The ideal body

From the age of 3 or 4, I started watching Disney movies. I desperately wanted to be like Ariel, or Belle, or Jasmine, or Aurora: the epitome of the ideal body. I wanted a waist as small as my neck, perfectly rounded and perky boobs, fitting into a, (approximate) 32D cup. I wanted visible collar bones, long, slender legs that perfectly taper from the toned upper thigh down to the toothpick ankle, a flat belly and arms that stay the same size from wrist to shoulder. I also wanted a Disney Prince to come and sweep me and my princess body off my feet: with a V-Line body shape, a chiseled jawline and big bulky biceps. Obviously, at age 3 or 4, I was not consciously listing those characteristics and recognising them as desirable attributes but my brain certainly was, and was logging this information diligently.

Brain observes, “These characters represent what it looks like to be attractive, because I see a pattern, that they are always loved by the people around them and always seem to find a suitable mate and happy ending.”

Brain then concludes, “That means in order to find a mate, to be loved, desirable and happy, you need to look like that.”

From that moment onwards, the ideal body was a permanent resident inside my head.

Naturally, I moved on from Disney movies and started watching shows with real-life people, in which the love interests were all as close to the aesthetic of a Disney Princess a human can get. I saw adverts for food, vitamins, household items and clothing stores, where female bodies larger than a size 6/8 are scarce (unless it's a Weight Watchers advert of course). I saw my mother's disgust at every stretch mark and every inch of cellulite on her body. I flicked through her magazines, picking my favourite outfits that coated the bones of the identical, emaciated models. I saw the damnation of the untoned bellies belonging to nameless female celebrities who had been papped on a beach, 3 weeks after having a baby. I saw the worship upon the skinny, and the curse upon the fat.

Before I knew it, success, happiness and popularity had a size. A size that only 5% of the human race are genetically able to achieve (1). Despite the fact that the majority of bodies we see day to day do not fit into the impossible mould of the ideal, we still fail to question its validity. When the world constantly surrounds us with the same 'ideal' bodies, we naturally assume that skinny is the norm and that anyone who slips too far away from this, should be sad, self-conscious and ashamed their body.

The ideal body of today is sinister. It likes pretend that we have turned a new leaf from the dark era of heroin chic, but in reality, it’s even more merciless than it was in the days of Kate Moss. In the 90s, thin was in, which meant everyone had to lose as much weight as possible and look like a walking ghost in order to be seen as beautiful. Today, the ideal masks itself as ‘health’ - but all it means is losing weight in many designated places, and keeping weight on where it looks pretty.

Body fat is still the devil’s work, and we must always be working to remove it. Yes, we are allowed to go through puberty, and our hips can widen a bit, but not at the expense of our waists. No siree. If we want the privilege of having wide enough hips to support the growth of a living, breathing human being, and to allow enough space to squeeze an actual head out of a tiny hole, of course we need to sacrifice our internal organs so that we can maintain a 5-year-old’s waist.

Cellulite is a criminal offence, flat stomachs are essential, (visible abs preferable). Any wobble that doesn’t originate from the boobs or bum is forbidden…but both still need to defy gravity. To achieve our gravity-defying bums, we should lift weights at the gym, but not too much, because our legs still need to belong to the matchstick family. Exhausted already? Then you’re a lazy piece of shit.

’Strong not skinny’ is a twisted lie. Even if it started as an innocent backlash to the era of heroin chic, it has now been usurped to mean eating protein, and only protein, and pushing oneself through the most punitive work outs one can find, until one achieves the (impossible) physique of a fatless, hour-glass brick. But I mean, look, maybe I’m over-doing it. If the gym really isn’t your thing, you don’t need to fret, because, luckily, heroin chic never actually went away! You can wipe the sweat off your brow and let out a sigh relief. You’ll definitely still be lauded for your body, seeing as almost every fashion model has chosen/is forced to stick with it. You might have to prepare yourself for some flat chested jokes, and the odd faint due to starvation…and you probably won’t get a period…But hey, at least you have two options now! You win some, you lose some xxx. 

Now, let me just clarify, that the presence of the‘ideal’ body is not the same as diet culture. Do they feed into each other? Oh 100%, but that does not mean that they are the same thing. The ‘ideal’ is the insidious curse that women, and more recently men, have had to cope with for centuries on end, leaving us feeling inadequate and anxious when we can’t achieve it. Diet culture capitalises on these feelings of inadequacy, by pretending to provide us with a solution. Obviously ideals have shifted over the years, and will be ever-changing in the years to come, but the dangerous nature of where we are now, is that diet culture thrives in today’s ideal. Diet culture is the pig and the ideal body is the juicy shit.

