The Summer Body

CrowsNestZine|Three

Contents editors Eloise Hendy @EloiseHendy

Figgy Guyver @FiggyGuyver

contributors Chris Belous Leonard Buckley Nolwenn Davies Jamie Delves Figgy Guyver Eloise Hendy Ella Hunt Spike Lister Nikoletta Majewska Hannah Oliver Toby Sharpe Fred Spoliar Colm Summers Marianne Wilson

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front cover | sète three | Editors’ note four | Pound of Flesh seven | Composed

Dad Dancing eight | (Post-Summit) ten | The soylent fail twelve | Ancient Wisdom? fourteen | At twenty I am fifteen | Torso sixteen | The Sex of Angels seventeen | conventional beauty

grotesque, ugly, banal eighteen | Three Figures nineteen | This is my Summer Body twentythree | Philadelphia, PA twentyfour | Hunger Strike twentyseven | Girl twentyeight | Back Out twentynine | Pool Party back cover | eerring

Are You Beach Body Ready?

My head is spinning Head for the hills Head in the clouds Head in the sand Keep a cool head with a stiff upper lip zip your lip word in your ear put your brain in gear Get your nose to the grindstone keep your shoulder to the wheel hang by the neck until dead pain in the neck upon your head be it twist your arm the long arm of the law the matter in hand Hand over fist Hand to mouth Hand it over Hand job Palm Sunday White knuckle ride My stomach thinks my throats been cut the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach heart attack on a plate heart throb have a heart to heart my heart bleeds My heart went boom when I crossed that room Navel gazing Pain in the arse You’re pulling my leg Show a lil leg On bended knee Two left feet One foot in the grave One toe over the line Put your foot down put flesh on your bones put hair on your chest put your money where your mouth is He makes my flesh crawl He makes my flesh creep He wears his heart on his sleeve The body is still warm The body of evidence

Body and soul

Body blow Body popping Body politic Body snatching Body surfing Body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch

The Summer Body.

the editors Issue iii 3

pound of flesh B

ody obsession is contemporary Western culture’s default state. When it comes to matters of the flesh it increasingly feels there is no space for neutrality, only neurosis.

Catwalks and red carpets parade lean limbs, magazine headlines herald new crash diets and magic detoxes and billboards alternately thrust heaving cleavage or jutting hipbones into our collective psyche – impossible Venus and Adonis figures reigning over cityscapes. On every smart device bulging muscles, bouncing buttocks and ever shrinking thighs vie for position. In all probability the average Instagram user will have seen at least five toned midriffs in their phone screen before looking in the mirror at their own naked form.

Body anxiety is actively encouraged as the norm. There may have been an outcry when Protein World plastered the London Underground in posters insisting the only way to get “Bikini Body Ready” was through a rigorous programme of meal skipping (their special shredding potion handily illustrated by a female as-

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sistant, a modern Venus emerging from the sea, complete with prominent ribcage), but the idea is nothing new. Bold yellow signs may be easy to spot, denounce and graffiti, but the insidious belief in the ‘bikini body’ is more difficult to tear down. God forbid your body should be exposed to the world in its natural state; with every beach and poolside doubling as On every smart a Facebook device bulging album fashmuscles, bouncing ion show your buttocks and ever two week holiday requires shrinking thighs vie at least two for position” months of preparation.

“No carbs before Barbs / Marbs / drinks at the Shard, amirite?!”

In the digitised, ever-connected world where anyone can enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame if they garner enough followers, all bodies can be subject to the same scrutiny celebrities face. Facebook stalking is often only the privatised version of the tabloid red circle of shame.

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By creating a culture where week long juice detoxes are hailed as the epitome of ‘wellness’ we have created a Frankenstein’s monster, as competing visions of bodily perfection are stitched together into a horrendous unattainable whole.

Tina Fey’s description of the current female ideal reveals the ridiculous nature of this collective fantasy : “Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits”

Tina Fey is clearly being satirical. Yet, while this jigsaw puzzle creature appears absurd, a grotesque figure of parts, each piece is also utterly recognisable. We may realise that this collection of traits cannot be easily stitched together (no, not even with a special shredding potion), but that doesn’t stop us berat-

ing ourselves and our parts for not living up to the fantastical ‘ideal’. Whether ‘not thin enough’, ‘not big enough’, ‘not strong enough’, the message is consistently ‘not enough’. The imaginary creature has enormous power.

