Illustration by Marcelina Jagielka.
TW: eating disorders, dieting, body image.
The funny thing about having a body is that you don’t just get to be anxious about your own body, but about other people’s bodies, too. As we move amongst the corpora of other people, each pillaring and holding up the world with their arms – softer, thinner, or more flexuous – it is impossible not to notice the ways in which we catch a shimmering, mimetic artefact of our own appearance in others, or the moments when we fail to recognise our own shell in the skinfuls of others. However odd, bad or unpleasant it is to admit, I have always been reassured when I saw other people, out and about, who were a similar size to myself. I’d pang with guilt when they were smaller, for they automatically seemed better somehow. I would not be writing this article if I did not believe my experience to be shared by many others. So much has been said on this topic already. I try in vain to avoid reiteration: and yet when people – girls and women, especially – are told in varying shades of triteness, and equally so, through reams of promising, profuse, effuse warmth – that they are beautiful, why do they not believe it? Or is this lingering insistence on ‘the beauty question’ (am I, or am I not? – like picking petals off a daisy) missing the point entirely? Are we, by participating in such discourse, selling out to the old propagation of oppressive structures that diminish women and their worth, and see them accelerate into depreciation like an expensive car, and keep them ashamedly chasing smallness and gorgeousness at the cost of all the other aspirations that they might have had?
You may or may not have heard that Kim Kardashian has—allegedly—had her implants removed (the same implants that, if real, have had their existence continually denied). Culturally, a lot of people choose to distance themselves from the proposed or felt significance of the Kardashian clan. But, inexorably, they uphold a totally visible position in our typically aesthetics oriented society. Whether you like them or not, whether you find them beautiful or not, the imprints of their success and the resin-cast moulds of their bodies have stained indelibly on our society and the minds of women – or, perhaps, so we thought. One of the most notable tenets of the creed of Kardashian beauty was the admiration of the ‘hourglass’ form – which, for some people, was a welcome deviation from the years of ‘heroin-chic’ that dogged the nineties, and the lithe schoolgirl-esque beauty of the Spears and Lohan noughties. For once, it was acceptable, in fact it was aesthetically desirable, to be couched in a body that did not require such arduous, gruelling manipulation and regulation that, for some, the pursuit of a small body entailed. Of course, the ‘hourglass’ body shape had its limits and constraints, too; should the body collect its weight in ‘undesirable’ places or should it deviate too much from the calculated curation of curves then it could quickly lose its beauty. Pedestalising a different type of beauty over the previous kind that was in vogue was not a solution, and ironically alienated those who naturally had smaller bodies, leading some to believe that they appeared inadvertently unfeminine; that they, this time, had come under the clanging fist of that condemning superlative: too thin, instead of too big.
But the reign of the hourglass appears to be in peril. The re-accession of thinness is being witnessed in real time, mutinying in plain sight, clad in new, smaller armament. As the internet commentates on the Kardashians’ changing bodies, we begin to revert back to the gloried images of beauty that punctuated the latter part of the twentieth-century and the early twenty-first century. What does this mean for the discard of beauty – the excess of those bodies who had just begun to be celebrated – now swapped out, unfazed, unblinkingly, for something else?
We are, historically, used to the different shapes of bodies rising and falling in favour, traversing a gamut of desirability. What the celebrity is to us now, in terms of illuminating our paths towards apex aesthetical prowess, the portrait once was: a little pocket of cultural value or a tiny appraisal of one kind of body translated into an image or visual. Images might be quite neutral, or peddle very little in actuality about beauty, making no claims, but people pick up patterns, and we are interpretative creatures. When enough paintings featuring a certain sort of body are successful and enough celebrities representing one model of bodily variation become famous and lionised, the purity and neutrality of a body (or the depiction of one) begins darkly to cloud and shadow, and become charged with an index of cultural value.
A close enough synonym for objectivity in beauty might be what we call ‘conventional attractiveness.’ It is not unheard of for someone to be perceived as unconventionally attractive – outliers escape our rules all the time, but, by and large, we do tend to have a prescriptive, neat, unchallenging image of beauty in mind when the term is called to our attention. As images of beauty fall into flux, those who desperately try to emerge victorious over the ever-changing ideals are set yet another challenge: how can they conform this time? What can they do? What needs to be altered and remedied about themselves?
