. It was a really informing (bad) experience of what it's like to be disbelieved in this fashion. When men report pain or narrate signals from the interaction of body and environment, it's taken completely seriously from that first moment of experience or description.
This resonates so hard and speaks to the misogyny I encounter from my husband all the time (just as one example). Typing that sentence is so painful because I don't want to think of him that way but I think it reflects the water we're swimming in and breathing in that teaches us to not trust or believe women. It's not just interactions with the world either--it's everything--and the commonality is assumed incompetence.
Here's a heartbreaking example from this week: my husband did the laundry the other day and the lint catch in the dryer was full of lint. So my husband asked me if I knew what it was and how to empty it; while he was asking half in jest, the default was to assume and joke about incompetence on a **chore** I've been doing for decades. Not "hey you forgot to empty the lint catch" or "wow whatever load you did recently must have been really big" but rather "lol you're incompetent." It turns out I had just done a load of oversized linen sheets and duvet covers.
The irony of this is how much pressure I feel to be competent in everything all the time, how much more objectively competent I am in more things than him (and all the other men) and yet, and yet.
This resonates so loudly, my mind is flooded with anecdotes. I don't even know where to start. Add to this, being a "highly sensitive person" (so I react to things that are undetectable by many others) ... I can't even. Thank you for articulating this phenomenon in your usual clear and brilliant way.
I have an autoimmune condition that was well managed until it wasn’t. One of the first signs that something was up was exercise intolerance and changes in my weight (the number isn’t important, but that it changed noticeably without any variance in my eating, exercise, or other things was). I was a fairly serious runner at the time, the exercise intolerance was measurable and significant. The male doc I saw at the time totally blew me off and said everything was fine. It took me a while to trust my instincts that something wasn’t right and to find a new doc. By the time I did, I was in the midst of a pretty serious flare. A flare that I caught very early. The several years I spent struggling to regain my health were extremely frustrating, mostly because it was all so unnecessary.
This is so so excellent. I'm in treatment for a restrictive eating disorder in a fat body and your line about "how much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" rings so true. Maybe it would be easier for me to eat more if the whole world wasn't screaming at me to eat less!
I was told I was fat and “not atheistic” and put on diets from a young age. By the time I was able to look back at photos of myself as a child and (gasp!) realize none of it was true (I was a chubby baby then I was a taller than average kid) I was in adulthood. By then I had lived to develop disordered eating and all manner of exercise phobia. In other words their lies had kinda become true. I also learned in adulthood that I had never known how to listen to my body--which put me in danger where men were concerned. Today I don’t feel scolded by the “listen to your body” (I just learned how to do it so I do it and enjoy it, it’s like magic!) but I do find it deeply hypocritical of this society: they don’t mean for my Black *ss to listen to my body, and I wish they’d admit it!
Oof! When I was thrown off a horse and broke my humerus, the local farmers who came to help opined it was only sprained because I was a ‘city girl’. When I fainted after they tried to stand me up that proved I was soft (urban, female) rather than that something was broken. The trail leader (male local) had to keep them from trying again and instruct them to call the ambulance they weren’t keen to call on my say so. Years later a degloving injury was missed by paramedics and emergency room staff because I was a fat woman. I was criticised for taking up a bed ‘for a bruise’. No scans of the wound site were deemed necessary, leading to complications requiring surgery. Later it was assumed I was too sensitive to pain rather than that I also had an undiagnosed tendon tear. That through line only became clear after reading your essay, thank you!
I also think about this phenomenon in the context of the left, where ostensibly we're supposed to be a little more aware of the epistemological and vocal injustice (whose voices are amplified and dampened) but all too often it ends up looking the same as the wider world. I was always struck in organizing spaces that women of a variety of positions (usually trying to address misogyny or racism, from men and from women) were basically gaslit in front of everyone, accused either of totally misunderstanding the person or of not knowing how to do "real" political work. Typically, they ended up leaving the space entirely. Including me!
