body love

Yesterday, my afternoon got hijacked by a little blog post titled My Husband Doesn’t Need to See Your Boobs. My first thought, before reading the article, was a cheeky “Well of course he doesn’t need to see them, even my own husband doesn’t need to see my boobs, but hey, boobs are awesome, of course people want to see them.” And note that I say people, not men, because men aren’t alone in liking to look at breasts. Many people find breasts, and the rest of a woman’s curves, objectively beautiful. There’s something very aesthetically pleasing about a body, whether it’s the soft curves of a woman or the chiseled planes of a male athlete.

And that’s what I’d like to talk about today, because much like the bikini-clad young women decried in the above article, belly dancers like me often get accused of dressing immodestly and attracting the attention of other women’s husbands and boyfriends. Well, of course we attract attention, we’re beautiful. And we dress to be beautiful. But we don’t dress to be sexually attractive — that’s a side effect, but the truth is, as a woman, no matter what you’re shaped like and how you’re dressed, someone is going to find you sexy. There were times and cultures where just a glimpse of a woman’s wrist was considered provocative, whereas in our current culture we only notice a wrist if it’s adorned with a nice tattoo or piece of jewelry.

When I dance, I dress to impress. I show my belly, the better to display my torso isolations. I might wear a skirt that hugs my bootie, the better to draw attention to my hips while I do a slow, languid maya. But then again, I might wear a huge, fluffy cotton skirt over billowing pantaloons, to make my spins all that much more showy and impressive. Either way, my intention is to create a beautiful image, an impression of something at once exotic and artistic. The dance would still be beautiful if I did it in sweat pants, but it would lose some of its magic.

There’s this weird idea that when women dress or put on makeup or do our hair to make ourselves more beautiful, we’re only doing it for men. Either we want to attract a man, or we want to make our man feel good about choosing us. As such, it’s obvious that a belly dancer must be showing off her body and wearing 50lbs of stage makeup to seduce a man. Why else would we go to the effort?

But quite simply, I think that women like to feel beautiful for our own sake. Is it wrong to think “My eyes are gorgeous, I should use this shade of eyeliner to really highlight them” or to enjoy smoothing a skirt down the curve of our hips? Is it wrong to be pleased with the size and shape of our breasts, whether we’re happy that they’re still young and perky or nostalgic about the way they sag from when we nursed babies that are now grown to adults? Is it wrong to sit down with a tutorial from Pinterest for a complicated braid, because your hair is finally long enough and you’ve always wanted to try that style? I don’t think it is.

Likewise, when I meet up with one of my female friends, whether it’s to grab lunch or to get ready for our show backstage, and I say “You look great” I’m not saying “Damn girl! You are going to seduce the hell out of someone tonight!” I’m saying “You know what? I find you to be objectively beautiful. You go girl, great job picking that skirt.”

We’ve long known that the human form was objectively beautiful. If it wasn’t, instead of the Venus de Milo we’d have a lovely sculpture of some flowers.

Proponents of the modesty culture like to say that once a man has seen an image, he can’t unsee it. Well, I believe that. I can’t unsee some horribly graphic pictures that friends have posted on Facebook, and I wish I could. But I don’t wish that I could unsee the Venus de Milo, or Mira Betz stepping on stage “dressed like the Queen of Sheba” as she likes to say, or me and my friends wearing bikinis and eating pizza. Why would anyone want to unsee those things? I think that our society needs to spend less time policing women’s modesty, and more time learning to differentiate between beauty and seduction.