And, increasingly, its not Whether ‘not thin enough’, ‘not just the ‘dolls’ scrutinised in big enough’, ‘not such a way, strong enough’, but the guys too. Bulky-butthe message is not-too-bulky consistently ‘not muscles in a enough’” lean-but-nottoo-lean frame without one ounce of body fat, standing at 6 foot 2, who isn’t a neurotic, gym-obsessive? Daniel Craig ditching the damp bikini babe and emerging from the ocean in tight swimwear himself may have been a plus point to feminism in some senses, but it sure didn’t do anything for bodily self esteem.

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Issue iii 5

Children as young as 8 are now reported to experience dissatisfaction with their bodies. In the largest UK study ever undertaken on children and eating disorders nearly 10% of 8 year olds were unhappy with their bodies’ shape or size. This jumped drastically at age 14, to 32.3% of girls and 16% of boys. At that age, 38.8% of the girls and 12.2% of the boys were involved in what the study calls ‘eating disorder behaviours’. These are children who were born in 2001 – before the surge in social media, apps and online sharing we have seen in the last 6 years. If Instagram’s first post has just turned 5, what will the these statistics be when it turns 15?

It’s not all doom and gloom. Social media also allows for grassroots activism.

Protests about the fashion industry’s obsession with an anorexic aesthetic, or still-dominant restrictive notions of gender, or the lack of older female faces (but presence of younger female breasts), can spread across platforms like proverbial wildfire. But, despite attacking a jigsaw piece fantasy creature, it cannot be a piecemeal attack, billboard here and page 3 spread there. It must be a constant message of self-worth, for the 8 year olds of next year. Body neurosis is a tough beast to battle, but the fight is vitally necessary. How can we address poverty and inequality if we’re too busy hating our thighs?

WORDS & ARTWORK: Eloise Hendy

Composed I wouldn’t tell you this, but I got this face from a summer catalogue.

My opinions are New Stateman chops with mashed Guardian and a dash of Private Eye, my clothes all unreturned loans, and had you known my father, you might recognize this way of playing with my fingers, his, my single crack-habit on the ring finger.

A ring would lend weight (happily the picture is unfinished) not just to a fatherly blow.

This gesture is Belmondo’s from A Bout de Souffle and it means ‘all or nothing’.

WORDS: Fred Spoliar ARTWORK: Figgy Guyver

Issue iii 7

( Po st-S u mmi t) When I haunt back to your body hinging up to crack out the sounds of box number one on my birth cert (this being Autumn), corpsing, corpsing, and making me feel uncomfortable, it becomes easier to think of mine as a thing made of stalactites worn beneath your neck, only much less beautiful; tiny, and unresponsive, rejecting any want I had to just be there or hear that.

Slowly, there, all handling is passed to your chest, as if it might sprout feathers in August, and sing to the things that we’d read in your bedroom, secretly beating into action everything to say You’re worthless, Leonard in the time I’m finished shrinking, finished looking like I’ve just been siphoned from the bonesmith’s mold (my Decembering parts dream of skin to approach).

All my weight’s going straight to my brain, I think but don’t say.

I’m shining out insides. We live in vulgarity. And what or who I stop to miss between tides for my breath over coffee is dropped from my body like months or shores taken out for the day and dropped-off at crèche for an ice-age.

What was left of you here you have taken back; marked-off your lifespan in notches with a pen in the leather at morning.

You, born in June, have been that, and account for the loss on my waist.

I finish up outside you tonight by myself, as you laughed, apologised, and laughed somewhere else, and saw me empty in more ways than were visible,

and didn’t.

I loved you for that, despite how it sounds, and at times still smell you above the stalagmiting whelms of the duvet, and notice the room left this month, after what Dodge had called ordinary for Summer.

WORDS:

Leonard

Buckley

T h e So ylen t F ail in plain view of mum’s cherry pie i shopped knock-off soylent from my iphone the real deal took six months to deliver and impatient for this powder i swallowed the click-bait whole, tap-paid in euros at the ktichen table. a legit website is enough to calm the nerves of a first-time deep webber, but i have stalked facebook late at night, and know the sight of a guinea pig, which as the light pushed open my blinds, it dawned on me i had become. the synchopated ring of an incoming skype ticked the delivery off my to-do list but eyes stuck to the shrink-wrap, the label’s type made me pause before swallowing: it ‘tahoma’ the font of choice for fitspo hype or murder by mail-order?

--the unopened sachets sit like a black hole in my kitchen, gumlessly chewing all that’s convivial.

am i a failure? probably. (however i hold that synthetic banana should carry a trigger warning.) hungover, there’s nothing better to curdle stomach mattter, than shaken with tap water, a chemical talc warm in plastic (how fantastic).

WORDS: Figgy Guyver

Ancient

S

ocrates wrote: “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” Clearly, our strange fetishism for the aesthetically sublime is rather a long one.

