Personifying Ourselves: Why We Name Our Body Parts
From boobs to butts, giving personalities to specific body parts is more common than you’d expect.
By Jessie Schiewe
Giving things names, makes them more human. Credit: Kati Kirsch
At first, it was self-loathing that made Lynn Aquaheart name her butt.
It felt too big and was always getting in the way, making the Los Angeles-based singer and tattoo artist struggle constantly with feelings awkwardness and embarrassment. These insecurities weighed heavily on Aquaheart, leading her to wear loose, formless clothing and shun taking photographs of herself. The final straw came one day when she knocked a stack of books off a table with her behind.
“Out of total frustration with and hatred of my round body, I suddenly announced I was naming my butt ‘Christine,’ ” Aquaheart told OK Whatever.
This happened at least a decade ago, well before concepts like body positivity and body inclusivity were as widely accepted as they are now.
“It was easy to feel like you had no place in culture at all,” she said, “because you never saw people like you in the movies, in print, or on TV.”
And so began a phase in Aquaheart’s life when she began referring to her butt as Christine, blaming it for her shortcomings and flaws whenever she could. She’d think and verbalize negative things about it, such as: Oh that Christine, always knocking things over. You know, she has a mind of her own or That Christine, she’s a brick house. I guess that makes me a whole neighborhood.
Making Christine her scapegoat eventually became almost reflexive for Aquaheart, emboldening her to lambast her derriere even in public. She thought it was funny, an inside joke between herself and her ass. But others felt differently.
“I was thinking that I was just joking, but people would overhear my self-abusive comments and give me only troubled nervous laughs.”
It took a chance encounter with a stranger at a coffee shop to help Aquaheart realize the folly of treating Christine — and her body — with such vitriol.
Love yourself. (Credit: Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski)
After picking up her coffee and finding a table, she bent down to plug in the charger for her laptop computer when she accidentally bumped her coffee with her butt, spilling it everywhere. Chagrined, Aquaheart went to wipe up the mess, automatically blaming Christine for the accident. “I’m always having to clean up after her,” she told a woman sitting nearby. “She’s a mess.”
What the woman said next completely transformed Aquaheart’s perspective on how she was treating Christine:
“I expected her to keep staring at me and just think that I was weird or something because this whole butt naming thing was, after all, acting out a feeling of alienation.
“Instead, her face softened and she said with all the love that my own grandmother never had: Honey, you be good to Christine. She carries you through your whole life. She’s there for you to sit on when you need to rest. It’s no sin for her to take up space.”
The stranger’s words weighed heavily on Aquaheart. She began to have second thoughts about constantly belittling her behind. The bitterness with which she referred to Christine began to soften. Gradually, her perspective began to shift, too, and Aquaheart found herself referring caringly, if not defensively, about her butt. Instead of saying hateful things about Christine, she praised her behind and focused on its positive features. She began dressing more adventurously, putting on dresses and other outfits that strayed from the generic jeans and t-shirts she used to wear when she felt less confident. She started taking selfies and joined Instagram, posting her photos there.
In Aquaheart’s mind, the positive changes in her life happened when she improved her relationship with her butt.
“I had become friends with Christine,” she explained.
Aquaheart and Christine’s relationship is unique, but it’s by no means unusual. People name stuff all the time. Some women give their breasts names, while as many as 7 out of 10 men are said to have named their penises. Cars get names, as do pretty much all pets. Even illnesses, like cancer, are sometimes treated like living beings.
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We’re constantly personifying things — or treating them as human. We think of them as having the same mental and emotional capacities that we do, and often project our own identities unto them.
For centuries, authors have relied on personification as a literary device: “The wind howled,” “My skin crawled.” The concept of Mother Earth, thinking of our planet as a wise, old woman, is an example of personifying. Some people even do this with numbers or letters in the alphabet, giving them personalities and physical features.
Humans name things all the time. Credit: Unsplash/Jamie Street
Why do we try to make things more like humans? There are a few theories.
One is that when we personify things, we’re trying to exert control over them.
“If you seek to make sense of something, that’s when you give it a name and you treat it as a person because we’re already pretty good at understanding other people,” Kurt J. Gray, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, explained.
Taking the focus away from ourselves and placing it on something external also helps us shirk responsibility for our behaviors, enabling us to distance ourselves from the very thing that bothers us.
“You’re separating it from your core self by naming it something else,” Gray said.