“Would I be better at fitting keys in locks—something I am in fact embarrassingly bad at—if I’d not been read as even less competent than I am at it on more than one occasion? Would I be less prone to giving up? Would I have greater self-efficacy? Not to mention simply more practice at the art of the jiggle. “
I have a classic “fixed mindset” that I am consistently trying to overcome. I have built systems to get myself out of trying things that I deem too difficult to overcome. If I didn’t have a husband who was mechanically inclined, I wouldn’t live in a house. I know how to wield a hammer and a drill but my husband regularly takes over for me because I purportedly take too long which I internalize as I do it wrong.
All the invisible labor of making things neutral, or good enough, things that no one actually notices but that keep things at a status quo are of course never seen.
It’s the same old adage that we are invisible until we trip up and prove our incompetence.
Which I will forever internalize as my own damned fault instead of the fault of a society that isn’t moveable.
This short essay reminds me of the podcast The Retrievals about how hundreds of women’s severe pain during egg retrievals was ignored by Yale’s reproductive medicine clinic (which for me was a more interesting aspect of the story than the nurse who stole fentanyl from the clinic and substituted saline solution as an anesthetic). Sadly the podcast made me feel “lucky” that my IVF experience was so different from the four pain-free egg retrievals to the fact my (male) doctor was always attuned to my pain during vaginal ultrasounds and other tests. It’s somewhat sad that I feel grateful for this experience rather than assuming it should be the norm.
I have been told for years and years and years by people in my life that I am a "pain baby" because I have outsized reactions to pain. I have, for years and years and years, said through tears or gritted teeth, you don't know what this pain feels like in my body. And the response would be scoffing or wink wink nudge nudge sure sure the burn feels BAD OKAY BABY.
When I decided to get my first tattoo, I was LAUGHED at. "You'll never be able to take it." "Hahahahahaha you'll have an incomplete tattoo on you."
I have 9 tattoos now, with my 10th scheduled for Sunday. My body knows. My body KNOWS. And it turns out I'm not a pain baby.
"Still, I have to ask: how much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" Damn. That's exactly it. I am a self-identified clumsy person, but it has more to do with how I relate to my body, how the world relates to my body--always too short, small, unable to take up space in a way that somehow I should. I lived through years of chronic migraines and was told by male and female doctors that it was in my head, they couldn't figure it out and didn't care to. What changed is when I removed myself finally from a toxic work world--haven't had a headache since. I can't fathom how much the world tells marginalized bodies that they are wrong and to distrust what our bodies tell us. Grateful that you are writing about this with such powerful clarity.
As someone who has historically "[billed myself] as clumsy to preempt the world’s harsh and monolithic judgment about [my] acumen", these subtle examples were eye-opening. It really pervades all levels, doesn't it? And talk about internalizing others' minimizing: I twice suffered months of crippling orthopedic pain; both conditions were ultimately easily repaired by minor surgical procedures.
A big disparity in height between me and my partner meant we literally couldn’t see eye-to-eye on spatial issues. It’s known that taller people are more confident. As males tend to be taller than their partners I believe this does have a subtle but pervasive impact on gender relations.
"[H]ow much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" THIS!!!!
This essay makes me think about the concept of "impostor syndrome" for professional women or the "confidence gap" for girls. Is it really some kind of faulty thinking (blaming the victim?) or just a logical response to the lived experience of being demeaned, mistrusted, and doubted by others?
I love this AND I'm also thinking about the opposite-- the sort of "hips don't lie" rhetoric of a woman's body, where her sexual availability is supposed to come from her movements, dress, etc. and not from her conscious words. I wonder how these are related? Like, under what conditions are women's bodies thought to be telling the truth of the world and under what circumstances are they thought to be unreliable narrators? From the examples given here, it would appear that the unreliable narration stems from moments of pain, injury, frustration-- in short, places where women are asking for accommodation or aid. As you write so well in your books, women are morally required to be givers, not takers, and so when their bodies are asking for something, this signal is read as incompetence, whilst their bodies supposed "invitations" are always read as being universally extended.
