Sigh, fidelity.

Before I post anything new, I really ought to clean up the mess I made over feminist-friendly ways to think about the human body. We all agree that hitching personal worth to thinness is a bad idea, and I agree with Feministe that hitching it to health is also bad, but when I tossed out fidelity to the Creator's plan as an alternative, there was a loud thwack as that idea hit the ground.

The dialogue in snippets, for reference, beginning with Feministe:

There are many of us whose bodies do not work the way the ideal body does. They process food differently, they grow differently, they respond to physical exertion differently, they follow different patterns of thought. If we are to give up the pursuit of thinness and replace it with a pursuit of healthfulness, those people will be as left-out as fat people are today.

Me:

The poster goes on to admit that she doesn't have a well-fleshed-out alternative to the yardsticks of either health or beauty. I'll offer her one she probably won't like, which is to keep in the front of our minds that our bodies were created with a purpose. My body, like my life, is not my own; I should not abuse it. My body was meant to be the way it is; I should not reject my gender, my talents, and my disabilities.

Scrap health and beauty (and authenticity, too, for good measure) and replace them with fidelity.

Dara:

But if we take "fidelity" as an ideal, what do we do with monasticism/asceticism and debauchery? Both of these seem to require seeing the body as an obstacle to purpose--not just disciplining it, but breaking it and breaking through.

Obviously this is a little dualistic, but it's a perception of dualism that makes fasting or "in vino veritas" work. Can this be integrated into the fidelity ideal? Should it be? (I suspect there's something about guilt I'm discounting...)

There is, in fact, something about guilt that you are missing.

The basic idea is that this body's only rental and so to modify it too much would be presumptuous. On the other hand, fidelity to Him trumps fidelity to the body, and asceticism that brings you closer to God is always in bounds. If, when I go to do good, evil is present with me in flesh, as Paul says, then a little bit of mortification seems necessary. I also think there's something to be said for the idea that feeling at home in your body is not something everyone is born with, and a drunken night on the town goes a long way towards achieving this. (This is essentially a different version of my fight club theory.)

But George Smiley beat me to the punch:

I could take you to mean that, taking the body as a given, one ought to remain faithful to the One who gives it (as it were). But wouldn't this subsume the concept of bodily goodness in some greater concept of goodness to such an extent that the body in and of itself might be seen as irrelevant. (Thus asceticism might be validly celebrated as a breaking of the body for the greater good rather than as a discipline of the body.) After all, fidelity to the Creator need not necessarily have anything to do with the particulars of a given body.

Might it not be best to say that beauty and health (and even authenticity -- whatever that means) are valid measures of bodily goodness but only within a valid hierarchy of virtues. As a ring of gold in a swine's snout...

Short answer, yes! Long answer, sort of. I think there is an extent to which fidelity to the Creator does entail fidelity to a certain body. Consider my favorite story:

I was having a conversation with Harry Crews, and he was complaining about some guy who, when confronted with his many sins, had responded with, “That’s just the way I am.” Well, this sickened Crews, so he leaned forward and looked me in the eye and said, “But what if what you are isn’t worth being?”

I once used this line on my housemate (in reference to a third party), but she pointed out that no one is in a position to decide that they're not a person worth being. It's not enough to have a good personality; you need to have a good version of your own.

In other news, Will seems to know what Albanian men want, which will come as a relief to at least one devoted reader.