‘We do not need to change our bodies, we need to change the rules’
– Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
WE ARE OBSESSED with our bodies. Or rather, we are obsessed with everything that’s wrong with our bodies. We are obsessed with shrinking our bodies, toning our bodies, sculpting our bodies, getting lean and perking up, burning fat and slimming down, flattering our figures and flattening our stomachs, accentuating curves and disguising flaws, battling the bulge, beating the scale, dropping dress sizes, becoming the best version of ourselves that we can be!
And for what? What are we in pursuit of when we do those things? It must be something good, because those things are not fun. Ask anyone on day five of the cabbage soup diet how much fun they’re having, and let me know if you get out alive. Of course, we’re not supposed to admit how not-fun it all is, we even go as far as lying to ourselves – I really am enjoying living off cayenne pepper and maple syrup cocktails, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself! The facade begins to crack when we start crying over our friend’s pizza and wondering if tissue paper is edible, and if so, how many calories? Why do we keep lying to ourselves? Why do we willingly inflict so much discomfort, even pain, on our bodies? What for?
We do it to get the perfect body – flawless, unblemished, ideal. Some of us spend our entire lives chasing the ideal body. The one that will finally make us beautiful; the one that we’re told will finally make us happy. We picture that body while we run desperately on the treadmill and our knees feel like they’re about to buckle. Just one more mile. We imagine that body when we say no, yet again, to our favourite dessert. That’ll go straight to our thighs. We have visions of that body when we step on to our scales and the numbers flash frantically in front of our eyes before they settle on our fate. Please, just two more pounds this week, we’ve worked so hard. And we have worked so hard. We starve, we sweat, we cry standing over those scales and fall to pieces at the sight of our naked reflection. We vow to be better next week.
Everywhere we go we carry around our feelings of not being good enough. They weigh on everything we do. I can’t wear that at my size! I’m not hungry, I ate earlier, I swear! They would never be interested, just look at me. I’ll do it once I’ve lost the weight. Our entire lives get tied up in the chains of the ideal body, only to be unlocked once we’ve earned it. Perfection is the key. And it’s always just slightly out of our reach. There’s always another pound to be lost, another problem area to fix (they seem to pop up out of nowhere, almost as if someone’s invented them …). But we still believe that we can get there. We still believe after all this time that if we hate ourselves enough we’ll end up loving ourselves. We don’t realise that we’ve been tricked.
How did we get here? How did we reach a place where it’s 100 per cent normal to hate your body? Every female I’ve ever known has disliked some part of her appearance, or all of it. We’ve been convinced that changing the way our bodies look should be our ultimate goal in life, and although women have been the primary target of these messages for the past century, these days no body is safe. Men are increasingly being told that their value lies in their muscles, and that looking like anything less than the cover of a fitness magazine isn’t good enough. Thanks to toxic expectations of masculinity, they’re also being told not to talk about the body-image issues they’re struggling with. Hating your body is the new normal.
Most of us know someone who’s had an eating disorder. Someone who’s had cosmetic surgery. Someone who’s lost and gained the same 20 pounds over and over again. People of all sizes, all ages, all genders, all colours, and all abilities are being affected by body-image issues. We’re too fat, too wrinkled, too masculine, too feminine, too dark, too pale, too queer, too different. We’re always ‘too’ something, compared to the ideal body. The pressure becomes too much for us to handle. Our societal self-hatred is spreading like wildfire, slowly but surely we’re all being set aflame in the pursuit of perfection.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this. You already know. You see it every day. It’s in the adverts for the new! Easy! Fast! Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days! Weight-loss plan. It’s in the sky-high posters of model bodies selling everything from perfume to burgers. It’s in the never-ending murmurs of how many pounds have been shed this week that you overhear on the train, at work, among friends. It’s in the TV breaks telling you how breast enhancement could change your life. It’s in the magazine pages you flick through to pass the time, raving about the latest juice cleanse or detox.
It’s in the back-handed compliments about looking good ‘for your age’, and the concerned comments from family members about when you’re going to do something about, well, you know … It’s in the supermarket aisles you walk down filled with ‘guilt-free!’ reduced fat, sugar-free, zero carbs, made-of-nothing-but-water-and-air food products. It’s when you try to unwind with your favourite film or TV show and parading before you is a cast filled with nothing but thin, white, beautiful, young, able bodies.
You might not even notice it, but you learn from it. You learn in millions of little ways every day that there is an ideal, and that you don’t match up to it. So that when you get home, away from the murmurs, curtains drawn against the pictures, adverts silenced and screens turned off, only you, your body, your mind, and the quiet … You still know, because there it is in your mirror staring back at you. Everything that you’re not. Everything that you need to change. All the ways that your body is wrong. You know.
If you’re anything like I am then you’ve known for a long time. Ever since you were first old enough to take in the words, the images, and the lessons. The first time I remember thinking that I was too fat is when I was five years old. That’s all the time it took in the world to believe that I was too much. I was too big, too soft, too brown, too ugly, my stomach was too round and my hair wasn’t blond enough.
I remember spending hours in fantasies of what I would look like when I grew up, grasping for reassurance that one day I would be beautiful. Beautiful meaning thin. Thin was the only option, of course that’s what I would become, that’s what all the representations of beautiful women around me were: Barbie-doll thin, Disney-princess thin, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe thin. To my five-year-old mind, that’s what women were supposed to look like. The fact that I was still a child didn’t stop me from comparing myself to them.
Recent studies suggest that children as young as three years old have body-image issues and at four years old are aware of how to lose weight.1 The biggest concern a child that age should have is whether they can do a cartwheel or memorise the alphabet, not whether they’re too fat or how many calories it takes to change your body. The obsession is starting earlier and earlier. And this is what those thoughts grow into:
There are thousands of statistics and surveys showing what the real story of our body image is. That we spend every day picking out our flaws and tearing our reflections to pieces. That we put our entire lives on hold because we don’t think we’re worthy of living in the bodies we have. That we would trade in years of life, risk illness, pain, and even death to turn our bodies into something worth loving. And that we’re teaching our children to feel exactly the same way about themselves. Statistics are easy to glaze over, so here’s the simple truth: we are destroying ourselves for an unobtainable and unrealistic body type.