My spouse and I were super-responsible when she was pregnant about going to the pregnancy classes offered at the hospital where our child was eventually delivered. We were therefore extremely well-informed about the signs of labor. When she went into labor several weeks early, we did everything we were supposed to do to confirm that was the case. We went to the hospital accordingly. Both of us are overweight; we found that what this meant at this moment is that the nurse assigned to us refused to believe she was not only in labor, but well along in the process; she assumed it was a kind of embodied incompetence, a false testimony. (And that I was merely endorsing her testimony as an act of loyalty, rather than as someone who had done the work the classes taught us to do in terms of timing reported contractions.) We had to strenuously demand that the nurse-practicioner do an exam, which she was profoundly disinclined to do, whereupon she found that my spouse was almost fully dilated. It was a really informing (bad) experience of what it's like to be disbelieved in this fashion. When men report pain or narrate signals from the interaction of body and environment, it's taken completely seriously from that first moment of experience or description.
This resonates so hard and speaks to the misogyny I encounter from my husband all the time (just as one example). Typing that sentence is so painful because I don't want to think of him that way but I think it reflects the water we're swimming in and breathing in that teaches us to not trust or believe women. It's not just interactions with the world either--it's everything--and the commonality is assumed incompetence.
Here's a heartbreaking example from this week: my husband did the laundry the other day and the lint catch in the dryer was full of lint. So my husband asked me if I knew what it was and how to empty it; while he was asking half in jest, the default was to assume and joke about incompetence on a **chore** I've been doing for decades. Not "hey you forgot to empty the lint catch" or "wow whatever load you did recently must have been really big" but rather "lol you're incompetent." It turns out I had just done a load of oversized linen sheets and duvet covers.
The irony of this is how much pressure I feel to be competent in everything all the time, how much more objectively competent I am in more things than him (and all the other men) and yet, and yet.
This resonates so loudly, my mind is flooded with anecdotes. I don't even know where to start. Add to this, being a "highly sensitive person" (so I react to things that are undetectable by many others) ... I can't even. Thank you for articulating this phenomenon in your usual clear and brilliant way.
I have an autoimmune condition that was well managed until it wasn’t. One of the first signs that something was up was exercise intolerance and changes in my weight (the number isn’t important, but that it changed noticeably without any variance in my eating, exercise, or other things was). I was a fairly serious runner at the time, the exercise intolerance was measurable and significant. The male doc I saw at the time totally blew me off and said everything was fine. It took me a while to trust my instincts that something wasn’t right and to find a new doc. By the time I did, I was in the midst of a pretty serious flare. A flare that I caught very early. The several years I spent struggling to regain my health were extremely frustrating, mostly because it was all so unnecessary.
This is so so excellent. I'm in treatment for a restrictive eating disorder in a fat body and your line about "how much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" rings so true. Maybe it would be easier for me to eat more if the whole world wasn't screaming at me to eat less!
I was told I was fat and “not atheistic” and put on diets from a young age. By the time I was able to look back at photos of myself as a child and (gasp!) realize none of it was true (I was a chubby baby then I was a taller than average kid) I was in adulthood. By then I had lived to develop disordered eating and all manner of exercise phobia. In other words their lies had kinda become true. I also learned in adulthood that I had never known how to listen to my body--which put me in danger where men were concerned. Today I don’t feel scolded by the “listen to your body” (I just learned how to do it so I do it and enjoy it, it’s like magic!) but I do find it deeply hypocritical of this society: they don’t mean for my Black *ss to listen to my body, and I wish they’d admit it!
