11:00 A.M.
I STAND IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR AND LOOK AT MYSELF IN IT, NAKED. Through some mad quirk of fate, I am a middle-aged woman with a nonperfect body who still, nonetheless, likes her own body. My initial instinct, on seeing my naked reflection, is to wave at myself whilst smiling.
“Hiya!” I say, still waving. “How you doing?”
I wobble everything around, to amuse myself.
“Hurrah!” I say, to no one.
I can see all the parts of me that belong only in “before” pictures in articles about plastic surgery—the Womble-nose breasts that point downward, one larger than the other; my C-section scarred belly; the Malvern Hills of my hips and thighs—and I’m fine with them. I’ve got some outfits it all looks good in, and I’m reasonably certain I’ll never be stopped in the street by a swimwear company, forced into a bikini, and then judged out of ten by an international jury of Bum-and-Tits Inspectors—and so I can’t bring myself to be anything other than “generally supportive” of my body. It’s a friendly looking beast that gets the job done. That’s why I’ve just done it the favor of getting a smear test—got to take care of Old Faithful!
The idea of hating it seems incredibly unkind; wildly out of proportion to any crime it’s committed—primarily, breaking wind—and, yet, I know I am in a minority.
As far as I can see, for most women, disliking your body is the default.
I can’t work out why I don’t have this default.
I regularly read features by women with bodies far smoother and more symmetrical than mine, bewailing their horror with their appearance. They talk about themselves with something bordering on terror—even as they stand there, looking unbelievably lovely. I feel I must have missed an important meeting—one where my awfulness would have been officially pointed out to me. I just haven’t had those feelings for decades now. I know that if I appeared on e.g., Newsnight, and cheerfully said, as part of the conversation, “I think I look ace. I’m pretty hot! I genuinely like my body!” that a huge proportion of the people watching would think, But—why? How? and would then take to Twitter to kindly point out to me how, with my saggy tum and puddingy thighs, I am, simply, wrong.
It seems to be absolutely part of being a modern woman to feel a constant despair over your own body. Every feminist comedian I have seen launches into a familiar body-hating riff, which seems an almost obligatory part of connecting with their audience—that it must be established that however successful, funny, confident, and clever she is, she has an Achilles’ heel—her Achilles’ body. There are a couple of exceptions to this: the Broad City girls take it in turns to rhapsodize over each other’s bodies—Ilana worships Abbi’s brilliantly average arse—and, in more recent years, pop star Lizzo has demanded joyous respect for her bounteous tits, thighs, and bummage.
But, by and large, otherwise badassy girls still insist they are literally badass: in that they have a “bad ass.”
This is, fundamentally, bad lady juju—for it feels as though we’ve got stuck halfway through a process. Admitting that—in a world dominated by images of female perfection—we feel like we don’t come up to scratch is a useful and vital piece of truth telling. Of course we feel inferior compared to supermodels and Instagrammers! And, of course, it’s amusing and relieving to describe or reveal the truth of your own, imperfect body, in some manner of bonding ritual with other women who feel bad about their bodies, too.
But it can’t, surely, just end there—for, once having admitted you feel bad about your body, the next thing to do is, logically, for the sake of your own happiness, find a way to feel better about it. All we are, at the end of the day, are bodies and minds—and if your mind is pained by your body, then you are, fundamentally, split down the middle: at war with yourself. It came as a mind-blowing revelation to me, in my late twenties, to realize that is an eminently possible option to decide that you just . . . love your body. After all, it’s gonna be with you until you die. It’s stuck with you, through literal thick and thin. It’s on your side, man. It’s where you keep all your . . . you. You just have to become a die-hard fan of it—like you are of, say, David Bowie. You love Bowie whatever he does. You acknowledge that he’s done some shady shit—the Nazi salute, the mullet, Tin Machine—just as your body has done some shady shit, like cystitis, and “going floppy,” and never looking good in cycling shorts. But you still love it. You need to be able to get drunk and rant about how amazing it is to your mates: “It lay naked in the garden yesterday, in the sun, and absorbed all this vitamin D like a fucking boss; and then it totally dug a border for an hour feeling all butch and glorious; and then it made this like sweaty smell that was oddly compelling, and I just had to keep sniffing how awesome I was?”
