Recently, I was visiting family for the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend. Since they have satellite TV, one night I was browsing channels and through on the beginning of Saturday Night Live. I caught the tail-end of an opening skit and maybe the 60 seconds of Shane Gillis’ monologue.
Infamously, Gillis’ monologue included a punchline which mocked the way women gym-goers dress. This was a completely inappropriate topic, rooted in sexism and patriarchy that was tone-deaf at best and actively cruel at worst. I stopped watching before he even made it that far, however, and the reason I did is why I’m not surprised it got worse after I changed to another channel.
Gillis started his monologue with sixty seconds straight of material which struck me as highly influenced by diet culture and fatphobia. In this portion, he was describing himself as fat and making clear that, in his mind, it was a negative state of affairs.
Fatphobia and diet culture are deeply linked with sexism and patriarchy. Gillis, perhaps unwittingly, distilled that connection to a few minutes of material that has outraged many. As I understand it, Gillis started his monologue by castigating himself and his body for being fat, and then moved towards criticizing the way women dressed and the presence of their bodies in the gym when he stepped foot in one with weight loss as his primary goal.
In Western culture, we have long been overly influenced by Neo-Platonic and Gnostic concepts that draw a sharp duality between mind and body. The mind/spirit are considered good and the body is considered bad-with the result that we are constantly encouraged to use “mind over matter” to subordinate our bodies to our mind/spirits. The ways we are given to measure whether we are successful with this is whether our bodies fit the ideal norms of the day. For men, this often means overly muscled or at the very least, toned; for women, this often means being slim everywhere except the breasts and buttocks, flexible, and wearing clothing which covers a prescribed area and simultaneously obscures and highlights desired areas of the body for the male gaze. This entire system is built on binaries where mind/spirit is superior to the body and where men are superior to women.
As a kid, I was diagnosed with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), also known as dyspraxia. My body had lots of difficulties and barriers at a neurological/neurodevelopmental level. Even though my family wasn’t actively religious, growing up in rural Ontario in the 90s and aughts, I quickly came to view my body as both alien and enemy. I aspired to subordinate my body to the power of my mind, and was frustrated by my inability to do so. Even though I was more active than I was aware of, practicing tai chi from the age of 12, curling from the age of 10, and both swimming and downhill skiing since before I can even remember, I viewed myself as unathletic and unfit. At the time, I didn’t fit the image in my mind, and I was comparing myself to the hockey and football jocks which surrounded my elementary and high school environment.
It wasn’t until university where I began to reconnect with my body and shift my thinking to a holistic approach. When I began to meet my body with a sense curiosity and play, I learned that my body, mind and spirit were deeply interconnected. Moving my body was crucial to my emotional, mental, and spiritual health. Even that was only part of the equation. As I continued moving my body, and exploring my body and what it could with curiosity and play, I also learned became more aware of my body. Autism is often linked with troubles with interoception and I am forever grateful that reconnecting with my body has enabled me to be deeply tied into my bodily signals and states.
Personally, Chen style taijiquan was game changing. The characteristic Chen style flavour which seeks to strike an ideal, dynamic balance between soft and hard, slow and fast, embracing both martial applications and health/spiritual cultivation, was exactly what I needed. The Chen style taijiquan curriculum is robust and provides both principles and a system sufficient to be a foundational movement practice. My instructor has described martial arts as a form of physical literacy and, as a practitioner of several martial arts, has advised having one art serve as a foundation or base that one can return to and build out from. While I have yet to expand my martial arts practice in that way, I have found the same approach helpful in movement practices. Chen style taijiquan serves as a foundational movement practice through which I can add in things like ceilidh dancing, Zumba, Pilates, yoga, even strength and resistance training.
Disconnection and dualistic approaches to mind/spirit and body will continue to make people like Gillis and the systems he is emblematic of possible. These same systems currently tell us that we can tell which bodies are valuable and worthy of respect by external, aesthetic measures, and they contribute the proliferation of sexual assault and domestic violence cases in the media and judicial system today. There are many crucial changes needed to address these systems and the people they produce. The more I have gotten to know my own body and the bodies of others through practices like Chen style taijiquan, the more I am reminded that bodies of all kinds are inherently valuable, worthy and sacred, and that health cannot be determined by external, aesthetic measures. I remain firmly convinced that one of the crucial changes we need to make is to increase our physical literacy through embodied practices so we can have better relationships with own bodies and the bodies of others.
If you wish to find our more about Chen style taijiquan and possibly learn some, I invite you to explore Hogg’s Chen Tai Chi Praxeum. Regardless of whether you do that or not, I encourage you to explore embodied practices with a sense of curiosity and play, and to not underestimate the power and importance of physical literacy.
