Nimue Brown's Blog, page 343

Questions of beauty

At the moment, I’m reading Jane Meredith’s ‘Aphrodite’s Magic’ which is raising a lot of questions for me about how we think about beauty. I’m reminded of things Penny Billington said at Druid Camp this year about how we view trees compared to how we view people. It’s much easier to see the beauty in a tree, and to accept the bumps, twists, eccentricities, damage and so forth as part of what makes the tree itself, not things that detract from beauty. When it comes to judging humans, we’re a lot more critical.

I recognise this is a whole subject area that makes me very uneasy. I can talk about beauty in regards to anything that isn’t a human person. Once we get round to the subject of people I feel tense. I’m more willing to think about how we craft beauty, through clothes choices, decoration, movement, or how the grace in a soul can shape a face. The accident of our genetic makeup and the degree to which it conforms to a narrow bandwidth of culturally defined norms, is something I don’t get excited about. I’ve never been that excited about the kind of youth-beauty, shiny, unmarked and fresh out of its clingfilm wrap, that seems to dominate at the moment. I like people who (with all due reference to Stranger in a Strange Land) have their own face.

Of course even so, as a teen and a young woman, I wanted to be beautiful and agonised over the fact that I wasn’t. Always too plump, fighting a losing battle against a pale skin dark body hair combination, broad shouldered. Even so, I chose muscle bulk (for drumming, and later for Viking re-enactment) over seeking waifdom, repeatedly. I chose not to invest vast amounts of time in nails, hair, makeup, accessories. I didn’t have the patience for it. I also felt that trying to hide my rather plain face under a lot of makeup in order to feign a beauty I didn’t possess, was a bit pointless. Largely persuaded by the need to fit in with mainstream beauty norms even though I’m not at all attracted to those same norms in other people, I never considered that I might be ok on my own terms.

I’m going to make a conscious effort to think about beauty. Not magazine beauty. Not movie beauty. The people around me, with no reference to age, gender, race, body shape or personal style. The idea that people could be looked at like trees, in appreciation not criticism. The idea, tentatively, that it might be possible to consider life as beautiful, just for being, and to remove all the weight of judgemental baggage from the experience of being in the world.

Not so quiet revolution

Last weekend, the British Labour party voted a passably left wing chap to be their new leader. This is pretty revolutionary, because for a long time now, the right wing media have been telling this country that only the right wing people are electable and only the right wing approach to economics is viable and acceptable. We’ve been painfully short of alternative stories. Yet in spite of the media barrage, Jeremy Corbyn is in.

It looks like his first challenge is going to be to sort out a party in which there are people who have no idea what the world ‘Labour’ might pertain to. We know this because a bunch of them just abstained from an important vote on worker’s rights. The majority of us either work for a living, or are, due to circumstances beyond our control, unable to do so (age being one of those factors). And yet we’ve been persuaded, and the political elite have persuaded themselves, that the right way to run a country is to squeeze the majority for the benefit of the few.

There are a lot of us. We the people who do not have our own jets, cannot afford to buy the time of politicians, do not have a media empire to put forth our views. We are the majority. To the tune of about 99%. What the right wing has cunningly done is set us up against each other, encouraging those who are working to hate those who are not working, those who have some to be afraid of those who have less. We of the 99% have more in common than not, and although we suffer to varying degrees in this system, most of us are not benefiting from it much. It’s difficult to see how this works when your daily news feed preaches a very different story.

I’m not a Labour supporter, but I like Jeremy Corbyn. I like him because he talks of solidarity, of working together and taking care of each other. He uses words like ‘decency’ and clearly knows what those words mean. He talks about people, shared humanity, common need. Rather than encouraging people to be afraid of each other, his words are about encouraging people to help each other. Culturally, this is a whole other thing.

I’m tired of the politics of fear. I’m tired of this constant flow of propaganda that tells us to cling tightly to what we have while looking around nervously in case someone wants to take it from us. It should be a matter of shame to have an excess when others are suffering. We need to stop obsessing about who ‘deserves’ help because this is designed to reinforce the idea that most people who are in trouble don’t deserve help. We need to look at who needs help, and then help them. We have the resources, we need the political will. Now at least we have a different set of stories in the mix and some political will. It’s a start.