Oof! When I was thrown off a horse and broke my humerus, the local farmers who came to help opined it was only sprained because I was a ‘city girl’. When I fainted after they tried to stand me up that proved I was soft (urban, female) rather than that something was broken. The trail leader (male local) had to keep them from trying again and instruct them to call the ambulance they weren’t keen to call on my say so. Years later a degloving injury was missed by paramedics and emergency room staff because I was a fat woman. I was criticised for taking up a bed ‘for a bruise’. No scans of the wound site were deemed necessary, leading to complications requiring surgery. Later it was assumed I was too sensitive to pain rather than that I also had an undiagnosed tendon tear. That through line only became clear after reading your essay, thank you!
I also think about this phenomenon in the context of the left, where ostensibly we're supposed to be a little more aware of the epistemological and vocal injustice (whose voices are amplified and dampened) but all too often it ends up looking the same as the wider world. I was always struck in organizing spaces that women of a variety of positions (usually trying to address misogyny or racism, from men and from women) were basically gaslit in front of everyone, accused either of totally misunderstanding the person or of not knowing how to do "real" political work. Typically, they ended up leaving the space entirely. Including me!
“Would I be better at fitting keys in locks—something I am in fact embarrassingly bad at—if I’d not been read as even less competent than I am at it on more than one occasion? Would I be less prone to giving up? Would I have greater self-efficacy? Not to mention simply more practice at the art of the jiggle. “
I have a classic “fixed mindset” that I am consistently trying to overcome. I have built systems to get myself out of trying things that I deem too difficult to overcome. If I didn’t have a husband who was mechanically inclined, I wouldn’t live in a house. I know how to wield a hammer and a drill but my husband regularly takes over for me because I purportedly take too long which I internalize as I do it wrong.
All the invisible labor of making things neutral, or good enough, things that no one actually notices but that keep things at a status quo are of course never seen.
It’s the same old adage that we are invisible until we trip up and prove our incompetence.
Which I will forever internalize as my own damned fault instead of the fault of a society that isn’t moveable.
This short essay reminds me of the podcast The Retrievals about how hundreds of women’s severe pain during egg retrievals was ignored by Yale’s reproductive medicine clinic (which for me was a more interesting aspect of the story than the nurse who stole fentanyl from the clinic and substituted saline solution as an anesthetic). Sadly the podcast made me feel “lucky” that my IVF experience was so different from the four pain-free egg retrievals to the fact my (male) doctor was always attuned to my pain during vaginal ultrasounds and other tests. It’s somewhat sad that I feel grateful for this experience rather than assuming it should be the norm.
I have been told for years and years and years by people in my life that I am a "pain baby" because I have outsized reactions to pain. I have, for years and years and years, said through tears or gritted teeth, you don't know what this pain feels like in my body. And the response would be scoffing or wink wink nudge nudge sure sure the burn feels BAD OKAY BABY.
When I decided to get my first tattoo, I was LAUGHED at. "You'll never be able to take it." "Hahahahahaha you'll have an incomplete tattoo on you."
I have 9 tattoos now, with my 10th scheduled for Sunday. My body knows. My body KNOWS. And it turns out I'm not a pain baby.
"Still, I have to ask: how much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" Damn. That's exactly it. I am a self-identified clumsy person, but it has more to do with how I relate to my body, how the world relates to my body--always too short, small, unable to take up space in a way that somehow I should. I lived through years of chronic migraines and was told by male and female doctors that it was in my head, they couldn't figure it out and didn't care to. What changed is when I removed myself finally from a toxic work world--haven't had a headache since. I can't fathom how much the world tells marginalized bodies that they are wrong and to distrust what our bodies tell us. Grateful that you are writing about this with such powerful clarity.
As someone who has historically "[billed myself] as clumsy to preempt the world’s harsh and monolithic judgment about [my] acumen", these subtle examples were eye-opening. It really pervades all levels, doesn't it? And talk about internalizing others' minimizing: I twice suffered months of crippling orthopedic pain; both conditions were ultimately easily repaired by minor surgical procedures.
A big disparity in height between me and my partner meant we literally couldn’t see eye-to-eye on spatial issues. It’s known that taller people are more confident. As males tend to be taller than their partners I believe this does have a subtle but pervasive impact on gender relations.