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When The Vagina Monologues author Eva Ensler spoke about her follow up book ‘The Good Body’ to The New York Times she said, "I said the word vagina vagina vagina a million times. I thought I was home free. I had finally come to like my vagina. Until one day I realised the self-hatred had just crept up into my stomach." As The Times commented, Ensler had found herself in a post-40 funk, engaged in an entrenched battle with her stomach. "It has become my tormentor, my most serious committed relationship," she commented. "It has protruded through my clothes, my confidence and my ability to work."

And while Ensler rightly called out this secret, toxic relationship that so many of us harbour in our 40s, the dysfunction starts much earlier. For women, from puberty, our stomachs are a physically and emotionally loaded part of our anatomy. They become a source of pain and discomfort at times, of ridicule and then admiration too. But we often spend more time lamenting their size than appreciating their worth. Exposing your midriff, unless it meets the acceptable socially-set norms, can in itself expose you to insult and injury.

Then later in life, and also during motherhood, it opens up a whole other area of objectification. You can’t look in any way pregnant unless you are, and then, if you are pregnant, you can look pregnant, just not too pregnant. Your belly becomes weaponised. During pregnancy particularly it is fair game. People feel they can touch it without permission. Then once you’ve given birth, the obsession quickly pivots to looking like you’ve never had one in the first place.

By all means, procreate, is the messaging, just don’t leave a trace that it ever happened.

Women in public life have not helped to temper this. Yes, you could argue, that this is not their job. But too many still opt to hide away after having children, or hit the gym and then sell a DVD about getting back in shape. And we are complicit. It is our own self-hatred that ends up with whole industries feeding off it. The Flat Tummy Co for instance. “From detox teas to meal replacement protein shakes, our babes do it all,” says their website, “Get back on track, reduce bloating, and flatten that tummy!” To which I would like to say, “fuck you”. They even have a Flat Tummy Pregnancy Tea, to allegedly reduce feelings of “bloating”. Meanwhile, another company, Happy Detox, has a tea called ‘Zero Belly’, they literally want to cancel our stomachs out altogether.

But when, and how, did all this belly bashing get so endemic? In the 1600’s the painter Ruben’s depiction of women was quite different. With their dimpled bodies and convex tummy’s, these figures were sensual, soft, real. Yet by the time the wonderful 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf statue was found in 1908, displaying the female form in all its gnarled beauty and with its especially curvaceously abundant belly, she was described as ‘ugly’, ‘monstrous’, and ‘horrible’, and hailed as indicative of the ‘primitive’ sexual tastes of people regarded at that time as savages.”

So somewhere along the line the feminine form, and our stomachs with it, got co-opted. It’s something philosopher Susan Bordo said in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the Body, that women grow up despising their feminine form because the ideal feminine shape in this society resembles that of a young boy: wide shoulders, tight muscles, narrow hips. In 2013’s Cross-Currents: Cultures, Communities, Technologies, Kris Blair, Robin M. Murphy and Jen Almjeld argued that feminism in advertising and media terms had become “all about the revolution that will happen if you learn to love your stomach.”

It was an attitude which perpetuated throughout the twentieth century, so much so that when Lucien Freud painted Londoner Sue Tilley in 1995, it was seen as radical. The painting is in fact, a glorious and fascinating depiction of a woman’s body, devoid of all the shock tactics which the bigger female form mostly gets. We can see that as twentieth-century hangover, or a masculine idea of beauty that modern men didn’t even invent, but have just been indoctrinated to perpetuate. But largely I think its ignorance. We do not teach our daughters, our sons, or ourselves about what an extraordinary part of our anatomy it is. This complex, fascinating, marvel of it. We all owe it our existence, and yet we trash talk it.

It’s not an attitude that is universal though. As part of her research, Ensler spoke to a Masai woman about their culture’s relationship with their tummies. She said. “Do you say that tree is not so pretty because it doesn’t look like another tree? We are all trees. You’ve got to love your tree.” I would add that you’ve got to know your tree first. But actually we have to do the unlearning first, and then start with the education we should have gotten in the beginning. This complex, glorious, sometimes burdensome part of us needs a new story. And we need to start telling it, before our daughters and our sons inherit the false, maligned one.

Jessie Collins, June 2020.