Hey, Society? Our Bodies are None of Your Business!
“My Body is Not Your Business” is a collection of writing, artwork, and ideas created by the spectacularly smart and talented Safe Spaces group of Comics Youth. The focus of this project is to challenge the body expectations pushed onto women, non-binary people, and the LGBTQIA+ community.
From gender stereotypes to diet culture and the toxicity of “thinspiration” to pushing the message that every body size, shape and ability deserves to be celebrated equally. The message? Your body is nobody’s business but yours.
In our next awesome piece of writing from the project, Lucy Butler talks about her own personal journey to rejecting society’s body standards and learning to love and celebrate the body whatever the size or shape.
Warning: This article contains content that may reference elements of body dysmorphia, bullying and eating disorders that some may find triggering.
It’s the summer of 2017 and, like most people my age, I am sitting cross-legged in a park with my friends, doing what teenagers do. There’s a group of boys sitting on the other side of the grass, staring at us. When I get home, a message from one of them comes through on my Instagram. My heart flutters, then falls. He’d like to know my best friend's name.
Of course. I’d spent years feeling like the DUFF friend, watching as the others, when they weren’t busy falling in and out of love, were doted on at parties. Frankly, I was embarrassed that I’d expected anything different.
In the same place a few weeks later, one of the younger kids from another group started to tease us. Confident in my status as a 17-year-old, I glared at them, half-joking. Then, “What are you looking at, you chubby b--ch?”
I sobbed down the phone to my mother the entire journey home, cursing my body over and over, hating myself for existing because other people saw my largeness as unpalatable.
There isn’t a time in my life when I have not wanted to look like someone else. No teenager can navigate puberty without feeling the unattainable mould of ‘the perfect body’ closing in on them, suffocating. I’ve been critical of my appearance for as long as I can remember. Whether it was examining myself in exasperation at my breasts for not growing quick enough aged 10, or wanting to fit in so bad that I’d deprive myself of food at 14, there has always been some quota that my body could never meet.
In my final years of high school, I was spending months at a time in psychiatric hospitals and taking medication that caused me to creep up two dress sizes by the time I turned 17. Devastated, I spent more time yearning after edited bodies on the internet and in magazines than I did looking in the mirror. For a year or so, I dieted healthily and lost some of the weight I’d gained in hospital. Then, ironically, at the very moment I began to accept myself, I started to shrink even more.
Shortly after finishing my first semester at university, I began to struggle with money. Most days I wouldn’t eat enough, simply because I couldn’t afford to. By the time Christmas came around in my second year, I weighed less than I did when I was a chubby 13-year-old. But this didn’t feel like popularity. I didn’t feel the sudden self-love that’s promised to women once we’ve attained whatever body shape is deemed acceptable in our epoch. This was fatigue, seeing stars each time I stood up and the exhausting, impossible cycle of nausea.
On my visits home, I’d be showered with compliments like, “Wow, you look so good!” Only one or two people ever actually mentioned my weight loss, but fat people become experts in hearing the subliminal messages behind comments like this.
I didn’t hide my struggle to afford food. At first, I was taken aback by my loved ones’ reactions to my weight loss. Perhaps they thought I was exaggerating. Perhaps that’s an excuse I’m making for them. Whatever the reason, I quickly learnt that it didn’t matter how the weight was being lost, just as long as it was going. I was no longer a person, but a shape. A body with no option other than to eat away at itself to the sound of deafening applause.
I wanted to hate losing weight. I wanted to want to budget better. To look after myself. But, that would mean undoing twenty years of subconscious programming telling me that, for a woman, smaller is better. When I was fat, I was overwhelmed with images of thin bodies and how to attain one. I avoided confrontation at all costs, shamefully aware of the ways in which my weight could be weaponised against me. Being slim was something I’d longed for since the first time I’d noticed I was not. A little dizziness or nausea was nothing in the long run. Right?
Wrong. If you’ll forgive the cliché, being slim isn’t the bulletproof armour I thought it would be. It’s been a good three years since I was at my heaviest, and I still carry that version of myself with me. Each time I meet someone I haven’t seen for a while, I feel that version of me in the back of my mind thinking, “Was I not beautiful, too?”.
I wasn’t too surprised at people’s reactions to my weight loss, but I was struck by how difficult it made my relationship with my body. It took me a while to realise that, despite what everyone else thinks, I am beautiful regardless of how my clothes fit or what the scales say.
I put weight on whilst recovering from an emotional disorder, and that is okay. What isn’t is how fat people’s bodies are viewed as everybody’s business, how prejudice is concealed behind a concern for wellbeing. Before I came home from university and began eating regularly, I was incredibly unhealthy: constant headaches, tiredness and stomach pains.
This is why I’ll never support our obsession with the shape of our bodies. They change for a multitude of reasons, including stress and illness. As human beings, we aren’t supposed to look like the hyperreal images we see on our screens. In fact, only 5% of women actually look like that (The Body Project, E. Stice et al, 2012). So let’s make a pact to stop putting so much value into how we look, and start to focus on how we feel.