TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070191/0701640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 80

Why Don't We Like The Human Body?


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    There's something wrong when a $7 movie in the mall can
leave you with post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the old days
killers merely stalked and slashed and strangled. Today they
flay their victims and stash the rotting, skinless corpses. Or
they eat them filleted, with a glass of wine, or live and with
the skin still on when there's no time to cook. It's not even
the body count that matters anymore. What counts is the number
of ways to trash the body: decapitation, dismemberment,
impalings and (ranging into the realm of the printed word) eye
gougings, power drillings and the application of hungry rodents
to some poor victim's innards.

    All right, terrible things do happen. Real life is filled
with serial killers, mass murderers and sickos of all degrees.
Much of the 20th century, it could be argued, has been devoted
to ingenious production and disposal of human corpses. But the
scary thing is not that eye gougings and vivisections and meals
of human flesh may, occasionally, happen. The scary thing, the
thing that ought to make the heart pound and the skin go cold
and tingly, is that somehow we find this fun to watch.

    There are some theories, of course. In what might be
called the testosterone theory, a congenital error in the wiring
of the male brain leads to a confusion between violence and
sex. Men get off on hideous mayhem, and women, supposedly,
cover their eyes. Then there's the raging puritan theory, which
is based on the statistical fact that those who get slashed or
eaten on the screen are usually guilty of a little fooling
around themselves. It's only a tingle of rectitude we feel,
according to this, when the bad girl finally gets hers. There's
even an invidious comparison theory: we enjoy seeing other
people get sauteed or chain-sawed because at least it's not
happening to us.

    The truth could be so much simpler that it's staring us in
the face. There's always been a market for scary stories and
vicarious acts of violence. But true horror can be bloodless,
as in Henry James' matchless tale, The Turn of the Screw. Even
reckless violence, as in the old-time western, need not debauch
the human form. No, if offerings like American Psycho and The
Silence of the Lambs have anything to tell us about ourselves,
it must be that at this particular historical moment, we have
come to hate the body.

    Think about it. Only a couple of decades ago, we could
conceive of better uses for the body than as a source of meat
or leather. Sex, for example. Sex was considered a valid source
of thrills even if both parties were alive and remained so
throughout the act. Therapists urged us to "get in touch with
our bodies''; feminists celebrated "our bodies, ourselves."
Minimally, the body was a cuddly personal habitat that could be
shared with special loved ones. Maximally, it was a powerhouse
offering multiple orgasms and glowing mind-body epiphanies. Skin
was something to massage or gently stroke.

    Then, for good reasons or bad, we lost sex. It turned out
to spread deadly viruses. It offended the born-again puritans.
It led to messy entanglements that interfered with networking
and power lunching. Since there was no way to undress for
success, we switched in the mid-'80s to food. When we weren't
eating, we were watching food-porn starring Julia Child or
working off calories on the Stairmaster. The body wasn't
perfect, but it could, with effort and willpower, be turned into
a lean, mean eating machine.

    And then we lost food. First they took the red meat, the
white bread and the Chocolate Decadence desserts. Then they came
for the pink meat, the cheese, the butter, the tropical oils
and, of course, the whipped cream. Finally, they wanted all
protein abolished, all fat and uncomplex carbohydrates, leaving
us with broccoli and Metamucil. Everything else, as we know, is
transformed by our treacherous bodies into insidious,
slow-acting toxins.

    So no wonder we enjoy seeing the human body being
shredded, quartered, flayed, filleted and dissolved in vats of
acid. It let us down. No wonder we love heroes and mega-villians
like RoboCop and the Terminator, in whom all soft, unreliable
tissue has been replaced by metal alloys. Or that we like
reading (even in articles deeply critical of the violence they
manage to summarize) about diabolical new uses for human flesh.
It's been, let's face it, a big disappointment. May as well feed
it to the rats or to any cannibalistically inclined killer still
reckless enough to indulge in red meat.

    No, it's time for a truce with the soft and wayward flesh.
Maybe violent imagery feeds the obsessions of real-life sickos.
Or maybe, as some argue, it drains their sickness off into
harmless fantasy. But surely it cheapens our sense of ourselves
to think that others, even fictional others, could see us as
little more than meat. And it's hard to believe all this carnage
doesn't dull our response to the global wastage of human flesh
in famine, flood and war.

    We could start by admitting that our '70s-era expectations
were absurdly high. The body is not a reliable source of
ecstasy or transcendental insight. For most of our lives, it's
a shambling, jury-rigged affair, filled with innate tensions,
contradictions, broken springs. Hollywood could help by
promoting better uses for the body, like real sex, by which I
mean sex between people who are often wrinkled and overweight
and sometimes even fond of each other. The health meanies could
relax and acknowledge that one of the most marvelous functions
of the body is, in fact, to absorb small doses of whipped cream
and other illicit substances.

    Then maybe we can start making friends with our bodies
again. They need nurture and care, but they should also be good
for a romp now and then, by which I mean something involving
dancing or petting as opposed to dicing and flaying. But even
"friends" is another weirdly alienated image. The truth, which
we have almost forgotten, is that Bodies "R" Us.