The things that we’re willing to do for the ideal body speak for themselves. We go hungry, we deny ourselves essential nutrients and ignore our most basic needs. We push ourselves past our physical limits until the room starts spinning and we can barely move the next day. We spend hours applying lotions and potions with promises of miraculous results on the label. We stuff ourselves into elastic casings to smooth out our silhouettes or train our waists into shapes nature never intended them to be. We drink teas and take pills that make our heartbeats race and make sure we don’t leave the bathroom all night.
We attend groups every week where we sit in circles fantasising about goal weights and pretending we don’t hear it when someone’s stomach rumbles. We live off nothing but juice, convinced that our bodies are full of evil toxins that must be cleansed. We pay people thousands of pounds to cut into our healthy flesh, lift it, pin it, tuck it, suck it, staple it, reshape it and stitch us back together again. And it isn’t a select few people who are going to any lengths necessary to get the body of their dreams, we’re all doing it. The stay-at-home mum who lives down the street, the girl you went to school with, your old English teacher, the star athlete, the savvy businesswoman, the A-list celebrity, the millionaire entrepreneur. The pressure of perfection leaves none of us behind.
And besides the physical lengths we go to, the things we willingly inflict upon our bodies, there’s an even darker side to our obsession with perfection, and that’s what it does to our minds. The real cost of a diet isn’t those irritating hunger pangs you have to ignore, it’s the constant preoccupation with food, the never-ending counting and weighing and bargaining that takes up so much mental real estate. The hatred we have for our bodies doesn’t stop at our thighs. It takes over our entire sense of self.
It affects our relationships, how we treat others and how we think we deserve to be treated. It seeps into our professional lives, determines what we have the energy to accomplish and the will to aim for. It saps our ambition beyond dropping dress sizes. You can’t dream of becoming an artist, an explorer, or a leader when your dreams are occupied by visions of thin. It makes us believe that we don’t even deserve to exist in the world, to be seen and heard and valued in the bodies we have. It takes away all of our power.
If we don’t measure up to societal standards of beauty, we see ourselves as failures, burdens, and disgraces. We don’t just hate our outer shells, we hate our whole selves. And it’s exhausting. I know I’m not the only one who feels completely worn out by it all.
Those extra pounds we’ve learned to see as hideous flaws turn into the weight of the world on our shoulders. Do you feel it? That heaviness? That pressure? That’s the weight of all the ways you’ve been told that you’re not good enough. In our current cultural game of How To Be Beautiful, none of us are good enough. We keep playing by the rules because we’ve been promised that it’ll all be worth it in the end. Even if we stumble, fall off the diet, or regain the weight, we get up and try again because we can still see it. The image of the body that will finally make us happy.
I want to let you in on a secret that nobody ever told me in all of my years chasing the ideal body: happiness is not a size. It isn’t a number on a piece of fabric, it can’t be found in a calorie count, and it sure as hell isn’t hiding in your bathroom scales. I know that’s hard to believe – after all, everything around us says otherwise.
We’ve been told for so long that if we just work hard enough the ideal body will be within our reach. Once we’re there it’ll all be worth it, we’ll be beautiful, desired, successful, and, finally, good enough. Except by now you might be starting to realise that you’ve been playing by those rules for a long time, for as long as you can remember, in fact. You’ve tried everything you possibly could, you’ve sacrificed so much time, energy and life to get the ideal body and still you look in the mirror and see something so flawed. So imperfect. So human. How can that be possible?
I’ll tell you how. Sit down, my love. Take that weight off your shoulders. If you’re reading this book then that probably means you’re tired of chasing the impossible. You’re tired of waging war against your body and never ever feeling like you’re good enough. The problem is that you just can’t see another way. How do you let go of the rules and realise that you’re good enough already? How do you make peace with your body?
First of all, we have to unlearn all of the lies we’ve been taught about the way we look. Then, slowly, we can learn the truth instead. If it doesn’t happen straight away or if it feels like it’s too difficult, I want you to remember that you are fighting against a lifetime of negative conditioning about your body. It’s not easy to undo all of that and embrace a new way of thinking. So be patient with yourself, be kind to yourself, and most of all, keep reminding yourself that you deserve better. We all deserve better than spending our lives hating our bodies.
Lesson number one: the image of the ideal body you’ve been holding on to for all these years, is a lie.
WE LEARN THE ideal from what we see, and we see it everywhere we turn. The images that fill our minds when we think about what’s beautiful aren’t creations of our imagination, they’re from the hundreds of media bodies we’re exposed to every day. With every magazine page, every film, every advert, every TV show, every music video, every time we turn on our screens or walk down a billboard-lined street we see it. We see her.
The fashion model, the Hollywood star, the girl with the golden hair and honey smooth skin. Sometimes the hair is sleek and dark, the eye colour might vary and very occasionally the skin colour does too, but two things remain the same: she is beautiful, and she is thin. If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, we now have the faces that launched a thousand diets, a thousand beauty regimes and a thousand different kinds of self-loathing. From seeing their bodies plastered wherever we go, we learn what our culture’s idea of perfection is, which bodies are celebrated and lusted after, what we should all be striving for. We’re never allowed to forget.
If aliens ever did descend upon Earth, and confined themselves to a small room with only a television and a stack of magazines in order to learn about humankind before integrating themselves into the community, what would they think? Probably that our women are all five foot ten, weigh about 110 pounds, with gravity-defying globular breasts, faces without a blemish to be seen, are naturally hairless from the nose down and that we pretty much all die out after the age of 35 (except the few that become mothers, cougars, or sad-looking old women). They’d probably also think that a disproportionate number of our men have rock-hard abs and dazzling white smiles, although they’d notice that men are at least allowed to age visibly, and have identities beyond how attractive they are.
