Body Image

and not the kind you think

How do you know where your body is? How can you be sure?

When children are young they often put too much food in their mouths that can feasibly fit- this worries parents and caregivers. Concerns about the child choking can cause them to remove the food, cut it into smaller bites or scold. The developmental reason behind this is something called mental mapping. The child is using excessive food bites to push textures and tastes up against the roof of their mouth, sides, teeth, gums, and tongue.

Now, as adults when we have something like a popcorn kernel stuck in our teeth, we are able to visualize where it is simply by feeling it. That’s a pretty complicated workflow that our minds can accomplish due to the mapping of our early years.

My physical therapist told me that when parts of our bodies are persistent sites of pain and trauma, the mental map of our bodies can become smudged or void. I’ve had the experience of looking down at my hands or feet and wondering who they belonged to.

I remember when I was about 11 or 12 I was staying at a family friend’s house and I couldn’t sleep. He happened to be an amateur magician and a professional forensic psychologist. He had all of these strange books on the shelf of the office I was assigned to sleep in. They must have been studies - I pulled one down at random and found myself reading about men in Japan who were experiencing a phenomenon where their penis no longer belonged to them. In some cases they felt disturbed as if it was a foreign entity, some cases featured numbness or pain, and in one the man felt that his penis was an alien who was attempting to destroy him and take over his body.

Using a strap-on is interesting - I find that I myself am not able to include it in my mental map and feel what it is doing. I know that certain people have this phantom dick that the strap-on can step inside of. They can feel…