I very much doubt I’ll be voting Labour any time soon, because I’m a committed member of the Green Party. What I will be doing though, is taking every opportunity to stand up for a different kind of world. Hope not hate. Help not resentment. Solidarity. Compassion. Working together to make things better for all of us. I believe we can do a good deal better than we are at the moment. I believe there are better ways of living, and after Jeremy Corbyn’s win at the weekend, I am cheered to realise that there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who feel much the same way. Their party politics are neither here nor there. What matters is the culture shift, changing the political agenda, and challenging the toxic right wing stories of fear and institutionalised mean-spiritedness that we have at the moment.

Paganism: Specific or generic?

Quite a lot of Paganism is generic. Our much loved wheel of the year is not a replica of something from a time and place, but cobbled together from many times and places, with added equinoxes. We know the Celts went in for ‘local Gods for local people’ but on the whole, we don’t do that so much. There are forms of shamanism that draw on the shamanistic practices to be found around the world – because there are startling similarities. But at the same time, there’s a tension for me between the themes and the details.

What really brought this home for me was reading Nikolai Shodoev’s ‘Spiritual Wisdom from the Altai Mountains’. The place in question is in Siberia – whereas previously I’d had the impression Siberian shamanism was ‘a thing’ but clearly, it isn’t. Altai is a bit of Siberia, not the whole place. Within it, there are many tribes with their own sacred mountains, valleys and trees. This is a tradition rooted in folk wisdom that has evolved and survived for a long time, going through various forms, and an early 20th century revival. The form it takes varies over time, depending on what’s needed and what makes sense. It absorbs science and progress, and social changes.

Although the book never says it explicitly, it makes clear how futile it is treating religion as something you can skim off from a culture for your own use. What you get that way are the surfaces, symbols and rituals, but you don’t get the coherence to hold it together. Part of that coherence comes from having a relationship with the land the spirituality belongs to. Part of it is about tribe and family heritage.

Does that mean we can only follow the gods of our blood ancestors and the religions established in our landscape? Actually, no. After all, every tradition starts somewhere. What’s critically important is working with what we have. Starting from a relationship with the land, perhaps drawing inspiration from other sources, but being fundamentally rooted in the ground beneath our feet means that we can’t mistake nicking the shiny bits from other people’s faith for something useful. This confirms for me a lot of feelings I’d had reading about Shinto – which is inherently Japanese and belongs in Japan, and without either the land or the bloodlines, probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. The same is probably true of Judaism. It’s worth noting that religions of place and tribe do not seek converts, because it makes no sense to do so. But at the same time, Russian people moving into the Altai region and adopting its ways have become a recognised tribe there, over time.

What Shodoev inspires me to do is not to start emulating his people in any way, but to think about my own high places where I go to be with the sky on my own terms, and my own sacred trees, and the way in which story, history, and ancestry connect me to the soil.

All too often it’s the surface details of a religion we get excited about, not the underlying philosophy. To take surface pieces out of context – the chakras, dream catchers, dreadlocks, dance moves, plant use, and so forth without the stories and traditions that weave them into a life, seems a bit mad to me. These surface things have come to being through long periods of cultural development, and to take the surface with no knowledge of the culture smacks of tourism. The surface only makes sense, only works, when you know what’s underneath it. To immerse deeply in the stories, values and philosophy of a people and a religion is a very different thing. It’s not the headdress that defines the religion, but the reasons for the headdress.

I heartily recommend ‘Spiritual Wisdom from the Altai Mountains’ as a fascinating insight into an evolving culture and spirituality, with much to teach us. Not about what we can copy from the Altai people, but what we can discover for ourselves in our own history, story and landscape.

The lovely Princess and the particularly unpleasant monster

Once upon a time (well, about 2 years ago) there was a beautiful princess who found a monster in a cave, gave it the kicking it so obviously deserved and went on her way to marry her prince and do the happily ever after thing. After she had gone, the monster (merely beaten, not dead) sat with its bruises and wondered how it had come to be cast in this role.