They’d probably assume that people of colour are a rare spectacle, and disabled people are far too rare to ever be seen in the outside world. And they wouldn’t have any idea that people outside the gender binary exist at all. Imagine their surprise when they leave that room and encounter us, women especially, in all our glory. After the initial shock, they might be quite confused about why our media chooses to constantly represent a body type that 95 per cent of us don’t have, and leaves the rest of us behind. They might even find it funny, seeing it as such an obvious distortion of reality. The problem is, we don’t recognise the distortion.
Instead of seeing a single body type everywhere we turn as inaccurate, misleading or manipulative, we see our own bodies as the problem. Why aren’t our legs that long and toned? Why is our hair so flat and lifeless? Why does our skin have lines on it? We compare ourselves with those images until we’re left feeling worthless. Those images are nothing like us.
They’re not supposed to be. They’re supposed to be aspirational, superhuman enough for us to be in awe of, but with a beauty that we can still believe is achievable. That way, we can be sold the thing that promises to make us just as beautiful. We can buy the miracle diet pill that will give us the figure of our dreams. We can spend our money on the shampoo to get thick, flowing locks. We can splurge on that outfit that we’ve seen advertised on the most flattering (read: thin) bodies, because maybe it’ll make us look like that too! Maybe we can be beautiful too! In all adverts we’re being sold two things – the ideal image, and the product to get us there. Want one? Buy the other.
Female beauty ideals are the best marketing scheme in the world. What better way to make money than to make half the world feel ugly and then sell them the solution?
Outside of advertising, the media makes sure we all get the message that the ideal body is the only one worthy of being celebrated, admired, or loved. When was the last time you saw a leading female character get a happy ending without first fitting conventional standards of beauty? You only get a happy ending if you’re beautiful, duh. When was the last time you saw a magazine cover with a red circle of shame drawn around a female celebrity’s ‘flawed’ body parts? Inside, the article suggests that she’s lost control of her entire life because her stomach folds when she bends over. She couldn’t possibly be happy! The next issue shows how she’s fighting to get her body, and her life back (cue eye-roll).
We quickly learn that the only way to be beautiful or happy is to spend our lives chasing the ideal body. And it will be a chase, since only 5 per cent of us naturally possess the body type that the media loves so much.6 Even those of us who appear to be perfect on the outside carry the same nagging insecurities about not measuring up. When we look in the mirror we don’t see ourselves clearly because we’re looking through a lens of every perfect body we’ve ever seen. Against those images, we are always too fat, too ugly, too dark, too imperfect.
One study examining the effects of how seeing ideal female bodies on television impacts our own self-image found that 95 per cent of women overestimated their body sizes after seeing images of women with ideal body weights.7 Meaning that when we constantly see images of the ideal thin body, we come away thinking that we’re bigger than we are. What we see every day is shaping how we see ourselves.
We can’t see the beauty in everything that we are because we’ve been taught to first see everything that we’re not. All the rules of how we should look take the magic away from how we do look. Jes Baker sums it up perfectly in her book Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls when she writes:
we do this terrible thing where we look in the mirror or at pictures and we expect to see a thin model. Unless you are a thin model, THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN. So stop that shit. The second you start looking for you is the second you will start to appreciate what you are.
Things get even more complicated when we realise that the perfect body we’re searching for in the mirror, the body we think we should have, the body we’re killing ourselves for, doesn’t even exist. The ideal isn’t a real woman, one with history that comes to life on her skin, one with a moving, changing body. The ideal is a creation of a Photoshop wand. Nobody looks as perfect as the ideal, not even those 5 per cent.
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, Susan Bordo wrote the following in her preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Unbearable Weight:
Now, in 2003, virtually every celebrity image you see – in the magazines, in the videos, and sometimes even in the movies – has been digitally modified. Virtually every image. Let that sink in. Don’t just let your mind passively receive it. Confront its implications. This is not just a matter of deception … This is perceptual pedagogy, How to Interpret Your Body 101. These images are teaching us how to see. Filtered, smoothed, polished, softened, sharpened, re-arranged … Training our perception in what’s a defect and what is normal.
Fourteen years later and things have only become worse. We compare ourselves to bodies that don’t even exist and spend all our time, energy, and money trying to look like an illusion. When I was younger, I used to dream of spending my one magic wish on sculpting my perfect body. I would be able to mould myself like Play-Doh, pushing the fat from my stomach up to my breasts, making them perky and round, and perched above my ever-shrinking waist. I could carve out my collarbone and etch on my abs, make my eyes three sizes bigger and my chin three sizes smaller.
Which is exactly what editing software does to nearly every image of the female body we see in the media, except it goes so much further than I could have imagined. It erases all signs of ageing, tiredness, and character from female faces. It routinely makes dark-skinned women paler and light-skinned women tanned. It shrinks ears, noses, ankles, toes. It doesn’t just shave pounds off the usual places like waists and thighs, it makes people thinner in places they never knew they had to be – necks, forearms, backs, knees, and everything in between. Not even our armpits are safe – they’re consistently smoothed out, brightened up, and made to look like hair was never even intended to grow there. There is an ideal armpit. I’m not joking.
In a recent Refinery29 article, a former Victoria’s Secret photoshopper described how the models all wore push-up bras underneath their bikinis during swimwear shoots, which were then erased in the editing process,8 leaving cleavage far beyond what the actual swimwear could give anyone. A friend of mine working in the photography industry told me how women ask for another person’s breasts to be cut from a photograph and pasted on top of their own. In 2013, over 3 million women worldwide had cosmetic surgery on their breasts.9
These aren’t just harmless pieces of imagery that we all recognise as unrealistic and then go about our lives, these images teach us how to see ourselves, and everything that’s wrong with us. It barely even matters whether we’re aware of how the images are manipulated, we still compare ourselves to them. How could we not when they’re everywhere we turn?
