I started thinking a few weeks ago about the idea of sin. Fitting, considering that on the holiday of Yom Kippur, Jews apologize for sins committed by our individual selves and on behalf of the larger Jewish community.

Today is Love Your Body Day, another holiday. LYBD is sponsored by National Organization of Women and celebrated across the nation. On its website, NOW writes:

“Women and girls spend billions of dollars every year on cosmetics, fashion, magazines and diet aids. These industries can’t use negative images to sell their products without our assistance.

Together, we can fight back.”

Yom Kippur and Love Your Body Day both provide opportunities to actually do what we should be doing every day: pondering our actions and pondering our bodies, respectively. As far as I know, these two holidays have never historically been linked together. They should be. While Yom Kippur obliges its observers to reflect on their past actions in the context of how they have treated others, Love Your Body Day turns this reflection inward and encourages us to think about how we have treated our selves.

For some reason, though, Yom Kippur has gotten more press.

On Love Your Body Day we reflect on the objectification of women via the 2,000 media images we view on average per day, which is not new or necessarily sensational anymore. And objectification of men is not new either. It is not only women that society has an idealized image of--nowhere near. I’ve chosen to focus on women’s body image simply because it is the subject with which I have first-hand experience.

Women have historically been painted through their positions, clothing, and expression as inferior to men, and childish: the worst ads arguably project the image of a woman’s complicity in a violent situation. Oh, and that’s when we appear as a full person, not as a dismembered ass or breast or head.

Though it’s not new anymore, I still would bet that some of the ways and some of the explicitness of this objectification would shock the average Joanne Six-Pack. This objectification takes place in ads that one might rationally assume have nothing to do with body image to begin with. How about the vintage ad for a Pitney Bowes postage meter asking “Is it always illegal to KILL a woman?” How about Maker’s Mark bourbon, which ran a series of ads frattily lamenting “Your bourbon has a great body and fine character. I wish the same could be said for my girlfriend.”

Even products that are inherently healthy have propagated unhealthy standards for women, like the 1950s ad for Pep vitamins with a satisfied man exclaiming “so the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks!” And these are only advertisements with text accompaniments. Most ads don’t even need text. The female model, looking as though she is addicted to heroin and has never eaten in her life but still very much wants to have sex with me, ironically speaks for herself in her silence.

Back to the idea of sins, though. We certainly cannot censor advertisers for portraying us as someone else’s disposable toy. To me, these advertisers sin against human progress, against human potentiality for a more equitable society. But we, too, sin in our complicity.

Just as the “original sin” represents a fall of “man”kind by virtue of an individual action, so we as women and men — all over the world — are obligated to reverse this process. We can bring about, through our own individual actions, a different vision of who we are and what we stand for.

I’m not blaming the Egyptian woman whom I observed with my very eyes in Cairo last semester purchasing skin-whitening cream (http://www.fairandflawlessskin.com, among innumerable others). I just wish that I had the courage (and the sufficient Arabic) to ask her: why? Whose standard of beauty is this? I certainly don’t think it was a sin for my friend from high school to move out to Los Angeles and purchase new breasts.

However. If the idea of “sin” is meant to deter us from behavior which prevents us from being the best people we can be, an idea I’d personally like to ascribe to, we need to have a long conversation with ourselves. This conversation could include issues such as why we buy the things we do, why we doubt our natural bodies as much as we do, and why we make unhealthy choices with our bodies. And maybe that conversation will lend itself to apologies.

When we apologize to our bodies, we apologize to our larger body as women. We apologize for not stepping in as that friend made excuses not to eat, again. We apologize for not using a condom that time and suffering thereafter. We apologize for perpetuating cosmetic companies’ falsified advertisements of ourselves (see Dove’s “Evolution” ad on YouTube). We apologize for letting anyone else dictate what “beautiful” is.

Yom Kippur marked my spiritual new year, but Love Your Body Day, in many ways, marks my body’s. Last year, on LYBD, my fellow Women’s Resource Center companions gathered as this year’s sex columnist and I shaved our heads. While it meant different things for both of us and feels minimizing to confine that experience to one sentence, I was constantly amazed at how a lack of hair on my head made me appreciate previously-unloved parts of my body.

And a final note about “original sin:” The “fall of man” was actually humankind’s very first Love Your Body Day. What we would today call “bodily transgression” was, for Adam and Eve, primal fulfillment. It was a human search for knowledge, an act of resistance against a force dictating what they could and could not do with their bodies. Today, take some time to meditate on what it means to “love your body,” on any combination of those terms. On what it means to love your body, what makes your body your own, and what defines a human “body” anyway. Take some time to eat society’s forbidden fruit: question the forces which dictate what a body “should” look like. In the spirit of exploration, of resistance through and by virtue of that exploration, Happy Love Your Body Day, and Happy New (Body) Year. And let us say: A-women.

Ariela Rutkin-Becker is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at arbecker@cornellsun.com. Dude, Where’s My Karma usually appears alternate Mondays.