It wasn’t that she got angry – people do get angry after all, and while I find it hard to deal with, I wouldn’t blame anyone for being cross. It wasn’t the telling off – humiliating and hurtful though that was. What did for me, was seeing her on social media announcing how proud she was of herself for standing up to me. I had no idea what I must have looked like to her; for knocking me down to be something to take pride in. She knocked me down so thoroughly it took me months to get up, but then, that’s what warrior princesses do to monsters, isn’t it? Two years on, and I’ve had a lot of being haunted by what happened.

It’s one of the experiences that have made me very wary about the degree to which I let people in. It raised for me issues about how I am in the world, and what it is reasonable to express of my own discomfort. Because for me, what lay at the back of this was the need to flag up that she’d done something that really hurt my feelings, and for her this expression read as a full frontal attack. I try not to attack people, as a general thing. I’m conscious of issues like Ahimsa (psychological violence). I try not to raise my voice, not to blame or accuse, not to demand. No doubt I get this wrong sometimes, maybe even a lot, but the general effort on my part is towards not attacking people.

Of course she’s not the first princess to take offence because I’ve been inconsiderate enough to express pain. Maybe there’s something about princesses that makes it very difficult for them to hear that someone is unhappy. My most recent princess has a great deal invested in being seen as a lovely, kind, gentle, generous sort of person. It was therefore like a pea under a hundred mattresses to be told that she may have inadvertently caused distress. Princesses are delicate creatures, and the onus tends to be on the monster not to offend that delicacy with any misplaced peas. There are things to recognise here about the difference between goodness, and an appearance of goodness.

We tell stories about ourselves. We tell stories about other people. We cast them in roles, we give ourselves roles. Hero, princess, wicked witch, rescuer, victim, dragon. Girl in the high tower, growing her hair. Woodsman in the forest looking for grandmothers with wolf fetishes. Who we think we are shapes what we do, and what we expect from others. Who we think they are shapes how we react when they do something. Our stories aren’t always accurate, or helpful. When the terrible monster roars, the lovely princess has to dust off her Kung Fu moves and do the heroic thing. Meanwhile in another story, a person who has had their nerve broken before finds all the things they fear about themselves may be true after all, and hides in their cave for months.

It’s taken me a couple of years to come up with a new story, one involving peas and over-reactions, and the entitlement of princesses who wish to be seen as good, rather than an acceptance that kicking monsters is what princesses are for. Maybe monsters are people, too. Maybe some of them are howling, not growling, or are purring, or singing. Maybe being an awkward thing in a cave is not a reason to be attacked. New stories, better options.

The Sweaty Druid

Getting away from the influence of ‘nature’ has tended to be what human civilization is all about. Following Druidry, identifying as having a nature-based spirituality, I am inclined to question every incidence of human ‘culture’ rejecting ‘nature’. Sometimes there are good reasons – most natural things seek warmth and shelter, for example. Making a home is perfectly natural. But what about sweat? We do it, but adverts teach us that to be in any way moist is a social failure. We must be dry and smell of chemicals to pass muster in our personal and professional lives.

Of course this sells a lot of deodorant and probably makes the London Underground more bearable, but is that enough to make it a truly good idea?

Sweat serves a number of functions. It helps us to cool down, and it gets toxins out of our bodies. We may also sweat nervously when under pressure, which can reveal our discomfort. So there’s perhaps a fear of looking uncomfortable and therefore less professionally cool and on top of things, to associate with sweat.

As a species, we’ve been wearing clothes for a long time. The basic idea of clothing is warmth, dryness and comfort, but being civilised, we’ve turned clothes into markers of affiliation, social status, profession and whatnot. Thus on a hot day, there are people stepping into tiny metal boxes wearing shirts, ties and jackets. Because that’s civilised. We’re supposed to sweat to keep cool, but we can’t be seen to do that in our suits, and so we suppress the natural reaction. It’s worth noting that skin which is allowed access to the air, able to breathe, cool down, dry off and generally get a breeze round it, does not stink especially. It’s when we use clothing to lock our smells against our skins that we really get the problem.