This is a game we cannot win. No matter how many sit-ups we do, lunches we skip, products we buy or hours we spend altering our appearance we will never look like the woman on the magazine cover. As the saying goes, ‘even the girl in the magazine doesn’t look like the girl in the magazine’. And it goes so far beyond those glossy pages.
The use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) means that moving bodies are being altered too – music videos, films, TV shows. In her videos, Britney Spears has the same chiselled stomach at 34 as she did when she was dancing with a snake wrapped around her shoulders aged 19. The only indication that we’re being lied to is when the footage becomes slightly blurred, or when shots of the video pre-CGI get leaked online and we see her real body. A body that’s already worthy of all the sweaty snake dances in the world! Apps that are free to download on our phones allow us to drop three dress sizes in just as many clicks before we post our pictures on social media. There is nowhere we can turn to any more for images of bodies that we know aren’t edited.
This is a big deal. As Bordo wrote, this isn’t a matter of seeing pretty (photoshopped) pictures that have no bearing on how we see ourselves, those pretty pictures are the standard we measure ourselves against, and we will always come up short. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and when the picture is a woman’s digitally manipulated body seen by millions, all those words become variations of ‘you’re not good enough’.
Despite how obviously damaging constant exposure to these images is, the people often responsible for putting them into the world (namely magazine editors), still claim that they’re harmless. When singer Kelly Clarkson appeared on the 2009 cover of Self magazine, it didn’t take people long to realise that the editing fairy had done some serious weight-loss work on her body. A behind-the-scenes video of the shoot showed what she really looked like, and TV appearances at the same time as the magazine release proved it too. The editor-in-chief of Self came forward defending the cover, saying that those shots aren’t supposed to be ‘true to life’ and that the editing was ‘only to make her look her personal best’.10 But hold on a minute … how can it be her personal best if it’s not really her at all? What kind of message is that sending?
I went to an event a little while ago hosted by a popular women’s magazine, the editor of which sat on a panel poised to answer our questions. When I asked what she thought about the toxic side of the media, particularly how it influences the body image of teenage girls, she told me that we don’t give girls enough credit. She said that girls are smart enough these days to know when a picture is edited, and that they can control how much the media affects them.
Now, some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known have been the ones to fall the furthest into eating disorders and self-hatred, so being smart has nothing to do with it. And as for credit, let’s give it where it’s really due: to every person who survives another day at war with their bodies because of the kind of poison that those magazines peddle, whether it’s unrealistic airbrushing, lack of representation, or yet another ‘How To Get Your Best Body Yet!’ article.
I left the event really disheartened that someone who had the power to change things would rather evade responsibility and avoid the truth: that smart, creative, extraordinary people are being hurt every day by the image they’re selling. And while those pages aren’t the sole cause, they are a powerful part of the machine that works to reduce us to imperfect pieces, and sell us the solution. Denial isn’t going to change that.
Do we know when an image has been photoshopped? I definitely didn’t when I was flicking through my mum’s magazines at eight years old. I still remember that feeling, the intoxicating glamour of womanhood beckoning me through those pictures, each one slowly seeping into my mind and forming my idea of what a woman should be. I couldn’t wait until I looked just like them – polished, carefree and, most importantly, thin. Thinner than any of the women I knew in real life. I didn’t stop to question how that was possible. Even once I knew about Photoshop, it didn’t matter.
At 17, I filled an entire book with female bodies that I’d sliced out of those magazines. I made myself look at them every morning, channelling the strength to spend another day denying my hunger and chasing perfection. I knew about airbrushing by then. I knew how bodies were made thinner and so-called flaws were blurred out, but it didn’t make a difference. Those bodies were still the goal, the dream, the ideal.
When we believe in the ideal body so ferociously, we’re willing to ignore just about anything that flies in the face of it. It’s why we still believe the right diet will work, even when the last 372 haven’t. It’s why we keep buying the lotions and potions that claim to make us younger and firmer, despite having a drawer full of them at home that did absolutely nothing. And it’s why, when we see a picture of an impossibly beautiful body, we still compare ourselves to it, we still strive to look like it, even when we know it’s been photoshopped. Even when we know that no real person could ever achieve a body that flawless. We still try. We just can’t give up our belief in the ideal body.
Imagine if tomorrow all the images changed. No more Photoshop. No more exclusion. Real diversity and real bodies displayed for all the world to see. Imagine every person being able to open a magazine or turn on their screens and see themselves represented, see bodies just like theirs being celebrated as beautiful and worthy of cover pictures or leading roles. I think the effect on our self-esteem would be undeniable. Then all of the people who say that images are meaningless will have to deal with the millions of badass, confident women demanding an answer as to why we’ve been lied to for so long, and made to believe that we were anything other than perfect.
HAVE YOU EVER thought to question where our image of the ideal body comes from in the first place? Who decides what beauty is, anyway? We treat the ideal body as if it’s a sacred truth, passed down from Mount Sinai through generations – thou shalt be skinny. Our current beauty ideals are seen as undebatable, it’s simply a fact that thin is beautiful and fat is not. To doubt the power of these truths would be blasphemous! But I’m going to anyway. Because if the ideal body is solid gold truth, then why has it changed so much over time?
It’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when fat was in and thin was out. Actually, there have been plenty of moments throughout history when our body ideals today would be seen as bizarre. In Western culture 200 years ago, fat was viewed as healthy and beautiful, fat meant you had enough to eat, that you weren’t poor, or in fragile health.
Once upon a time our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied on being able to store fat efficiently in order to survive, that extra jiggle was life-saving when food was scarce. Now we curse our slow metabolisms and see our bodies as less efficient the more fat they store. And sure, we’re not hunters any more, for most of us food is readily available, so it’s logical that plenty of body fat is no longer seen as essential. But why should it be seen as hideous? And why, over the last 100 years alone, have there been so many different ideas about fat, how much we’re allowed and where we’re allowed it?