And then prompt your friends until they, too, admit that they love taking their body for a bit of Zumba, and then giving their body this fucking amazing apple, which it ate with all the joy of a pony in a field.
If we love giving a pony in a field an apple, we must love giving us one. Are we not as glorious as ponies?
Of course, it’s little wonder women have so many problems with their bodies, when there are so many body parts that are seen as problematic. Indeed, the amount of body parts that can be problematic grow year on year.
For whilst we still might not yet be able to name body parts that do exist—the vulva—we appear to be creating names for body parts that don’t exist at an astonishing rate. There are incredibly common words and phrases that you come across every day—online, in magazines, or in conversations—even though the things they are talking about aren’t real. They’re just not actual things. Can I say this any more emphatically? It’s entirely fabricated balls.
Thus, the “muffin top” brings up 103 million results on Google—including the claim that drinking neat vinegar for breakfast will eliminate them, which suggests the writer is confusing “muffin tops” with “limescale.”
One hundred and three million results are weird, because muffin tops don’t actually exist. It’s just your hips and belly. Just your hips and belly in some too-small trousers. Believe me. Look in Gray’s Anatomy. Muffin tops don’t exist.
Similarly, “back fat.” It’s not “back fat.” It’s just your back. It’s literally just your back. It doesn’t need a separate name, because it’s not a separate thing.
“Knee overhang?” Allow me to clarify: no. It’s not “knee overhang.” It’s just a knee.
“Cottage cheese thighs?”—them’s your thighs, sister. That’s how you be.
“Bingo wings—I mean, if they actually were wings, that would mean you would be the next stage in evolution, which would be something to be globally celebrated, and not covered with a Matalan shrug. As for “cankle”—well, even though calling a woman you hate the “Archbishop of Canklebury” is momentarily amusing, I think we can all admit that, in the long term, by using it, you’re just ruining ankles for yourself and everyone else. Dude, ask not for whom the cankle tolls—for, one day, after six months in a posturally incorrect wedge and/or a good Christmas, it may toll for thee. It’s just too risky to live in a world where you might, one day, look at your own ankle and think, self-loathingly, That is a cankle! Shit! I have cankulated!—for then, you have allowed someone else to be the voice in your head. Someone else has put a little explanatory caption beside the beautiful collection of things that are your body, and that is the beginning of a terrible process that can end up with you walking around, wholly alienated and distant from your body, and at risk for many self-loathing behaviors, ranging from self-harm to wearing midlength culottes.
Women slagging off other women for perceived physical imperfection is like farting in a spaceship: everyone on board suffers, including she who dealt it. I do not think you can truly love other women if you do not love your own body. It is urgent, urgent work—for both yourself, and womankind—to learn to love your own adorable legs and fully functioning arms. And you must never, never, never allow yourself to start seeing your body as a collection of separate, problematic items—cankles, muffin top, bingo wings, camel toe—for that is the tactic of a far-right polemicist: dividing a glorious whole into a series of sad, isolated ghettos, and then pitching them against each other (I can’t decide which is worse—my back fat or my bra overhang). It’s all you, and it must, urgently, become your lifelong friend.
OF COURSE, AS any eager historian knows—and by “eager historian,” I just mean anyone able to Google “Rubens”—what is considered a “desirable” female body is always a matter of fashion. Any one of a dozen feminist #bodypositive hashtags will show you side-by-side shots of a Juno masterpiece, or the Venus of Willendorf next to Ashley Graham or Tess Holliday—illustrating that what might be a “controversial” body shape now would have simply been described with an admiring “hubbana hubbana” in centuries gone by, or on a different continent. There is a growing awareness that there’s no such thing as the “wrong” female body—just the wrong culture, or century. This is one of the reasons I’m glad there is finally a female doctor in Doctor Who. If, at any point, someone tries to belittle her about her legs, nose, or tits, she can simply fuck off in a time machine to an era where they’re hot.
And the thing about certain body types being fashionable, is that things can change so quickly. For instance, in my lifetime, what constitutes a desirable bum has done a complete 180. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, the bum everyone gunned for was, essentially, the “Invisibum.” Anything bigger than two boiled eggs in your jeans’ back pocket was seen as something to despair over—every aerobics video showed some woman with a flammable, dry perm wielding the kind of microbum you could fit in a cup.