Sweating goes with activity. The person who sweats regularly doesn’t have a big backlog of toxins in their skin, and so the sweat is more of the fresh, healthy animal variety. It’s worth noting that sweaty animals tend not to smell anything like as gross as sweaty humans even though they tend to shower less and seldom use deodorant. Doing it regularly, plus not wearing a suit probably helps. Being well hydrated so that you can easily wash it all through, also helps. The person who sweats rarely and does so under stress, isn’t going to smell too good. Lots of ick to come out of the skin, and nowhere for it to go.

Any chemical applied to the body for the purposes of stopping sweat, is basically helping you store up your toxins. When eventually you do sweat, it will all smell that bit worse as a consequence, and in the meantime you get to carry about all the toxins your body would otherwise have preferred to dump. This does not strike me as being a perfect solution.

Alongside all the crap we put out, sweat also contains smells related to our hormones. We send smell messages to each other – or we would if we didn’t mostly smell of sprays. Those messages tell us things at a less than fully conscious level about how sexually compatible we are with each other, how well the people around us are and so forth. The unmasked body odour has a lot to say about a person. If we don’t smell so good, the temptation is to hide that under an artificial smell, fooling ourselves and everyone else around us. Socially speaking there’s a fair amount to commend this. In other ways though, it may be costing us. I find myself wondering if the stinky tendencies of teenagers may be a neat evolutionary device to stop them breeding too soon. Taking away their deodorant may be the most effective form of contraception available!

Female body image, fitness… and joy

A guest blog by Autumn Barlow

http://thorvalkyrie.tumblr.com/post/128129428179/littlemoongoddess-booksomewench

In this blog post I want to write about female body image, fitness … and joy. Celebration. Positivity. Love. Support. And laughter.

Twelve weeks ago, I would not have imagined I would be writing that. Indeed, you only have to stray onto the internet to be assailed by a ream of blog posts and articles which warn you about the trials and pitfalls of simply being in possession of a female-presenting body. You will always be too big, too small, too muscular, too rounded, too angular, just too real.

Twelve weeks ago, I decided to join a gym. I had a few reasons; after the death of our dog, I lost all motivation to go walking or cycling, and a history of medicinal steroids for Crohn’s Disease has left my bones thinner than average. The best thing for bone density, I found, was “resistance” training, also known as strength training, also known as … weightlifting. In my case, I chose powerlifting.

I googled. I read article after article that warned me about the terrors I was about to face. The articles told me I was going to be doing A Good Thing but that no one else would understand. I would have strangers warning me to “not get too muscular.” I would have men looking at me in the gym and trying to “mansplain” things to me. I read case studies and facebook posts where women documented their struggles to be taken seriously in the weights room. The negatives were endless; women struggling to eat enough for their training because society was judging them. Women trying to hide their toned arms. Women being used as bad examples to others – the woman who overheard a trainer tell his client not to use the big weights “Or you’ll look like her over there.”

I compiled a mental list of witty comebacks and strode into the gym with a face like a slapped arse. Come on, I snarled. Let’s have it.

Three months later, and I’m still waiting to be able to use those cutting retorts.

There is a website I have been following which talks about the everyday oppressions that many people experience; it discusses issues of race, sex, gender, able-ism and concepts of the “other”. I have read it, daily, for many months.

I recently unfollowed it.

Day after day, to be told that whatever you do – in whatever way you try to understand and be an ally – you will always be, somehow, wrong or privileged or in some way too entitled to ever really understand – that is draining. I ended up feeling like the very fact that I was trying to educate myself on issues was a problem! My desire to understand was a symptom of my education privilege, my intellectual privilege, these walls not of my own making that would forever see me on the other side, the evil oppressor.

When you go looking for wrongs, you can find them very easily. I went into the gym fired up and ready to take on the world because I had been told that the world was out to get me.