Every so often an angry teenage boy who’s mad about fat women loving themselves comes on to my Instagram page to tell me that we’ve evolved to see thin bodies as attractive, and I can’t change people’s instinctual preferences (I’m paraphrasing, usually there’s at least one ‘ur a fat whale!’ thrown in there). Their argument is that the ideal body has been ingrained in our minds through evolution to ensure that we find the best possible mate. And sure, some of our personal preferences about what’s attractive are hard-wired, but those preferences don’t even begin to cover how extreme our current cultural idea of beauty has become.
When we think about female secondary sexual characteristics, the physical traits that we associate with feminine bodies like breasts and hips, and the parts that should play a key role in any evolutionary-driven ideal body, it’s clear that sometimes, these are the parts that we’ve been taught are the most flawed. The parts that we should have evolved to admire the most are the parts we’ve been made to hate the most.
Wide hips and increased body fat in the thighs and buttocks are signs of oestrogen production in women, the sex hormone responsible for the development and regulation of the reproductive system. Surely, if the ideal body is so connected to instinctual survival, they would be physical features we would evolve to be always attracted to? But taking a glance back at any magazine, TV show or beauty icon of the nineties will show you how demonised those features have been in the past.
Back then ‘does this make my butt look big?’ was the question on women’s lips everywhere, hoping for the answer to be no. Sir Mix A Lot didn’t do much to stop the trend either; women kept trying to flatten their derrières way into the noughties. Why? Because that’s what the image of beauty was at that time: tall, straight, and flat. Thick thighs are only just making a comeback (and only if they’re cellulite-free). And what about stomach fat?
Women are genetically predisposed to storing more body fat than men,11 and the fat around our stomach is there to act as protection for the reproductive organs.12 In other words, it’s supposed to be there. That pouch of squishiness at the bottom of your belly that you hate so much? You’re meant to have it, it serves a purpose. Even the most slender, toned female bodies in the world usually have at least a small curve at that part of their stomach. If our body ideals were about what evolution has influenced us to see as positive qualities in a mate, then stomach fat would be all the rage. Instead we can barely go a single day without being bombarded with ways to Blitz Your Belly Fat! Battle The Bulge! Fight The Flab! Get Washboard Abs In Three Easy Steps!
Even while researching this chapter I searched Google for ‘female stomach fat is good’ and every single result, was an article about finally losing that stubborn belly fat, how to get flat abs and maintain them, fast and easy weight loss for your tummy. The title of one Bustle article, which I did eventually manage to find, says it all: ‘“How Do I Get Flab Abs” Is A Biologically-Rigged Question For Women To Be Asking Themselves’. It is rigged, making something as natural and normal as stomach fat into the ultimate female sin is rigging the game so that we always lose. So as for evolutionary body ideals, I think we left that reasoning behind a long time ago. We’re playing by a whole new set of rules now. Besides, I’m not sure what kind of evolutionary instinct would make defined eyebrows and thigh gaps a priority.
The only possible reason that the ideal body keeps changing, and exists in the form it does today, is because groups of very powerful people make it so. Just like the ones who make pleather fashionable one year and tell us that it’s hideous the next, these people, instead of playing with fabric textures, play with our self-image. The rules spread fast, and soon all the people in charge of what we see on a daily basis are clued in. They enforce the new ideal body by saturating our surroundings with images of it, selling us new miracle products to help us reach it, and writing headlines that reinforce the ideal into fact, even if the proof was built on shaky ground.
There is no higher reason why the bodies we idolise today are different from the bodies we idolised 50 years ago, just like there’s no higher reason why bootleg jeans were gradually replaced with skinny jeans (and probably a new type of jeans by the time you’re reading this). It’s fashion. It’s a cultural preference built on nothing more than what we’re told. We hate our bodies for not fitting well enough into a standard that is literally made up. And if we weren’t living in this time and place in history, things would very different.
One of my favourite body positive artworks called Wrong Century by Tomas Kucerovsky shows a beautiful fat woman in a striking red top standing in an art museum. A man passes by, raising his glasses to glare at her body with a deep frown on his face. Behind her two younger men whisper to each other and laugh, gesturing at her size. We then see her face, staring sadly up at a piece of art. The piece she’s staring at is Peter Paul Ruben’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, where the two women’s bodies he painted are soft and dimpled, with thick thighs and rolling stomachs. She stares, knowing that things were once so different. You see it and you can’t help but think if only those people judging her size understood that they’re just blindly following the trends, then they might see her very differently. Open your eyes: bodies like hers were once worthy of great art and admiration.
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus shows the Roman goddess of sex, love, and beauty emerging from the water in her shell. Her stomach has a fleshy pouch at the bottom and her thighs definitely touch. She is mesmerising. There’s a sculpture called The Crouching Aphrodite, showing the ancient Greek interpretation of the same goddess bent forwards with three distinct soft rolls flowing down her belly. The figure considered to be the very epitome of beauty at those times had belly rolls. Yet we’re supposed to feel disgusted with them now.
The Venus of Willendorf is a small statuette carved in the Palaeolithic period (around 25,000 years ago) showing a female body with enormous rounded breasts resting on an even bigger stomach. She could walk into any modern-day diet centre and instantly be dubbed a morbidly obese apple shape who needs to cut the calories immediately. She’s thought to have represented fertility and sexuality all that time ago. My oh my, how times have changed.
Even since the beginning of the twentieth century an array of different bodies have been idolised at different times. We need to remember that our idea of beauty today isn’t immutable truth. It isn’t unshakeable fact. It’s fashion. Why do we take something so seriously that changes by the decade? Can’t we see how meaningless ideal bodies really are, constantly changing and being dictated to us by the celebrated shapes of each generation?
Body positivity is often misunderstood as wanting to make a new body type the ideal, one that’s bigger and curvier and represents those of us who’ve spent years on the ideal body sidelines. The truth is that we don’t want to change the ideal, we want to abolish it. We want absolutely all bodies to be celebrated and idolised, represented and glorified. The women on the magazine covers can stay, but they’re going to have to make some room for the rest of us too. We’re tired of being told that there’s only one kind of beauty when we see that all of us exist on the spectrum of beauty, no matter how well we fit into the standards of today.
