Chapter Eight
The Perfect Body
In 2014 Victoria’s Secret ramped up an advertising campaign to launch a new line of bras and underwear called Body. The print campaign featured ten lingerie-clad Angels in a lineup. The campaign slogan—THE PERFECT “BODY”—was emblazoned over their supermodel curves.
Women around the world responded with outrage. Thirty-three thousand women signed a Change.org petition called #IAmPerfect. They asked for the company to recall the campaign and to apologize for promoting unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards for women. Journalist Sarah Vine criticized the Victoria’s Secret campaign saying, “As for their use of the word ‘perfect’, it’s not only offensive to the 99.9% of the female population who don’t share the models’ ‘perfect’ proportions, it’s also deeply irresponsible, if not downright cruel.”
Dear Kate, an underwear company, published its own ad in response, featuring normal-sized women in tank tops and underwear. In another response, ten British women of all ages and body types re-created the Victoria’s Secret ad, wearing the same lingerie and posing in the same positions as the professional models. Each participant shared why she had chosen to be so exposed. Gail Daniel from Leicestershire, England, said, “I’m fed up of ads making women feel bad about ourselves. Why can’t we stop beating ourselves up about our bodies?” Suzanne Dalmedo from Berkshire, added, “I want to show my little girl that women should love their bodies.” Thirty-four-year-old Natalie Lee from East London said, “The fashion industry needs to realise women come in every size—and we are all perfect.”
Many women experience lingerie ads like the Perfect Body campaign as a form of body shaming. Body shaming can take many forms: equating “pretty” with only one body shape in television, movies, books, and online; assuming that anyone who doesn’t have a supermodel body is stupid, lazy, or unworthy of love; making jokes about a person’s body or clothing; or criticizing someone’s food or exercise choices. Body shaming can damage a person’s self-esteem and be a contributing factor in eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.
Gail Daniel, Suzanne Dalmedo, Natalie Lee, and the other real-life women who decided to be photographed in lingerie were rebelling against a restrictive definition of beauty. The protest said to the world, “I am perfect.”
Underwear company Dear Kate created a body-positive ad, representing all types of female-identified bodies in their underwear. The ad was a response to the Victoria’s Secret Perfect “Body” campaign, which offended women around the world.
In the Principal’s Office
Damaging messages about body image directed at women are nothing new. There has always been intense pressure on women to meet the ideal. Increasingly the “right” shape for women is highly sexualized. The media presents images of women in sexy underwear to sell everything from trucks to perfume. The message to women couldn’t be clearer: this is what you should look like if you want men to want you. But women are also bombarded with the exact opposite message. Don’t be too sexy or wear something too revealing because if you do, men won’t be able to control their sexual urges. You’ll be called a slut or worse.
Men are sexualized in the media too, but not to the same extent. They do not face the same restrictions and expectations of what is acceptable to wear. This double standard—having one set of rules for women and different rules for men—is especially obvious in the debate about school dress codes, which often target girls. School rules might forbid leggings, shorts, miniskirts, tank tops, exposed bra straps, visible shoulders, sheer blouses, or anything else deemed too provocative. Schools often enforce the codes unevenly. Girls are called out for dress code violations far more often than boys. Heavier girls are called out more often than thin ones. Gender nonconforming teens often run afoul of school dress codes too. Aniya Wolf from Bishop McDevitt High School in Pennsylvania was sent home from her prom in 2016 for wearing a tuxedo instead of a gown. Her school refused to budge, but Aniya and her girlfriend were invited and went to prom at nearby William Penn High School instead.
When school dress codes focus on boys, the restrictions are almost always on clothing that is considered disrespectful or gang-related. This can include T-shirts with provocative words or images. Most often, however, disrespectful clothing usually refers to sagging—a fashion trend that originated among young black males in the late 1980s. It is associated with rap and hip-hop culture. The pants are worn low on the hips so that the top half of the underwear is exposed. School administrators sometimes call the look urban or ghetto. Both terms have deeply racist implications that wrongly associate black men with criminality.