I am not dismissing the horrible and negative experiences that many women have had in the gym. And men, too; how terrifying is it for anyone to walk into a place where everything is unfamiliar and the rules are unwritten? No wonder that many people, if they find the courage to step inside, leap straight onto a running machine – they are near the door and they are simple to work out how to use – and they never make it to the sweaty freeweights section in a dark corner. I judge no one on their choices in the gym. Everyone who is there is damn brave.

And I acknowledge the disgusting comments that some women have heard; the well-meaning patronising advice; the sneers; the dismissals; and the abuse. I do.

But that’s not what this post is about. Not today. This post is about my experience … and my profound gratitude to my allies. Those who have tried to be an ally. You have succeeded. Thank you.

I hope that you, too, have people in your life – friends or family or strangers – who have helped you and supported you. It’s not always done overtly or directly. It might be the man in the gym who you don’t know, who chooses to stand at an angle while he does his biceps curls, so that he is not facing you head-on and intimidating you. Did you notice that he did that? It’s a small thing. But an important one. For all the douche-canoes I have heard of, that like to stand behind a woman who is squatting a heavy barbell, there are a dozen men who hold a respectful distance.

These allies, unacknowledged, unthanked. They don’t need a website to tell them that they are never going to understand me. Yet they can support, be respectful, be encouraging. And they do.

This, then, is for my parents. When I told them I had managed to deadlift 50kg after a few months of training, they did not shriek with alarm about how “big” I was going to get. They laughed and said “But that’s more than 100lb! Well done!” This, too, is for my husband. When I told him I was going to start lifting weights, he did not look scared and feel emasculated that I would no longer need him to open jars. He smiled and said, “Have fun!” This, then, is for the fitness instructor who said, “Finally a woman wants to do the weights!” This, then, is for the man in the power-rack before me, who said, “Do you want me to unload my weights or is this your warm-up weight?” His max was my warm-up weight and I appreciated his unforced comment. There was no assumption that I wanted a lighter weight. Small things. But … yes, important ones.

I could have driven myself crazy with the imagined terrors the internet warned me about. The experiences of other women, the online comments, the bad times. And I know I am not immune and some doofus will make a stupid remark at some point.

But hey … I’ve still got those witty come-back lines I need to use, right?

 

Image credit: http://thorvalkyrie.tumblr.com/post/128129428179/littlemoongoddess-booksomewench

Why are we not helping these other people first?

It seems like a fair point. Why are we getting so upset about refugees from ‘away’ when we’ve got our own homeless people, our own families in poverty depending on food banks, our own vulnerable, suffering people? Why divert resources when we can’t look after our own?

It’s a clever card to play, and it’s worth looking at the people playing it and casting your mind back a bit. Are these people volunteering in food banks? Are these people below the poverty line themselves? Are these people you’ve ever seen raise a hand to help another human being? I notice that the answer seems to be ‘no’. The people keenest to say we should look after our own first, have been reliably not doing that for some time now.

What this does, and is designed to do, is have us wondering about the various merits of people. Who deserves our help? Who is most vulnerable, most in need, most deserving? And of course the more time we spend arguing with each other over whether person A is more or less deserving than person B, the more time we spend talking each other into the idea that maybe these people aren’t very deserving at all. Right wing agenda success achieved!

It’s about judging people. It’s about looking at need, and finding reasons to say ‘no’. It’s about the idea that there’s a hierarchy of need based on worthiness, not on vulnerability. All people need warmth, shelter, food, clean water and physical safety. All people. Some people are less able to provide that for themselves than others. If we have to choose, need should be the priority. That and whether we can do something. You might as well do what you can rather than fretting that you should have gone out and found someone worse off to help. Deal with what’s in front of you.

There are people who would like us to choose. It supports the story that resources are scarce. We can’t house our own people so we can’t house refugees. Bollocks. Shelter reckons there are about ten empty homes for every homeless family in the UK. We’ve got money for weapons, for MP pay rises, for a nuclear submarine we can never use and a vanity rail project so that people can get out of London a wee bit faster. We don’t mind epic tax dodging by big business, and we subsidise inadequate wages out of the state purse to make life easier for business. It is a lie that we don’t have the resources. We do have the resources. What we don’t have is the will to distribute those resources even slightly fairly, or to deploy them based on need.