He used a hypothetical scenario about someone who, feeling fat, decides to name their stomach “Jimmy:”
“Instead of being like, ‘Well, I need to change my diet,’ I can just think, ‘Well, Jimmy just likes pastries.’ It makes things a little simpler.”
If you name something, you’re typically more capable of blaming that thing, which was how Aquaheart’s relationship with Christine originally manifested. She used the name “Christine” as a euphemism for coping with a feature of her body that she didn’t like.
“If it’s not something you’d want to talk about on the first date, it might be uncomfortable to discuss, so naming it can make things a bit easier,” said Gray.
Personifying things can also have the opposite effect. It can create perspective and provide a different angle, helping people to realize they are more than just that one thing they do not like about themselves.
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A few years ago, while trying to help her daughter recover from anorexia, a mother in Los Angeles was advised by a therapist to give the disorder a name. They decided to call it “Ed” (short for “Eating Disorder”). Though it still took some time for the daughter to overcome her illness, humanizing the anorexia helped the mother act with more kindness and patience towards her daughter throughout the process.
“It allowed me to understand her and the fact that there was something else controlling or affecting her,” said the mother, who spoke with OK Whatever on the condition of anonymity.
“So I can see why people name things. It helps them be able to get control and not blame themselves.”
A lifelong eczema sufferer in New Jersey told OK Whatever that she employs a similar tactic. Though she hasn’t given her skin condition a name, she thinks of it as her “best friend” and believes doing so has helped her better control and reduce her flares.
“There are a lot of people that treat their eczema very harshly. They hate their skin and they hate their body and they wish it would just go away. And for me, it’s like would you treat your best friend that way? And for me that answer is no,” Ashley Lora explained.
“So any time I flare up, that’s an indication to me that there’s something happening deeper. My ‘best friend’ is trying to tell me something. Maybe my skin is reacting because of a food I ate or maybe I’m not being present to thoughts on my mind. It varies, but it’s just about listening to my best friend, hearing her out, and then working together to try to heal.”
Studies show that personifying things can also lessen loneliness. Though it’s not necessarily a solution, giving something a name and treating it like it’s human helps us cope during times when we feel alone or abandoned. A classic example of this would be Tom Hanks’ constant companion Wilson, the volleyball, in the film Cast Away.
Research focused on humans’ interaction with technology has found that naming things can increase our trust in them. It can even make us more empathetic towards the object.
One of the earliest known instances of body part personification comes from the medical writings of Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a doctor from ancient Greece. In his diagnoses and clinical descriptions, Aretaeus would include references to hearts that could “comprehend,” spleens that would “delight” in things, and diseases that “lurk[ed].” His tendency to give agency, purpose, and characterization to human organs differentiated him from his peers and established him as one of the least biased and most compassionate physicians during ancient times.
Aretaeus of Cappadocia. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Cesaree01)
“When people think of things as humanlike, they are often more likely to care for them,” Adam Waytz, a psychologist and associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told OK Whatever.
“Considering any entity as humanlike means it has the capacity to feel, which means you want to treat the entity well.”
Just as naming something can defer blame from the person who owns it, so too can it instill a sense of responsibility and accountability in a person. That’s what Aquaheart realized after her conversation with the woman in the coffee shop.
“I had personified my rear in order to make fun of it like an awkward, messy person,” she said.
“The truth is that I would never look at a real person in that way because I have empathy. [Because of the woman at the coffee shop], I was starting to have empathy for Christine, and by extension myself. It was a magical change.”
As Aquaheart has demonstrated with Christine, personifying body parts can just as likely be used for ill as it can be for good. The efficacy of the tactic will depend on how often you do it and how far you remove yourself from the body part in question. It’s important to recognize that you are still the sum of all your parts, even if you aren’t fond of each and every one of them.
But for most of us, naming body parts can be a helpful, if not transformative practice. Studies show that when we give things names, we consider it worthy of moral care and consideration. And for someone who might have a hard time accepting how they look on the outside, using personification might be the ticket to coming to terms with it.
It certainly worked that way for Aquaheart.
After years of feeling detached from her body, the simple act of bequeathing her butt with a name helped Aquaheart feel a connectivity to it that had long been missing. Though she had originally created Christine as a cruel act of humor against the curves she so hated, she ended up forming a friendship with it — one that still exists to this day.
JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN UNICORNS AND SHE THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.
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