The ancient Greeks, like ourselves, were obsessed with the body’s curves, ridges, lumps and bumps, proportioned just so, and cutting the perfect silhouette. Certainly this understanding has lingered on into the 21st century; the representation of male bodies in art has seemed fixated with the virtuously athletic, with connotations of bravery and righteousness.

Simply look at The Death of Socrates by Jacque-Louis David, and you will notice how one of the fathers of philosophy appears to have abdominals of a man who has spent half his life planking and the other half on a treadmill. To make matters worse, according to the Phaedo Socrates died at roughly the age of 70. That means that a man 50 years my senior cuts a better shape than I do.

Without doubt, these representations have been greatly contrasted with the obscenely circular; either Falstaffian, comic but vulgar, or simply self-indulgent.

This long battle between the chiselled and unrefined has not ceased, and two trends have emerged recently in stark contrast.

The first, ‘spornosexualism’, was first coined by the journalist Mark Simpson in 2006. Spornosexualism is

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wisdom? the cultural phenomenon in which men strive to strike the perfect synthesis of the defined shape of Brad Pitt in Fight Club and the ‘gifted’ nature of male pornstars. These are bodies that do not require Photoshop or editing software to improve, they come absolutely ‘perfect’.

They are no longer the ‘excessive’ shape of the body builders that were the obsession of the 1980’s. They cut a far smaller size than their predecessors. As such, the spornosexual body is deemed far more ‘achievable’ than the sheer mass of body building shapes. As a result, the pursuit of spornosexualism The ancient can now occur on a relatively pasGreeks, like ourselves, were sive basis, which means no one has obsessed with the the excuse not to body’s curves, go the gym... or so the logic goes. ridges, lumps It is now the case and bumps” that even if you have a desk-job, in which you sit for 9 hours of the day, you should have the body of a Premier league football player.

In stark contrast comes a counter trend: ‘the dad-bod’. Best embodied in Chris Pratt (pre-Guardians of the Galaxy) and Leonardo di Caprio, the dad-bod is one that reacts to the apparent excess of the spornosexualism. It, and its disciples, maintain that a male

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and its disciples, maintain that a male body deemed ‘attractive to the other sex’ is one that is natural, and not maintained to the point of vanity. It is one that is far more passive than its spornosexual counterpart.

It says that an ideal male body enjoys the excesses of life: pizza, burgers, beers, a box of Quality Street. It celebrates the cheese grater more than cheese grater abs. Of course, this is not to the point It is now the case of Falstaffian that even if you overwhelming, have a desk job, excess - the dadbod still requires you should have the regular gym body of a Premier going, but not to the point of League footballer” total obsession.

Whilst I would laud the latter approach instinctively, as I myself see gym

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equipment as nothing more than popular torture equipment, I find myself having reservations. Indeed, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with both approaches, as they both seem to perpetuate the notion that our bodies are simply instruments by which to attract others towards us. Mackenzie Pearson, the journalist who coined the term argued that the dad-bod was more attractive to women. Yet surely, this simply means that the dad-bod is not so unlike the spornosexual body in its attempts to attract others towards it. I don’t wish to argue that somehow we are beyond such aestheticism, and that the dad-bod and spornosexualism are somehow something to be vilified. Each person has the right pursue the body they wish to present. However, it is clear that, whatever guise it may take in an historical moment, the pursuit of society’s ‘perfect body’ usually falls rather short.

WORDS: Spike Lister

At twenty I am A new wound in the wind I am naked and raw In the slow hospital The painful hotel The flesh green tree Hopefully I wake up to pee Jesus it’s freezing And this slow, awful Jazz, the breeze Plays crap on my pillows And I sit with my knees Brief, naked and raw And I wait I wait for the thaw

WORDS & ARTWORK: Colm Summers 14 Crows Nest

ARTWORK: Eloise Hendy

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ARTWORK:

Ella

Hunt

this is my

summer CW: fatphobia, body image, food, weight issues, nudity You’re supposed to lose weight in the

summer, and for the summer (so we’re told), but this year I’ve gained. I have no idea how much as I haven’t used weighing scales for nearly two years and I’m trying to keep it that way for my sanity, but I know it’s enough to make my clothes tighter and my stomach more prominent.

I know it’s enough to make me cry in the mornings and distracted in the evenings. It’s enough to make me regress to my younger years, when my body image and food and weight issues were far worse than they have been more recently.