Today’s ideal body is deceptive. It tells women that they’re allowed body fat, embrace your curves! It insists that fitness is just as important as beauty, strong is the new skinny! It claims to be a relief from the years that Kate Moss measurements dominated the beauty conversation. But it really isn’t. Sure, curves are allowed, but only in exactly the right places and only in exactly the right proportions. The Internet is overrun with people declaring who gets to call themselves ‘curvy’ and who doesn’t (‘this isn’t curvy, this is just fat’).
We’re allowed our hips and our breasts back, but our stomachs, legs, arms and faces have to stay in line, and our arses are a whole different story. As for fitness, the only thing that really counts is if you can see physical results, chiselled torsos and high, firm glutes. Today’s ideal is the hourglass shape of the past taken to its extreme. Is it really any easier to maintain a body that’s thin, toned and hard in the specified places and overflowingly voluptuous everywhere else, than it was to be thin all over? Or is it just as unattainable for the majority of us?
Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.
– Tina Fey, Bossy Pants
Unless you hit the jackpot in the cultural beauty standards’ genetic lottery, achieving today’s ideal body is going to take more time and energy than any past ideal body. Working for a body type that so few of us could ever naturally possess becomes a full-time job. Every waking hour is dedicated to fighting your flesh into submission. The obsession takes over. And maybe that’s the point?
FEMALE BEAUTY STANDARDS are never simply about being beautiful. How a woman is supposed to look also dictates how she must act, and ultimately how she fits into the world. Because the road to the ideal body is made up of superficial things – which low fat yoghurt to choose, which size to pick up, which shade of eyeshadow to wear or brightly coloured magazine to take from the shelf – we forget that it’s about so much more than that.
If we think about our own experience, it’s easy to see how striving for the ideal body changes us far beyond the physical. It prescribes to us how we should spend our time, our money, and our energy. It becomes the thing we focus on the most, the thing we talk about the most, the thing we want most in the world. It becomes a core part of our identity, which is why the thought of giving it up is so terrifying – what will we be without it? The answer, of course, is whatever the hell we want to be. Female beauty ideals have been used to limit us, who we can become, and how much space we’re allowed to take up in the world. They are about so much more than what we look like. Here’s a mini history lesson to show how fucked up beauty ideals really are:
In China, female foot-binding was once the ultimate symbol of feminine beauty and status. Women who had ‘lotus feet’ (feet altered in shape by binding, making them around three or four inches long), were seen as the most attractive, and were the most likely to earn prestigious marriages. The process of achieving this beauty standard involved breaking all but the big toes, tying them flat against the soles, breaking the arches of the foot in two, and binding them together until they were crushed into place.
The women also became symbols of the husband’s wealth – having lotus feet meant that even walking was painful. The women couldn’t work, so their feet showed the world that they came from wealthy homes, where men didn’t need the women’s labour to earn enough money. It was an ideal that caused immobility, pain and sometimes death.13,14 By keeping women’s feet tiny and broken, their roles in the world remained that way too. But at least they were considered beautiful, right?
The Victorian woman’s corset had the same effect. A cinched waist was a sign of beauty and class. It was ‘considered essential for real femininity’, despite the fact that ‘corsets put so much force on women’s bodies that they often constricted the lungs, squeezed the liver and small intestines, dislocated the stomach, and compressed the bladder. Some women’s corsets were laced so tightly that, over time, their ribs grew into their livers and other organs’.15 Do we seriously believe that’s just about looking beautiful? Why does female beauty have to come at the price of so much pain? That painful ideal wasn’t a simple aesthetic preference for small waists – it served to keep women confined, laced into their roles in the home and too short of oxygen to question it.
In her 1991 work The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf charts the rise in women’s social, economic and political power with the increasing pressure of the rules of beauty, showing how connected the two are. In other words, the extreme thinness that became the ideal body type at that time isn’t accidental, it’s an effective method of keeping women hungry, preoccupied, and without enough energy to fight for real equality. On the surface it’s about looks, but underneath it’s about controlling what a woman can be. As Wolf famously writes ‘a cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience’.
The ideal body serves a social purpose beyond just telling us how we should look. So what’s the social purpose of today’s ideal? We’re still hungry, and preoccupied, and so obsessed with our bodies that we don’t realise how much extraordinary potential we have. When I think back over the dieting years and the rare moments I managed to force my body into looking more like the ideal, I don’t wish for that body back. I wish for that time back. All that time that was supposed to be about discovering the world and who I was became wasted on making myself smaller and smaller. Imagine if we all stopped expending so much energy on trying to change our bodies. We could do anything we dreamed of. We could get shit done.
Another purpose of upholding an unattainable ideal body is making cold hard cash. Some of the biggest industries in the world make billions from our belief that we’re not good enough. Just think about how much we spend on diet plans, beauty supplies, exercise equipment, anti-ageing products and all the other things we hope will finally fix our physical imperfections.
The thin body ideal has stuck around for so long because it’s such a profitable one – it’s one that so few of us can ever successfully obtain, and one we’re willing to spend whatever it takes to achieve. We’ll talk more about that in a bit. For now, it’s clear that the beauty myth still has a firm grip on us, and it will do as long as we continue to believe that beautiful is the most important thing a woman can be, whatever form beautiful takes at certain times in history.
LET’S GET REAL about the ideal. It sucks. It doesn’t represent us, and it doesn’t even try to. It refuses to acknowledge that people of all sizes, shapes, ages, skin colours, genders and abilities exist and are worthy of being seen, heard, and valued. It isn’t even real, it’s built on digital manipulation and deception. And yet we’re still told to do everything we can to look like something only a Photoshop pro could create.
