The Body on Display
Merely thoughts, not facts, from an unconventional Muslim
When I share images of my body, friends sometimes respond jokingly with arousal, while strangers may have assumptions of my intent.
I’ve been told that I should monetise the images or that they belong somewhere hidden behind a paywall.
I laugh at this because when it comes to my lifestyle, I am usually in bikinis or half clothed, just as much as I am fully clothed.
In regards to my brand, Sekhem Skin, it is about self sensuality and honouring your body as your temple by adorning and anointing yourself in a ritualistic manner with oils.
In case you’re new here, I live in a tent, so to mix up my only environmental aesthetic, I use the only scenery nearby, the beach.
I use my oils exactly as they are intended. On my face, throat, heart and womb.
Except…I’m in a bikini and now it’s somehow gone from PG to rated R?
With that little bit more flesh on display, all of a sudden, I can’t help but question, what is our relationship to body?
I was raised in a house full of women, three older sisters, my single mother, and later my niece.
The female body was never treated as something shameful or taboo.
Nudity was ordinary, practical, and human.
Because of that, I don’t carry discomfort or about being topless at the beach even around my brother or other men.
If people want to make it weird, I let them make it weird because it isn’t about feeling sexually bold or provocative.
Why should I feel shame or impose sexuality onto breasts whose primary purpose is to sustain life?
In saying that, I do find breasts sexy, perhaps that is Patriarchal programming, but they are not symbols purely for display, but of function.
However they are no more scandalous than a hand or a shoulder.
For me, the body is not inherently a sexual tool, but we live in a culture that has trained the eye to read flesh as spectacle.
The same curve that, in another era, might have been painted as devotion to life, is now filtered through a lens of capitalistic consumption.
The body is either hidden, sold, compared, or judged.
Rarely is it allowed to just be experienced.
What I feel as a woman is an appreciation for the feminine form.
I do love the architecture of a woman’s body.
The softness, the strength, the way it holds memory, labour, pleasure, birth, grief, and resilience all at once.
To me, the flesh of our body is an art and an instrument and I somehow find that the sexiest part.
Our bodies are powerful and power provokes reaction.
It can stir admiration, projection, jealousy, desire, or accusation.
Sometimes people interpret the body as performative or they decipher confidence as attention seeking because we have been conditioned to believe the body must always be for something.
For validation, for seduction, for approval.
So where is the line? How do we find the balance?
Does over sexualisation turn the body into merely an object to be consumed and does embodiment return the body to experience?
One is externalised and shaped by how it will be seen.
The other is internal and shaped by how it feels to exist inside it.
For someone who is Celibate, I sometimes pause and ask myself… Was that overly sexual, will that make people uncomfortable, will people view that content as misleading? Then I usually just click post and say “f*ck it, sounds like a them problem.”
Why, just because I filmed myself in my bikinis does it take away from any other day I’m at the beach… In my bikinis?
Do we blame the patriarchy? Patriarchal systems have undeniably framed women’s bodies as both commodity and a moral battleground, but it’s also about modern hyper visual culture where everything is curated for reaction.
We are navigating layers of historical control of women’s bodies, commercialisation of desire, and a digital world that rewards exaggerated efforts over authenticity.
To be embodied, then, can almost feel radical and somewhat punk.
Whether you’re embodied in a Hijab or a bikini…
Perhaps the discomfort this evokes is not about exposure, but about how unfamiliar it has become for a body to exist without explanation.
We have been programmed to reduce the body merely for sexual function.
Advertising has trained us to associate bodies with selling.
Internet culture rewards exaggerated erotic signals and many people were raised with shame around the body, so visibility feels provocative.
Where does embodiment step in? Embodiment does not reject modesty.
I can honestly say I feel embodiment in my baggy Adidas track suit, just as much as I do in a bikini at the beach.
It also does not equate visibility with immodesty.
Instead, I think it shifts the conversation away from fabric and toward consciousness and intention.
It asks whether we are relating to the body or reacting to it as an object.
Through being Celibate, I find myself pondering that perhaps the discomfort many feel is not with the body itself, but with encountering a body that is not trying to be anything for them.