Help whoever you can help. In whatever way makes sense to you.

Little hazard warning lights

There usually comes a point with depression (which I tend to experience in cycles) when I’m just too threadbare and ragged to do anything much. This is invariably the dangerous zone for me, and the point of greatest suffering. Every time I’ve gone through it I have allowed myself to believe that it came as a total surprise. How did this happen again? It’s a mystery.

This summer I’ve been exploring questions of emotional honesty. Not least, the question of how emotionally honest I am with myself. There are stories I tell myself that rather get in the way here. Perhaps story in chief is ‘if I keep pushing, I can get through this. Getting the things done is the most important consideration. I must get the things done at any cost.’ Of course being a self employed person and a parent, and for that matter a human moving through time in a linear way, the ‘things’ are never ‘done’.

Somewhere much earlier on in the process, there are warning signs that I’m overloaded and burning out, but my habit has been to ignore them and keep pushing, and of course that always leads to the same things. Bodily tiredness, stress, anxiety triggers, lack of time off, colds and other such minor ailments, and other small setbacks have a cumulative effect. Big dramas and upheavals have proportionally bigger effects.  If I pay attention to when I’m not ok, perhaps I can get life back under control before I make myself emotionally ill. It’s a theory.

For some weeks now I’ve been making a point of doing regular check-ins with my body, and with my heart. How are we doing? What’s going on? Because otherwise I tend to live in my head and run roughshod over my physical self, and often my emotional self as well. All in the name of being useful and doing the things. Sometimes my body does not want to be useful. Sometimes my heart is not in doing the things. I’m learning how to notice this and to make room for it. Alongside this I am of necessity learning how to express to the people around me the idea that I maybe won’t be doing all the things. The people in my life who are willing to flex, accommodate or forgive, I shall be very glad of. I have to stop appeasing the people who want me to work myself sick. There are a lot fewer of them in the mix, these days.

The little hazard warning lights are on. The last few weeks of the summer were intensive with the doing. The great ‘back to school’ upheaval also creates a lot of work. There have been some serious dramas and life issues – mostly other people’s but impacting on me in significant ways. I’m very tired, and wanting to sleep ten hours a night and more. So I’m not fighting it, but am going to bed early, and when I hit points in the day of having no energy to throw, I’m not using will to push through it, I’m stopping, and curling up.

It feels a bit weird.

I’m so used to dismissing my body. I’ve had a lot of being told that I have a stupidly low pain threshold, that I make a fuss. Lazy. Melodramatic. Hypochondriac. Psychosomatic. All that jazz. It’s taught me to be silent when in distress, and to not take seriously the messages I get from my own body about what hurts and what strains. Learning how to hear what my body is expressing, without judgement, without rubbishing the experience or ignoring it has not been easy. I’m not at all sure how useful it is to try and measure pain objectively, and to say that one person’s pain is less valid somehow than another person’s. Taking myself seriously is an option I’d not much considered before, but have a feeling it could help me avoid getting into states of really dysfunctional depression.

When the wild gazes back

Often, the validation we talk about and seek in Druidry comes from other humans. Whether that’s through courses, being read, reading something that speaks of your experience too, being witnessed in ritual, or heard in conversation, we tend to look to each other for affirmation. While there are many people who perhaps also look to the gods for affirmation, often what happens with those experiences (based on observation) is that people bring them back to other people for substantiation. Otherwise what you have is ‘unsubstantiated personal gnosis’ and we tend not to feel that’s substantial enough.

The ephemeral, uncertain qualities of deity make them a bit challenging in this regard, and it’s hard to look around for someone who has seen and felt all the same things. However, deity is not the only non-human form of presence a Druid might encounter.

I’ve had a number of very intense experiences recently, where I gazed at nature, and nature gazed back. Urban foxes who made eye contact, or in one case stopped to have a wash, having acknowledged my presence and decided I was not an issue. Deer who are not afraid of me and stop to look, even when they have young ones with them. Several foraging sparrows who hopped towards me and got within a few feet.