Growing Up Too Fast
More and more very young girls are having to deal with increasing sexualization of dress. In 2002, for example, Abercrombie & Fitch released a line of thong underwear, sized for elementary-aged girls, with eye candy and wink printed on the front of the thongs. In 2011 the same company sold a skimpy bikini swimsuit for girls as young as seven. The padded cups of the top piece of the suit gave the child the appearance of having fully developed breasts. And then there’s bum writing. From underwear to sweatpants to leggings, tween-focused companies sell tight clothes with brand logos—Pink or Juicy—printed across the backside of the garment.
A Bratz doll known as Cloe is just one of many highly sexualized dolls for young girls. A bustier, short flouncy skirt, and superhigh ankle boots are part of the look.
And it’s not just clothes that spread the message that girl children are sex objects. Dolls for little girls come with sexualized clothes and undergarments such as fishnet stockings, corsets, and lacy dance hall skirts. Youth beauty pageants feature young girls in heavy makeup doing sexual dance moves, wearing skimpy swimsuits, and imitating sex symbols such as Madonna and Marilyn Monroe.
Social psychologist Sarah K. Murnen from Kenyon College in Ohio and several of her students analyzed sexualized images of girls in teen magazines. They looked at thousands of advertisements and tallied characteristics such as low-cut shirts, bare midriffs, visible lingerie, high heels, and other adult features. From 1971 to 2011, the number of sexualized images in Seventeen magazine tripled, and the number of sexualized images that appeared in Girl’s Life in 2011 was fifteen times greater than in 1994.
In a 2007 report from the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, researchers identified four characteristics that separate damaging sexualization from healthy sexuality:
- A girl’s value is related to her sexiness.
- Her attractiveness depends on how sexy she is.
- She is an object for the sexual pleasure of men.
- Her level of sexual expression is imposed by others.
The report concluded that sexualization of girls negatively affects their self-esteem, often leads to depression, and plays a key role in the development of eating disorders. Lead researcher Eileen Zurbriggen from the University of California at Santa Cruz said, “The consequences of the sexualization of girls in media today are very real. . . . We have ample evidence to conclude that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive [brain or thought] functioning, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development.”
From Frustrated Consumers to CEOs
Lingerie is a multibillion-dollar industry that is run primarily by men. Men design the undergarments, market them, plan the fashion shows, and run lingerie companies. They profit from the low-wage labor of women working in substandard conditions. They also profit from purchases that women and girls make to try to meet the standards imposed on women through media images. But twenty-first-century female entrepreneurs are changing the garment industry from the inside out. Out of frustration with sexist ideas of what women should or shouldn’t look like and what they should or shouldn’t wear, women are starting companies that do things differently.
Megan Grassell, founder of Yellowberry, designs comfortable, age-appropriate underwear for tweens. The company’s site offers information about body positivity, buying tips for first bras, and more. You can even join Megan’s Book Club and read books about strong girls.
Megan Grassell was seventeen years old when she took her younger sister bra shopping at the mall. It was a disaster! Nothing fit right. Every bra was padded, cleavage enhancing, and way too sexy. Grassell kept wondering, “Why wasn’t there just a cute, colorful and comfortable bra for Mary Margaret to fit her and her body, not the body that she was “supposed” to have? The answer was that there simply wasn’t one.” Grassell thought tweens should have age-appropriate bras, and she decided to take matters into her own hands. In 2014, when she was a junior in high school, Grassell founded Yellowberry, a bra company for tweens. Her company offers cute bras in bright colors that provide support but don’t artificially enhance cleavage. Every detail is designed for tween comfort, not sex appeal. The company’s packaging and advertising offer messages of girl power. In 2014 Grassell was selected by Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Teens of the Year, and Yellowberry continues to grow.
Gina Rodriguez is a cofounder of Naja. The company believes in supporting the workers who make Naja garments. They do this, not just with salaries, but by providing each worker’s children with books, school supplies, and school uniforms. Naja also pays for school meals.
