Writing about the body without apologising

There's a line I've read a thousand times on dating-app profiles, and I'm not going to copy it out in full because I can't be bothered. It basically states which bodies are accepted and which aren't, with all the coldness of a shopping list. Every time I read it I think the same thing: somebody has decided the body is a requirement, like having a driving licence.

I write songs about gay love, exes, self-esteem. It was impossible not to end up writing about the body. The hard part was deciding how.

The apologetic tone

When a song talks about the body of someone who isn't perfect, it tends to take one of two tones. Either it apologises, or it asks you to applaud it for being brave. Either way the body is still a problem. One hides it and the other shows it off like a medal, but neither treats it as what it is most of the time: something ordinary that turns up in everybody's daily life.

I wanted something else. I wanted to write about a belly the way you'd write about a lamp. Something that's there, that has its charm and doesn't need a speech.

I don't always manage it. Sometimes I catch myself softening a line because it seems too raw, and then I ask myself whether I'm softening it for the listener or for me. Nearly always it's for me.

Comedy as permission

I have a title called «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet). I won't explain the song, but the title makes the tone clear: the word "diet", loaded with guilt for decades, gets paired with an ice-cream cone, the least guilty thing in the world. That collision really interests me. You take a word that weighs a lot and put it next to one that floats, and suddenly the first one weighs a little less.

Humour gives me permission to talk about the body without the conversation turning into a sermon. If I laugh at the bathroom scales, the scales lose their authority. If I write about the gym as a slightly absurd place, full of people staring at themselves in the mirror with the gravity of a notary, the gym stops being a courtroom. Mind you, I'm not mocking the people who go. I'm mocking the idea that you have to go in order to deserve something.

Gay culture has an especially complicated relationship with the body. Anyone who's spent a summer on certain beaches or walked into certain parties knows it. There's one body that gets celebrated and a lot of bodies that get tolerated. And then there are the ones that simply don't appear in the photos.

I'm not going to set myself above all that. I've looked at photos and compared too. I've sucked my stomach in in front of a stranger. It would be strange if I hadn't.

But I think a song can provide a small counterweight. It isn't going to change the fitness industry or the apps. At most it can be that friend who, halfway through the party, tells you that you look fine and to stop fiddling with your shirt. That's already quite a lot.

And sometimes not even that. Sometimes all a song does is name something you'd never heard named out loud, like stretch marks or your belly after lunch, and the simple fact of hearing it set to music takes away a little of the secrecy. What gets named stops being a monster.

Details, not concepts

What helps me most when writing about the body is getting down to detail. "Accepting yourself" is a phrase that means nothing. A knee that creaks on the stairs means a great deal. The hair peeking out of the neck of a T-shirt. Tan lines. The back nobody sees except whoever sleeps beside you. When you write like that, the body stops being an idea to have opinions about and becomes something you can touch.

And desire lives there too. I think that's important to say. Writing about the body without apologising includes writing about the body you fancy, the other man's, with appetite and without florist's-shop metaphors. Straight love songs have spent centuries describing lips, waists and glances. Men who love men have the same right to name what we like, with the same joy and, if need be, the same soppiness.

Music videos and mirrors

I direct my music videos, more than 280 of them, and there the body stops being a word and becomes an image. That's a different challenge. In a video every shot decides which body deserves to be up front. I've tried to make sure the ones that appear don't come out of a catalogue, though I don't always succeed and I won't pretend otherwise. Images have inertia. They push you towards the usual.

What I am clear about is that I don't want anyone to watch one of my videos and come away feeling worse. If they come away laughing, all the better. If they come away looking in the mirror with a bit more affection, that would be perfect, but I don't insist on it.

Apologising is a habit. It's learnt. And because it's learnt, it can be unlearnt, even if it's hard. Writing has helped me do that. Every time I finish a lyric without having watered down what I wanted to say about the body, I feel something like taking off a girdle. I breathe better.

Nor do I ask permission from the other side, the one that says talking about the body is frivolous. It isn't. The body is where everything happens: love, shame, dancing, hangovers. If a pop song can't talk about that, I don't know what it's supposed to talk about.

The full lyrics are at mikesaintlouis.com.