The Body's Intentions: Navigating the Traps of Modernity
#014 Tests of fortitude
Humans may have evolved past the days of rugged survival and traps of the wild, but modernity may be enacting its own trappings in ways that test one’s fortitude.
SURVIVAL TV AS A GATEWAY TO THE PAST
I am fascinated by the reality survival show Alone. It originally aired on the History Channel, but a season or so streams on Netflix. I’ve indulged in a few episodes because it is entirely scary to witness each of the contestants face the difficulties of catching their food, building their shelter, and roughing it alone.
Transported to a remote neck of some wilderness, these contestants must out-survive other competitors in the wild to take home the cash prize of up to a million dollars.
The rules are fairly simple. Contestants are allowed to bring their own weaponry and tools to hunt, and to stay alive. They have no shelter, or food on arrival. Drinking water’s a gamble. There’s an emergency walkie-talkie you can call if you really fear for your life. Doing so takes you out of the game.
It’s TV. And however made up it might be, it gives me a thrill.
VIDEO LENGTH: 94 seconds
Part of the show requires each contestant to film themselves. One sees the emotional turmoil of hunger, shelter that fails under rain, and the incalculable difficulties of living in the wild.
It’s been a year or more since I last watched a full episode, but what replays in my mind these days is the memory of contestants capturing wild animals in traps, then consuming them. There are stupid traps contestants build. Stupid traps won’t bring you a meal. Smart animals out-wit them, and easily escape with a meal of their own in tow. Even worse are the smart traps that capture your would-be meal, but said traps are not enough to out-wit larger and even smarter animals that ultimately steal the contestants’ trappings.
It’s a race against time. The humans that get it right end up eating well, and conserving energy to put more time into their shelter, or to make improvements to their traps. They have more leisure time to read, or to enjoy their time in nature.
Those with the traps that fail are left hungry, and furious. In one instance I watched a man poison himself as he ate. Between catching, killing, preparing, and eating the meat of a very small rat-looking critter you see the man’s bloody hands at each phase of the process on screen. I glean that his unwashed hands or consumption of undercooked meat are the cause. In pain, he buzzes himself out of the show.
When we zoom out a bit more, we can bring ourselves to the awareness of a larger ecosystem of the traps - what can ultimately take contestants or any one of us out of the game of life. Bears and big cats, wolves, alligators, humans. The man-eaters.
VIDEO LENGTH: 1:18
However reminiscent for our once wild ways we may be, we’ve crossed the threshold of those ways with domestication, barbed-wire and electric fences, agriculture, logistics, and a slew of other accomplishments and technologies that makes such captures a bit more rare.
Modernity, however, has its own traps, and I am perplexed by the succession of capture that has failed to cease. I’ve been wondering what’s capturing me.
TRAPS & INTENTIONS
I’ve been pondering on a question: What are the intentions of my body in this life? It is a question derived from Ashley C. Ford, author of Somebody’s Daughter. It was her article that made the question burst forth during workshops with the writer-editor collective, Foster. In sitting with the question, the idea that the body’s need for freedom and agency surfaced from discussions with other writers.
Then came the remembrance of that which traps the body.
I picked up my medicine book, Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I fumbled through the table of contents to select which dose of story I needed. The tale entitled, “The Red Shoes” is housed under Self-Preservation: Identifying Leg Traps, Cages, and Poisoned Bait. I drink the tincture and so much illuminates.
I won’t get into the details of “The Red Shoes”, but I will let you know that there are eight traps outlined, and metaphorically speaking there are three consequences (maybe more):
Death (instant or may include injury)
Injury (psychological, physical)
Escape (always includes injury)
What are traps? For me, they are the innumerable distractions, hazards, or compromising occurrences that take us off the course of our journey. And the problem with traps is that we don’t know we’re in them until we’re in them.
Estés shares that when our instincts are weak, we slip into traps - whereby one is so hungry or desirous of a thing, that one inevitably fails to pick up the signals that otherwise would keep one safe. We might survive through escape, but then we’ll get distracted over and over again until we overcome it - at least - this was my case.
I’ve identified traps in multiple categories that make sense to me. These categories may differ or overlap with Estés’ Jungian traps:
Personal Traps: The ways in which we think about: ourselves, our place in the world, and our bodies. The saboteur.
Relational Traps: These can be familial. They can also be the 1:1 dynamics. Think of the romantic or platonic relationships, friendships, or work/community environments that can become abusive, toxic, or compromising.
Cultural Traps: These are the ethnic, racial, religious traps. They’ve been identified as systemic in some cases, but I’d add that within the culture there are trappings too by way of expectations. I think of those born into extremist views, or those who are adopted into extremist groups as one example.
Civil Traps (Societal): Laws writ to effectually harm, are traps. I think of this woman who was unlawfully charged a felony for her own painful miscarriage in court. Or this woman who’s state laws would rather her die given the condition of her pregnancy.
Technological Traps: One example: the ways in which technology favors the server-adjacent, where lawmakers debate concert ticket sales and those with the means to use their proximity to maintain technological power. New Jersey servers I’m looking at you.
Worldview Traps: The way in which an individual looks at the world and draws conclusions about the world can be a trap. Holding to archaic worldviews can be a trap. Upgrading worldviews can potentially liberate (Take your worldview quiz here).
Unintentional Traps: Perhaps you were born into a family dynamic and you felt trapped in circumstance, situation, economic frustrations.
Geo-Political Traps: Birth into a particular nation may hinder your movement around the world, online, or even within your own household. See the Henley Passport Index which identifies the most powerful passports.
You get the gist - and I get that no human will experience the totality of freedom. Not on this planet - with gravity and all.
But I reckon this is that critical internal juncture where part of the answer to my question lies. If there’s no path for this body towards a prolonged total freedom, then perhaps my body’s quest is for something more attainable.
THE BODY’S PURSUIT
It has felt that my body has been fighting her way out of traps. Healing her scars after escape, and gathering her gumption to go towards the most accessible freedom she can. Pleasure.
The pursuit of pleasure has never been with ease. I think of pleasure as a thing that presents itself. And we go for it, or we don’t.
In childhood the pleasure of tastes like chocolates and salty things were easy to come by. While more of a challenge, adventure pleasures, trips to theme parks to ride rollercoasters, required bargain.
Later, romantic pleasures were siphoned out of teenage me and packaged into religious mantras that made a mockery of love while beckoning the further domestication of my body. This was my first major introduction to glittery predators, the kind that present well-intentioned, but that only seek to hijack your journey, and control all that you’re after.
The predators turn me against myself, and taught me to deny whatever coursed about and within. They taught me to be ashamed of its sensations. Young, I was trained to place my body and her feels into an invisible holding cell in wait for a ‘most holy’ giver of pleasure. The indoctrination to lie to myself through an unnatural denial almost knocked a precious, wild essence out of me.
One must fight for one’s pleasure.
This teenage meeting with psychological hijackers imprinted ways of being and doing that kept me knotted up without a jacket or shackle.
I don’t reduce my life to a TV game now, I just find the parallels uncanny.
I recognize that the intentions of my body towards attainable pleasures require something of me too. One must fight for one’s pleasure. One must find the courage to advocate for it. And as this body of mine intentions towards pleasures, known and unknown, I gather the journey will not leave me unscathed.
Immense gratitude for the following Foster editors and writers for their insights across earlier versions of this piece:
Sara Campbell, Nivien Saleh, Anthony Pica, Judith Klinger, Simoun Redoblado, Felicity Brand, and Nick Goodey.
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Brava!! Powerful writing!!