And then: the Kardashians. We could spend the rest of our lives analyzing the exact societal pros and cons that have come with the Kardashians becoming the most influential women on earth—is spending eighteen seasons of a reality TV show crying into gigantic salads good or bad for women?—but one thing we can absolutely credit them for is the rise of the Big Bum Empire.
The Kardashian sisters have taken sibling rivalry to a new and very specific place, in that there appears to be some kind of arms race—or, more accurately, a “bums” race—between them, in order to have the largest bot. Within the Kardashian milieu, the bigger the bum, the greater the power. It’s almost as if the bum is a proxy for their wealth—like their arses are actually made of cash. Every season, they get bigger. To be a Kardashian is to be a Bum Farmer—raising a yearly crop of buttocks and taking them to market (Instagram) for “likes.” And I can’t pretend my massive bum hasn’t been a beneficiary of all this. In the twenty-first century, I can say to my teenage daughter “My bum is bigger than yours,” and she will cry, “Don’t rub it in!” For people of my generation, this is, truly, a miracle.
What I find most vexing about the ebb and flow of “fashionable” female body types—suddenly being made into some physical extreme of one sort or another—is that we still trail wildly behind men in glorifying “normal bodies.” In 2015, an American psychology undergraduate, Mackenzie Pearson, wrote a blog that coined the phrase “Dad Bod,” in terms of an affectionate and celebratory lust.
“The dad bod says, ‘I go to the gym occasionally—but I also drink heavily on the weekends and enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time.’ It’s not an overweight guy—but it isn’t one with washboard abs, either.” The dad bod, she notes, is the preferred physical type for her female friends.
“We call ourselves the ‘dad bod squad.’”
The phrase went viral, is now in common parlance, and regularly prompts “Top Ten Dad Bod” charts, in which Seth Rogen, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Denzel Washington are featured.
Personally, I’m really moved that a young woman—of the gender that has been dealing with impossible physical ideals for its entire existence—reached out to a generation of men becoming increasingly worried about their physical appearance, and said, “Guys! We’ve been here! Don’t fall for it! We love you as you are! You had us at ‘a reasonable level of fitness, but still up for spag bol!’ We’re even going to come up with a term to describe this kind of body, and then write endless blogs talking about how we like to put our hands on your round tums and go ‘Wubba wubba wubba!’ You will not feel as unhappy about your bodies as we do! We’re going to do you a solid favor!”
“Dad bod” has genuinely changed the metrics on male attractiveness, and in the loveliest and most supportive way possible.
But this leads to a question. MEN! THIS PHRASE WAS COINED, FOR YOU, FIVE YEARS AGO. WHY HAVE YOU NOT RECIPROCATED WITH AN EQUALLY LOVING PHRASE TO DESCRIBE THE AVERAGE FEMALE BODY? WHY IS THERE NO “MOM BOD?” WHY, IF I HAVE TO DESCRIBE MYSELF PHYSICALLY, DO I HAVE TO RESORT TO “I’VE GOT A LADY DAD BOD?” WHY ARE THERE NOT HORDES OF YOUNG MALE BLOGGERS HYMNING THE PRAISES OF WOMEN WITH SLIGHTLY POUCHY BELLIES, BUMS LIKE A WOBBLY CUSTARD, CHUNKY MONSES, AND ADORABLY BATTERED TITS?
Don’t leave us hanging! In 2019, John Legend—another man who scores high on the dad bod charts—was voted “the sexiest man in the world.” And yet I can guarantee you there isn’t a single chart of the sexiest women in the world that includes, say, Kate Winslet when she was a bit chunkier, or Meryl Streep in her dungarees in Mamma Mia! It’s an absolute failure of both lexicon and chivalry, and I find it frankly rude that women are going around the internet captioning pictures of Jack Black in his underwear “HELLO FUTURE HUSBAND!,” whilst men stay resolutely silent and uncreative about loving Amy Schumer in shit leggings.
Men need a to-do list, and they need to put this at the top—possibly ahead of world peace. Because there will be no world peace whilst 50 percent of the population feels bad about just having a body.