Generally speaking, a degree of thinness is taken as a signifier for health – but what about when the breathless, excruciating, tormenting chase swells and swallows the peace and potential for happiness mentally? It is often a conscious decision to alter a body. It takes planning, time, dedication, overhauls of existing patterns of life, and often (though this is in the figurative small-print of lifestyle changes and pursuits of thinness) large amounts of money. In isolation, some of these things are not in and of themselves bad. Changing a routine in such a way that it genuinely supports us to be happier, healthier people in a sustainable way is not inherently detrimental. But it is when the time and effort and energy spent outweigh all other revenues of joy in one’s life – when there is no time to be spent on anything but weight loss, no happiness to be unearthed in anything but charting the shrinking of one’s body. When we ask people to drastically change their lifestyle – a lifestyle that wasn’t actively harming them – simply to cloak themselves a little better in conformity to something that is ultimately unattainable (or unattainable in the long-run), that is when we demand far too much. We ask for them to shred too much purpose and potential in their lives, and direct it somewhere that is both transitory and meaningless. Upon becoming the paragon exemplar of beauty, what then? An uneasy rule until the structures cave in, and beauty is upended and distorted again, and a new, dreamed body of reimagined beauty outwits the old? and we let ourselves sigh and turn ourselves into palimpsests; rewriting, repainting our bodies to become facsimiles of the new embodiment of desire.
One celebrity has decided to change her appearance. This means as much as we elect for it to mean – to an extent. Through necessity, and determination – in spite of the forces that try to pit us against one another – women often form great, sprawling, boundless sisterhoods, incredible bastions of loyalty. When one of us chooses to fight against the all-consuming, entangling, hissing thoughts that beg us to change, this is a great vulnerability as much as it is a thing of bravery: it is dissent from popular opinion, from popular choice. If everyone else is also running towards that moveable goal of beauty and its narrow arbitrations and we withdraw and flee from the stampede, then we find ourselves out, marooned and astray from the camouflage and defence of the herd. It is left to ourselves to defend our choices, and our bodies. This is equally as alarming as it is bold. One celebrity has decided to change her appearance. And, in doing so, even subconsciously, an unfortunate precedent is set in which impressionable (and even those not so) minds begin to twitch agitatedly, at once thrown vividly into intense cognisance of the perceived flaws of the body they might inhabit that the celebrity has chosen to abandon.
The point is that we wear ourselves to frayed and faded slithers of ourselves when we direct our energy and our attention to this impossible, unappeasable quest for the body of the current trend. It is said by some that, no matter what, thin is always in, which supposedly ameliorates the issue of constantly having to pre-empt the next trend to surface amongst body shapes. But this fabled destination of bodily ‘perfection’ – or close enough – risks so much, from things like being able to say ‘yes’ to cooking and sharing food with friends, to having the energy to wake up in the morning, to feeling focused and replenished, preventing muscle wastage and maintaining strong bones, to the ability to feel a whole spectrum of emotions – things that, otherwise, we would just be too tired, or too dissatisfied with ourselves, to be able to feel. The lethargy of the constant, soul-crushing pursuit of what is styled and touted as perfection is so heavy, so annihilatory of everything that makes life worth living. As this Guardian article illustrates, one surprising posited determinant of health is how often we eat meals alongside others. The more guarded we are about our eating habits with an intention of changing our bodies, the less likely it is we would want to cook with others or eat and share what they were having, the more protective we might be of our (often very costly) ‘diet’ food products, the less energy we would have for socialisation.
It is hard to try to deflect the incessant messaging and imagery surrounding certain body-types, or the lengths one could go to to try and achieve these bodies. It can make you feel somewhat conspicuously wrong when you try to see beyond the straits of dieting and painstaking self-manipulation, when you try to let yourself be as is, but I do believe that this is because nearly anything we do – no matter how good and freeing it is for us – after so long being culturally conditioned otherwise, feels treacherous and deviant. When we base our decisions of how to go about our lives and treat ourselves on what other people are doing, we lose confidence in our own judicial ability to decide for ourselves what is best. There is a limit to how much we should permit ourselves to be ‘influenced’, for how far can things go? We begin to doubt the myriad choices we make daily and over time – our choice of degree, clothes, hobbies, food, music taste; whether we are ‘good enough’ or like or do the ‘right’ things. Concomitantly, irrespective of our doubts and susceptibility to independently generated pressures, we are all the products of our genetics, environments, dispositions, likes and dislikes. Pressures surrounding our appearances are formed often by the varying genetics of other people that, whilst natural to them, make certain body-types or appearances practically impossible for some of us to healthily obtain, whilst pressures are also being formed by the insecurities of other people, all neatly bundled together in a package of media and visual gloss and spectacle. But whatever other people do or look like, we can only outrun ourselves for so long.