There is No Such Thing As a 'Bad Body'
Content warning: This post contains references to disordered eating, body image issues, body dysphoria, and unhealthy online body image forums.
People have a lot to say about how the ‘ideal body’ should look. Preposterously, these opinions are also often gendered, presented as ‘fact’, and packaged as an aspiration we can literally buy into. For the My Body is Not Your Business campaign (as led by the Safe Spaces group of Comics Youth), Eleanor Thorndyke challenges an entire industry which tells people how they should look and that there is nothing but shame for those who don’t fit the frame. But as Eleanor reminds us, it’s a massive lie: There is no such thing as a bad body…
My first memory of feeling bad about my female body was when I was 10. In year 6 we all had to have a health check at school and when I was put on the scales my teacher told me I was obese.
I wasn’t.
I was hormonal and developing a woman’s body yet I felt so shamed for gaining the weight I would need in order to produce life one day and ultimately go through puberty.
Walking out of primary school to the sweet shop and seeing the pharmacy’s “XL Weight Loss Pills” advertised in the window, and wanting to ask my mum to go in and buy some for me is not something any child should be acknowledging never mind considering.
Throughout the crucial development years of my adolescent life and to this day, I’ve had negative thoughts and feelings around this beautiful creation that allows me to be alive and experience life. I’m aware of how marketing works. I know the body type being sold to me as an aspiration and why it is. But growing up in the prime of technology and advertising hasn’t been great when dealing with these thoughts and feelings about my body not being enough for me.
I’ve dealt personally with disordered eating alongside having an augmented view on what I really look like. However, within this huge realm of eating disorders it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one.
On social media platforms many people I know (myself included) have been sucked into the toxic world of ‘thinspo’, thinking that an underweight or photoshopped body is a normal goal to have. Images on Tumblr or cult-like online forums predominantly present very thin girls in aesthetically pleasing imagery as a way to make others feel like this is the ultimate standard of beauty.
But, beauty is whoever you are: Whether your body is slim, curvy or anything at all, its beautiful. Its so hard to accept that its still an issue for mass consumption when everyday we see ‘instagram models’ face-tuning themselves tiny with unrealistic proportions. Worryingly, many young people don’t understand the concept of Photoshop and think these images are real.
These images are so finely picked out: So much goes into them including posing, lighting and editing. But even though we understand these pictures are photoshopped, it’s hard to not feel hung up or down about yourself in comparison from this side of the fence. And I think that’s true whether you’re dealing with body image or not - it’s challenging to see what are deemed gorgeous figures online which you may long to look more like.
Its so tiring being constantly bombarded with different forms of media and people telling you how you should look. So much so that when I stopped by disordered behaviours I noticed no one ever warned me about the new relationship I’d have with what I deemed my “new body” as it changed.
It feels like once you overcome this huge hurdle and relax, the media hits you like a train: It tells you your body isn’t worthy enough, that it is too fat or too thin now that you’re back to a healthy mentality. We only have to look at 16 year old Charli D’Amelio, a TikTok star who has opened up about the tiring commentary she gets over her body, when she quite frankly never asked.
Everybody is 100% unique, we all have different traits, body types and features that set us aside from everybody else but with this society has constantly enforced a set of impossible standards that we feel forced to follow and to strive to achieve.
It’s easy to argue that we should just ignore social pressures. But how can the most vulnerable manage this when this type of advertising is common in every form of media from pornography to successful mainstream movies.
Women should have “the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women’s appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically”
Naomi Wolf
Here, Wolf is ultimately saying that a woman’s freedom to be in her body will always be dictated by environmental factors. It can feel as a women that our bodies are always a political discussion to which were made to feel shame and embarrassment over whats natural.
I feel so much wiser having these experiences and overcoming a mentality that I thought was normal. It’s made me more aware to the media’s advertising techniques as well as to how I see fashion and what corporations do to make a product sell.
In my own work I’m more aware of beauty standards and perceptions and how I want to show that different, fat, skinny, tall, black, white etc is all beautiful and that it’s who we are as a person that should be our most striking feature, not our waists.
I believe that fashion designers, brands and creatives are leading on from the body positivity movement and are enforcing real bodies that represent real people are to be shown to the world. Brands like Chromat are becoming so innovative and successful in championing body diversity because the modern consumer how demands a personal relation to a body of work. They don’t want to be made to feel ugly or discriminated against in order to feel pressure that leads to a sale.
There are so many toxic discussions over women’s bodies and we see it everyday in the likes of Take a Break magazine where women are pitted against each other with who things like Who Wore It Best? But I genuinely think that the newer generations will abolish this traditional behaviour for good.
We’re constantly evolving and learning from one another. In a world full of hatred were spreading love and acceptance to all.
Important
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