It changes over time so that even if we do come close to fitting the standard it slips from our grip and transforms into something else. Which shows us that it’s only really about fashion, not truth, not necessity, not evolutionary purpose, just a made-up rule. A rule that keeps us trapped, small, and believing that we don’t deserve better. Why are we still buying into this?
Mostly because it promises us so much; it doesn’t just sell us the image, it sells us the dream. Everything that we’ve always wanted wrapped up in a pretty thin bow. But just like the image itself, those promises are all lies. For everything it claims to give, it takes more away.
Even Oprah Winfrey, self-made media mogul, beloved around the world and dubbed as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, has repeatedly said that it doesn’t mean anything if she hasn’t lost the weight. So much success, and yet the ideal body is the one thing that she thinks will bring her happiness. The only problem is that she keeps regaining the weight, we all do. We never reach the ideal because, as we know, it changes, it’s impossible, and most of us just aren’t genetically cut out for it. If we keep playing by the rules of the ideal we’ll be waiting for happiness for ever. So what if we just took happiness now, as we are? Weight loss doesn’t solve our problems. Dress sizes don’t bring us fulfilment. And spending your life believing you’re not good enough will never make you happy. I hope Oprah realises that too.
The ideal works incredibly hard at convincing us that it’s all our fault. That the reason why we’re not beautiful enough, successful enough, happy, or in love is because we’re not working hard enough for it. We’re not following the rules well enough. We’re undisciplined. We’re lazy. We’re failures. We’re the problem. And we believe it, we soak up all that guilt and all that self-loathing and we don’t stop to question that maybe the problem isn’t us and our bodies.
Here is something that I want you to try your hardest to believe right now. I want you to say it to yourself, read it over and over until it sinks in:
You are not the problem. Your body is not the problem. The problem is the culture. The problem is the rules. The problem is the ideal. Not you. How you feel about your body is not your fault. All those insecurities aren’t something that you’ve just made up and decided to torture yourself over. This is something that has been done to you, to all of us. There is absolutely a problem, but it’s not you.
You might still have a hard time believing that, after all you’ve been blaming yourself for so long. But you did not ask to be born into a culture that values how we look above who we are as people, and prizes thinness so highly. You didn’t ask for the ideal, and if you’re still in any doubt about how damaging it truly is, just take a look at one of the most well-known eating disorder studies in the world, conducted by Anne Becker, to test what effect exposure to Western body ideals had on the body image of adolescent girls in Fiji.16
Before 1995, the Nadroga province of Fiji didn’t have access to television. Traditional Fijian values showed a preference for robust, strong bodies, and encouraged hearty appetites with feasts. People would be wary if someone showed a lack of appetite or lost weight. The Miss Fiji beauty queen of the time described how people saw slim women as weak, saying ‘people are always telling me to put on weight’.17 Most notably, before TV arrived in Fiji, eating disorders were practically unheard of, with only one reported case of anorexia by the mid-1990s – and dieting for weight loss before the nineties was non-existent. Until TV came along.
Within three years of television shows from the UK, USA and New Zealand being broadcast on the island, 74 per cent of the teenage girls surveyed said that they felt ‘too big or fat’. And 15 per cent of girls reported using self-induced vomiting in order to control their weight.
Some of the quotes from these girls say it all: ‘When I look at the characters on TV, the way they act on TV and I just look at the body, the figure of that body, so I say “look at them, they are thin and they all have this figure”, so I myself want to become like that, to become thin’ … ‘I just want to be slim because [the television characters] are slim. Like it’s influencing me so much that I have to be slim’.
The study is a perfect snapshot of how damaging images of the ideal body can really be. These images had the power to cause so much pain in just three years, in just one format. Take a minute now to reflect on how many years you’ve been exposed to the ideal body, all the hundreds of images in all different formats you see every day, and ask yourself, is it really any wonder that we feel the way we do about our bodies?
We weren’t born hating our bodies. The Fijian girls didn’t even hate their bodies until the image of the ideal body came along. Even if it seems too distant to remember, there was a time when your body was not your worst enemy. A time before the flaws became visible, a time before the diets became mandatory, a time before you got swept up in the way the world told you that you should be. I know that at some point I was carefree, safe from comparison and perfectly content in my soft, fascinating body. I know that slowly I learned the self-loathing that took over my life. Hating our bodies is something that we learn, and it sure as hell is something that we can unlearn.
THE NEW IDEAL would be no ideal at all. It would be all of our bodies celebrated and represented. It would teach us to see the beauty all around us, and to see ourselves through kinder eyes. It wouldn’t use yet another exclusionary image to divide us, making fat ‘in’ and thin ‘out’. It isn’t the body-shaming slogans that some people think of as body positivity: ‘real women have curves’. It would recognise, as Hanne Blank wrote, that ‘real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise’. It wouldn’t leave us feeling less than, unworthy, not good enough. It wouldn’t place us in competition with one another. It would raise us all up instead of tearing 95 per cent of us down. We are the ones with the power to make it happen.
I want you to fall in love with your body. Truly, madly, deeply in love, as the song goes. I want you to be wonderstruck by all the ways it works to keep you alive. I want you to be in awe of how the signs of your life trace themselves on your skin. I want you to feel like a goddess. Or god. Or gender-neutral deity. I want you to see the beauty that comes from your body and beyond.
I also know that for some of us, that kind of body love seems impossible and way too daunting to even contemplate. If body love feels unachievable right now, that’s okay. Nobody can jump from a lifetime of body-image issues straight into self-love. Instead, we can take some stepping stones along the way. One option is to aim for body acceptance.
Body acceptance is about accepting that this is the body you have, and feeling neutral about that fact. It means not thinking that you’re flawless and bootylicious 24/7, but also not thinking that you’re hideous and need to change. Actually, it’s not thinking about your body very much at all, just accepting that how it looks is how it looks, and getting on with your days.
A stepping stone down from body acceptance could be body respect. You might feel like you can never make peace with how your body looks. You might feel like you can never accept your stretch marks, or your loose skin, or your softness. So for now, let’s forget about accepting the outside. Instead let’s work on being thankful for all the incredible things our bodies allow us to do.