There’s an immediacy to encountering a wild creature. Often it’s a significant blessing just to be tolerated for a few moments during which you can get a proper look at them. To have more than that – eye contact, more time, more interaction – depends on a number of things. You have to either be still and quiet, or moving gently enough that the wild thing does not see you as a threat. The more often they see you (as with me and the deer) the more relaxed they can become. They recognise you, and that’s a very powerful thing. Wild creatures have no reason to stay, to tolerate or to interact, unless we give them reason, or make it very easy for them. There’s a measure of how you are in the world to be found in the gaze of something that is free to leave.

In human exchanges we tend to look for word based affirmations. Non-human people won’t give us that, but they do speak with actions, body language and the fact of their presence. For me, this is something that creates a deeper awareness of myself as a physical presence in the world – I can tend to be too much in my head, if I’m not careful. The gaze of a wild thing reminds me that I too am a physical presence.

Once, our ancestors were wild things, too. In finding how to encounter non-human people, we can re-wild ourselves a bit.

The dubious logic of appearance shaming

There are many ways in which people shame each other over their bodies and appearances – fat and skinny shaming, and slut shaming being the most obvious. There are plenty of people making the case for why shaming others is cruel and unhelpful, so I want to take a different tack and talk about the assumptions you have to make to get the whole process under way.

Step 1: I believe that I can look at someone, even a total stranger, and make a reasonable judgement about them based only on what I can see in the moment. The surface that I can see is the whole story – be that the tight dress, the body shape, the cleanliness, the apparent poverty, or lack of apparent poverty (shaming the poor for not looking poor enough is becoming a thing).  What I see in front of me is the whole story.

Step 2: Thinking that I can see all there is to see, I believe I am entitled to infer things about the sort of person I am looking at – a refugee who is well dressed can therefore be considered suspect. A girl in a short skirt is asking to be raped. A fat person is greedy and lazy, etc. All of these judgements are incredibly harsh and critical, and assume the worst of the person I’m looking at based on no real evidence beyond my interpretation of a surface impression.

Step 3: I have successfully created a power imbalance in which I give myself the moral high ground, and determine that the other person is inferior to me. This gives me an even greater sense of entitlement which in turn enables me to take action.

Step 4: Based on my sense of moral superiority, I tell the person who I’m judging some ‘hard truth’ I ‘tell it like it really is’ – I spout my hate and assumptions and expect them to take this onboard. I also feel entitled to act unpleasantly in line with these assumptions.

Step 5: If the other person objects, I point out that I am only doing it for their own good, to help them and that they need to face up to reality and sort themselves out. I leave the encounter feeling like I’ve done them a massive favour (which of course I haven’t), and not like I am a total git, which would be a lot closer to the truth.

Many disabilities are not visible. Depression is not visible. Whether someone’s partner just died is not visible. Whether someone has just made huge progress in getting to a healthier body size is not visible. Whether someone is on meds affecting their body size is not visible. How promiscuous someone is, cannot be seen by looking at their clothes. How promiscuous someone is, is not actually a measure of whether or not they are ‘good’. People who are poor are not required to conform to certain dress codes so that you can see they are poor – there’s a double bind here: Look smart and clearly you aren’t really poor, look rough and downtrodden and you’re a lazy person who hasn’t made the effort so your poverty must be your fault.

When we shame people based on how they look, it actually has very little to do with them. It’s all about the person who is doing the shaming wanting to feel superior to someone else, and feeling entitled to inflate their own ego by bullying someone else. This kind of shaming also lets us off the hook, because if we blame the other person we can tell ourselves we’re under no obligation to help them.  Even if you think you know what’s going on with someone else, maybe you don’t, maybe they haven’t told you.

Helping people starts by not shaming them, not humiliating them, and not assuming we know what’s going on for them and consequently what they should do about it. Ask, listen, enable, support. That kind of thing can make a difference. The other thing just mires people in misery, and makes it harder for them to speak. Blaming people just doesn’t make anything better.