Another female entrepreneur tired of sexism in the lingerie industry is Colombian-born entrepreneur Catalina Girald. Frustrated with the Victoria’s Secret focus on men and what men find sexy, she and Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez founded San Francisco-based Naja (pronounced nah-yah), a company focused on women. Girald says their mission is “delivering luxury lingerie at fair prices while empowering women.” Girald’s designs focus on the woman wearing the lingerie rather than on the male gaze. Every bra is lined with colorful fabric so that it is as beautiful on the inside as on the outside. Each pair of underwear has an inspirational quote—Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful or Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want—printed on the inside of the crotch for only the wearer to see. Girard is committed to her female employees as well. She says, “If we were going to empower women who wore [Naja], we needed to empower the women who made them too.” She works with a nonprofit organization in her hometown of Medellín, Colombia, in a project called Underwear for Hope. This program teaches poor and single mothers to sew and gives them jobs sewing for Naja with fair wages and flexible schedules so they can take care of their children.
British businesswoman Ade Hassan’s complaint with the lingerie industry was that it focused on white women to the exclusion of women of color. Nude, one of the industry’s top-selling underwear colors, is a pale pink intended to be worn under light-colored and sheer blouses. But when Hassan, whose skin tone is dark brown, wore a typical nude bra under a white shirt, the bra stood out instead of blending in. She launched her company, Nubian Skin, in 2014. It sells bras and panties in four nude skin tones, ranging from dark brown to tan. Her ad campaigns feature brown-skinned women celebrating high-fashion lingerie in nudes that work for them.
Hayat Rachi, another activist-innovator from the United Kingdom, is the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. She remembers being bullied as a kid. “When I was in school, people would point out my appearance and laugh [about my] curly Moroccan hair, big nose, small breasts and body hair!” Rachi founded Neon Moon in 2015 to make body-positive lingerie and spread a message of body acceptance. The Neon Moon website and its ads feature real women of all sizes, shapes, and ethnicities—complete with stretch marks, blemishes, freckles, tattoos, and body hair. Selfies on the website offer a wide variety of images of women in Neon Moon undergarments, which are all made in the United Kingdom. The site even introduces the women who make the underwear!
Hayat Rachi founded Neon Moon in 2015. Her underwear company is committed to body positivity. To achieve this, the company does not edit out body hair, cellulite, or rolls of skin in photographs of models. The company believes that all bodies are beautiful.
“Girls,” says Rachi, “should not have to question why they look a certain way. . . . Rather they need to reclaim the right to their bodies and decide how it should look for them and not for others.”
Express Yourself
Somali American model Halima Aden wears a burkini in the first bathing suit round of the Miss Minnesota USA pageant in November 2016. Aden has gone on to become an internationally famous fashion model.
In November 2016, nineteen-year-old Halima Aden competed in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. For each event, she took the stage wearing a hijab, a headscarf worn by some Muslim women that covers the head and neck. During the swimsuit portion of the pageant, she wore a burkini, a swimming garment that covers most of a woman’s body. When asked about her choice of attire, Aden said, “I just want to go on as myself. When you have a lot of women in our state that do wear the hijab, we should be able to see that everywhere.” For Aden, this was about choice.
In many parts of the world, such as the United States and Turkey (a secular, nonreligious, Muslim-majority nation), Muslim women have the choice of whether to wear a headscarf. But in other parts of the world, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran (Muslim-majority nations that follow strict religious guidelines), women are required by law to wear a concealing garment. These garments may be a hijab, a burqa (a one-piece veil that covers the head, neck, face, and the rest of the body), or a niqab (a veil that covers the lower half of the face and is worn with a headscarf). Other secular, predominantly Christian countries, such as France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, have large populations of Muslims. These nations have chosen to ban concealing garments as well as modest burkini swimwear in public. In one case, armed police officers on a beach in France tried to force a woman to remove her burkini.
The global controversies over traditional Muslim garb reflect the complex issues about women and appearance in modern life. Who decides what women can wear? Do secular nations have the right to impose values that impact how women from modest cultures dress? Is it a religious issue? Is it a race issue? Is it a feminist issue? Americans live in a society that values youth, beauty, and sex appeal, but feminism isn’t just about appearances. It’s about creating opportunities for all women to be in charge of their own lives.
When Aden’s mother, a refugee from Somalia, was asked about her daughter’s participation in a beauty pageant, she said, “This is something new to me. I’m very happy to live in the United States where people are free and can wear what they want.” Perhaps the modern era represents a fundamental change in the history of women’s underwear. Instead of controlling women, intimate apparel can be a form of self-expression and self-adoration. Whether she chooses cotton or lace, what matters most is the woman wearing the lingerie and what she wants to say about herself.