If your arms allow you to hug the people you love, let your body know that you’re grateful for that, instead of focusing on whatever shape those arms might be. When your body tries its best to heal you when you’re sick or injured, recognise how hard it’s fighting for you, not how it looks while it’s fighting. If your body takes you places and lets you experience the world, you can still be thankful for that, even if the gratitude disappears as soon as you look in the mirror. You can respect your body, even if you can’t make peace with your reflection. Hopefully the stepping stones of body respect and body acceptance will lead you to body positivity, but if not, that’s okay too.
No matter where you land on your journey to making peace with your body, remember that it’s not about being beautiful to others. It’s not about being beautiful according to the rules. It’s about knowing that you’re good enough and knowing that your outer shell is one of the least important things about you. What every step on this journey has to start with, is realising that you deserve better. And you deserve to have your body represented in our culture’s idea of beauty, always.
So show me it all. Show me the fat bodies and the thin ones. Show me the belly rolls, the cellulite, the jiggling upper arms. Show me the muscular and the soft. Show me the wide hips and the narrow ones too. Show me the breasts of all shapes and sizes, perky and droopy, uneven or absent. Show me the scars, the marks, the freckles, the blemishes. Show me the darkest skin and the palest, and every shade in between. Show me the able bodies and the differently abled bodies, the bodies in wheelchairs, the amputees, the bodies with disabilities visible and not. Show me the wrinkles and the lines, the hair in all tones of silver and grey. Show me the tall bodies and the short bodies. Show me them all. Let the world see them all, and let us call them all the new ideal.
LET’S TALK ABOUT the word FAT. If you’ve read this far then you’ve already seen it plenty of times. You might have wrinkled your nose at it, squirmed in your seat a little bit, felt your face flush with heat or wondered why a body positive book would drop so many F-bombs. After all, fat has become one of the most powerful insults in the world. We’ve all felt the white-hot shame that slices through your insides when someone says those two words: you’re fat.
Not too long ago those words had the ability to catapult me into a spiral of self-hatred faster than you can say ‘bikini body’. I’ve spent my life running from fat, living in fear that it would catch up with me. I ran when I was five years old on the playground. I ran when I was 10 years old on my first diet. I ran when I was 14 years old and in a hospital bed, still convinced that I could feel it creeping up on me.
I nearly ran right into an early grave, desperately looking over my shoulder for its shadow. And then after recovery, when all that extra softness suddenly appeared and I didn’t know what to do with any of it, I start running again. I kept running from fat for so many years, through crash diets, exercise addiction, and hundreds of pounds gained and lost. Fat was always there, the enemy, the threat, the fear.
When we see the word ‘fat’ we don’t just think of a body size or a food group or a type of cell that covers our bodies. We see all the meanings that our culture has given those three little letters. Fat is ugly. Fat is unhealthy. Fat is disgusting. Fat is lazy. Fat is unintelligent. Fat is failure. Fat is disgrace. The list goes on and on, there are no three letters in our culture quite as loaded with negativity as F A T.
So what’s it doing here amid words on self-love and body acceptance? Surely I should be telling people to stop calling themselves fat, and saying things like ‘you’re not fat, you’re beautiful!’. But really, who said you couldn’t be both? Who said you can’t be fat and beautiful, fat and successful, fat and sexual, fat and intelligent, fat and healthy, fat and happy? Fat is not a bad word. I know that’s a pretty unbelievable statement, but bear with me.
Reclaiming the words that have been used to tear us down in the past is part of this journey. When I first found the body positive community, the word fat was still unspeakable to me, unthinkable even, and yet here were hundreds of people declaring themselves as fat. Why weren’t they running from it like I was? Why weren’t they hiding from it? Why would they insult themselves like that so openly?
It turns out that they weren’t insulting themselves, they were celebrating themselves. They were taking back the words that have been used to make them feel worthless and stripping them of their power. They were fat babes rocking fatkinis and all other kinds of flabulous fatshion. They were embracing their fatness in every way and they were powerful as hell.
Marilyn Wann wrote in Fat! So? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize For Your Size, that ‘reclaiming the word fat is the miracle cure you’ve been looking for, the magic trick that makes all your worries about weight disappear’. You can’t be hurt by a word that you no longer see as a threat. People can jump up and down all day long raging about what a fat whale you are and when your only response is ‘so?’, you’ve pretty much burst their bubble. Marginalised groups have historically reclaimed the words of their oppressors to strip them of their power, for example, the word queer was used as a derogatory slur towards LGBTQIA+ community long before it was reclaimed and became a celebratory term. Why shouldn’t the word fat be taken back too?
Is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me.
– J.K. Rowling
All the negative things that society has taught us fat is synonymous with just aren’t true. Fat doesn’t mean anything other than just that, fat. Some people have fat bodies, some people have thin bodies, some people have chubby bodies, some people have muscular bodies, and every other variation of size and shape in between. The amount of fat cells your body carries does not define who you are as a person, it doesn’t dictate your beauty or your value. You don’t need to keep running from it.
So start! Say the F-word out loud, say it until that nervous feeling in your stomach goes away and it becomes just another three-letter word (it’s a pretty cute one actually). Find some unapologetically fat babes and notice how they’re living their lives in full fat force. Call out people who say that someone’s fat like it’s a bad thing. Stun the next person who tries to tear you down with an F-bomb by taking their words as a compliment. I wouldn’t suggest going around calling other people fat unless you know they’re comfortable with it – most people haven’t realised how fabulous fat can be yet. But get comfortable with it yourself, take back a little bit of your power with just one word.
I’ll say it again: fat is not a bad word, it’s just a way of describing bodies. It should hold no more negativity than ‘brunette’ or ‘blue-eyed’, and it definitely shouldn’t be something that has the power to destroy our entire sense of self and leave us living in fear of our own bodies.