I wrote in my previous post: "The problem is that sometimes we give consent without knowing it. People think we've given consent when we have not, or we are unaware that the consent process is being assumed. Sometimes we give other entities permission to determine what we do with our bodies without knowing that we had a choice in the first place. We think we have no choice, or we don't know that there are other options."
How do we cede sovereignty of our bodies without realizing it? How do we seem to allow people or institutions or social norms to obtain sovereignty over our bodies and lives?
The movie the Matrix portrays the conflict between individuals who are ignorantly asleep and exploitative systems that are greedily eating on their energy. The question posed to Neo is: do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill? The two pills represent a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. Until this question is posed, consent has not been obtained.
As in the movie, is it fully consensual to be in a tube being fed a simulation if you never chose it and didn’t know there was a choice? Once you are given the choice of red pill versus blue pill, and you understand the choice, then it is consensual. But if you don’t even know that the Matrix exists, are you truly giving your consent to be in a simulation? The answer is, I think: No, it's not consensual until the choice is presented.
The obtaining of consent without their knowledge is what happened with Indigenous land in North America. According to legend that is taught in schools as fact, Native Americans signed over their rights to the land to the white settlers. According to some historians, they, not knowing how to write or what a signature was, simply put an x-mark on some paper contracts and agreements that effectively ceded all of their land over to white settlers. In this way, some people argue that the Native Americans willingly consented to giving their land away. But is it really consent if you don’t have all the information you need to understand what that agreement was really about, and more importantly, if you don’t even have the epistemological framework to understand territory, private property and land ownership?
Land is a type of territory, and bodies are also a type of territory. In politics, we often fight over the territory of the body.
COVID. Mask mandates. Vaccine requirements. Social distancing regulations.
Abortions in Texas.
Trans rights to use the bathroom and access health care.
MY BODY, MY CHOICE, yell the slogans.
Our political climate is riddled with examples of the fight over bodily sovereignty. But what does it all really mean on the micro-scale, the scale of everyday life, the scale of the individual body?
I also wrote in my previous post: "Gaining back consent over our bodies is the first step towards gaining back consent over our lives."
How can we start to go about doing that? Beauty is about exercising bodily sovereignty. Think about tattoos or body piercings, plastic surgery or hair dye, fashion choices or make-up. It’s about turning our bodies into art but also about self-expression. But it’s also a way of saying, “it’s my body and I’ll change it if I want to.”
Doing what you want with your body is your choice alone–what kind of clothes you want to wear, what kind of haircut, what kind of facial hair, what kind of piercings and tattoos. You get to own your body, nobody else gets to determine who you are or your body for what it is.
At the end of the day, we can never win if we are trying to mold to society’s expectations. Instead, we can take back sovereignty over our own bodies, which is about choosing how to adorn and present our bodies as a temple and as a celebration of our soul. You (yes, you!) have such a beautiful soul and it deserves to be honored in whatever physical manifestation you have and want to share.
I know what it feels like to have a body that just doesn’t fit; a body that doesn’t fit right into clothes and doesn’t fit right into people’s expectations. No matter what happens, I will always have a female body and I will always feel wrong in it and it will never fit into what society expects or wants or glorifies. Many of us have bodies that don’t fit into what society wants or expects. But it’s not our fault that capitalism makes clothes only fit to certain body types. It's not our fault that patriarchy worships certain bodies and certain genders. Society polices our bodies as much as the government does. But it is our right to re-claim our bodies.
Your body is yours. For whatever reason, God gave you the body you have, or your soul chose your body, or your genetics paired up exactly right to give you the body that you have. No matter how you look at it, your body is yours.
If there’s one thing I hope for everyone, it would be for everyone to cultivate love for their body. It can be through sports or sex, of course. Those are two common ways. But it could also mean getting a piercing or a tattoo, or just buying some more nice clothes for yourself, or wearing a bracelet or chain, or cooking yourself some delicious food. It could mean doing your nails or getting a haircut or growing some facial hair or giving yourself a massage or doing some yoga. But your body is the one thing in this world that you can and do truly own, and it’s the one thing that will be with you for the rest of your life. You get to reclaim it for yourself, and nobody gets to take that away from you. We can take back consent over our own bodies in creative ways outside of the system.
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