I only started learning to love my body when I became slimmer a few years ago, and when I left home and was more in control of my surrounding influences and my lifestyle as a result. But I only ever thought a smaller me could be worth loving. A bigger me is an entity which must be stopped, ended, literally reduced at all costs, especially for summer when my body will be more on show because of the clothes I want to wear to stay cool, and the skin I want to show for the sunlight.

body

I am an angrier, louder and more confident feminist now. On the outside, I am full of self-love, and I am all about learning and enjoying one’s body and encouraging that practice in others. I am all about takA bigger me is ing up space as a an entity which queer depressed woman in a world must be stopped, which won’t allow ended, literally me that space unless I fight for it. reduced at all Yet I do not, on costs, especially the inside, love for summer” my body truly. I still struggle with the fact that my breasts are too asymmetrical, my thighs too chunky, my face too chubby, my stomach too wobbly – even when I’m slimmer, I struggle.

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Issue iii 21

So imagine my self-loathing when I gain weight, probably for very simple reasons which I shouldn’t worry about, summer or no summer.

Actually, don’t. I wouldn’t wish that self-loathing on anyone.

So here I am right now, taking up this bigger space. I hate it. But I know, at least rationally, at least as a feminist trying to claim and reclaim spaces, that I am going to need to own it if I am going to function. I don’t think I will ever stop being overly concerned with my body and my size and weight and fatness. I don’t think this internalised fatphobia will ever go away for me, not while I am still struggling to fight against it while surrounded by all kinds of fat-shaming influences whether I like it or not (advertising is a bitch). But – I can reduce it. I can try to learn better how to cope with it.

So I tried taking some photos of my body, especially the parts I don’t like, to fully confront myself and to learn myself and to own myself, on the day I was most recently worrying. I present my breasts. I have something called ‘tubular breasts’,

which is when one or both breasts are underdeveloped – it’s pretty normal and unlikely to cause me harm, but it’s been more on my mind recently because I’ve realised how uneven my breasts are and I am not sure I am always okay with that. I also present my thighs, the chunky thighs of a Slav woman which wobble when you slap them no matter how toned they might be. I present my face, too, with my big cheeks I don’t think (which I I will ever stop am conbeing overly con- vinced are cerned with my h i d e o u s l y body and my size big) and my blemand weight and ishes and all the rest. fatness” I present my stomach and the rolls of fat which define it and make it jut out and which make me never want to leave the house again.

I hope someone else likes them, because I don’t. Not quite yet. But at least I know them better now. This is my summer body.

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WORDS

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&

PHOTOS: Chris Belous

PHOTOS:

Marianne

Wilson

Issue iii 23

Hunger Strike waistline unease inches to be pinched skin to be bitten by every gust of wind (teeth only chatter) famished for peachy cheeks this is midwinter rosy blooms replaced by blue bruised fruit flesh lips stay sealed Everything’s under control. wasting disease wasting away from within muscles become carnivores (the only scraps from the table) the last supper the final meal weaning of weakness collar bone necklace tinkle the ivories play rib cage chords run circles around wrists Under control. wasting time wasted days the effort for the waste sleepwalking through treacle afternoons tearing against fragile dawn horses ride the nights snakes rule the days constrictors (creature of scales) watch me disappear WORDS: Eloise Hendy PHOTO: Nikoletta Majewska

Back Out Part giant, part Pygmy A Neanderthal offshoot I hope you kept the receipt for that goldfish I’ve got you bro I offered a finger, but you wanted a hand, A nice guy in the night sky At the Mystics back door You’re one of the funniest guys I know I’m going to miss you when I go.

I don’t think that’s what they’ll see, I think they’ll see someone who shows More self-identification than he did before.

Showing symptoms, it’s not all for show, Not all shows have to be performances, You back off man, Stand over there I’m backing out slowly can’t you see Close the curtains I can’t sleep in this light.

Princes street on the 30 James Blake vibrato in my brain I was falling for you But I caught myself Because you didn’t seem To want to meet me At the bottom

WORDS: Jamie Delves ARTWORK: Ella Hunt

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PHOTOS:

Hannah

Oliver

Issue iii 29

P h il a delph ia, PA The curious dusk of an unfamiliar city, The heavy pollen of it A weight of saying ‘I’m not scared!’, Again and again, With arms outstretched.

I’m watching half a sunset, over a river.

Night is falling, and I think of how easily I could be killed here by the swing of the young tourist’s tripod.

I used to think a lot about the vulnerability of the skull and I do more, these days.

Another waterway, more pinkgreyyellow above.

The dusklit clouds are greasy swallows and I leave before the sun dies.

In the amniotic fluid of the darkened room, I hug the mattress and sink into a dream where none of us have mouths.

At the free-upgrade continental breakfast, I sit quietly, and toy with my scone.

In the queasy reflection of the bus window, I look thinner than ever.

WORDS: Toby Sharpe

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