Let’s do a cheeky case study, by looking at some films released in the last 10-20 years:Exhibit A: Hairspray - the first and only film I have watched with a larger-bodied female as the love interest. It’s also one of the only films where the entire identity of that love interest, is her weight. Tracy Turnblad is the fat girl. And although she may be the fat girl who gets the hot guy, the script does not let her, or the audience, forget how unlikely it is that anyone would ever be attracted to someone like her. In the song “I Can Hear The Bells”, Tracy has lyrics such as, “This heavyweight champion takes the prize”, “Everybody warns him he won’t like what he’ll see” and “Everyone says a girl that looks like me can never win his love”. What did this film teach baby Rach? Well, yes, at first the story gave me a glimmer of hope that someone bigger than a size 6 could be loved, but it also taught me that that was so unbelievably unlikely, that anybody who was deemed attractive and larger than a size 6, should be fucking grateful to be loved by anyone other than their parents. It taught me, and any other audience member, that a fat person had to constantly acknowledge their lack of sexuality: “Tracy I’m in love with you no matter what you weigh”. Also, let’s be frank, despite the fact that Tracy got to kiss Zac Efron (AKA Troy Bolton to me), I didn’t want to look like her. I wanted to look like Penny or Amber, because all my life I had been told that people like them were beautiful.

Exhibit B: Pitch Perfect - yes, I’m gonna be predictable and talk about Fat Amy. Although it is positive that Rebel Wilson’s character is able to be unapologetically larger bodied, and she has some of the funniest lines in the movie, she is also completely and utterly defined by her fatness. She doesn’t want to engage in the cardio “I’m horizontal running”, she has comedic lines such as “oh guys I think it’s clear that I’m the hot one” and the screamingly obvious fact that she is literally called “Fat Amy”. So, the brain logs: fat people are lazy and unfit, fat people are so ugly that it’s funny when they try to suggest that they aren’t, and fat people have a duty to overtly acknowledge their fatness, in order to prevent comments on their appearance.

Exhibit C: Mean Girls - although the film does highlight the ridiculous extent to which girls scrutinise themselves: “my nail beds suck”, and despite the fact that the leading ladies are not completely stick thin, it ferociously perpetuates the ideal body. As friends Janis and Cady set out to destroy Regina Georges’ reputation, one of their ideas is ‘sabotaging’ her appearance, which is done by, surprise surprise, making her gain weight. One of Regina’s major crises is gaining weight so that she can’t fit into a ‘size 5’ dress - which is approximately a size 8 in the UK. So, not fitting into a size 8 dress is a failure and destroys your appearance - brain logs that.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Even with the increased representation of larger bodied women on screen, they aren’t allowed to just be a human. They aren’t deemed desirable, like their skinnier counterparts are. They aren’t allowed to be seen as sexual beings. All of this outside influence subconsciously sculpts how everyone views their own size and shape, and plants the seeds of internalised fatphobia. This, my friend, creates an optimum breeding ground for diet culture to take hold: HOW TO STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM FAT AS POSSIBLE…which also means perfect conditions for making a lot cash.

There is more solid proof than my own, personal ranting to support this theory, (back at it again with the scientific studies). In fact, one of the most well-renowned eating disorder studies in the world, conducted by Anne Becker, was set up to test the impact of exposure to Western body ideals on the body image of young girls. To do this, Becker wanted to find somewhere that wasn’t already indoctrinated by the ideal. So, she ventured to Fiji…(2)

Prior to 1995, the Nadroga province in Fiji had no access to television. They held onto their traditional Fijian values that celebrated robust, strong bodies and encouraged big appetites through feasting and a thriving culture of food. The woman who had won the title of “Miss Fiji Beauty Queen” at the time, spoke about this during her acceptance speech. She told her audience that people were ‘always telling [her] to put on weight’ because slim people were seen as weak (3). In Fiji, Eating disorders were pretty much non-existent, with only one reported diagnosis of Anorexia by the mid-1990s. Then, in 1995, UK, USA and New Zealand broadcasts came to Fiji for the first time. A mass survey, carried out 2-3 years later, and it found 74% of teenage girls on the island said they felt ‘too big or too fat’. 74 fucking percent. After 3 fucking years. Here is a snippet of an interview with one of the girls who was surveyed, that further proves my point; “When I look at the characters on TV…I just look at the body, the figure of that body, so I say, look at them, they are thin and they all have this figure, so I myself want to become like that, to become thin…I just want to be slim because the [television characters] are slim.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the survey also revealed that 15% of girls had reported self-induced vomiting in order to control their weight since 1995, when international broadcast became available. 15% of all teenage girls in Fiji developed Bulimia after 3 years of Western television. (2)

This is a prime example of the devastating affect that media’s perpetuation of the ‘ideal body’ can have.If an alien was given unlimited access to the Earth’s media, be that advertisements, television, magazines, movies, music videos, or modelling campaigns, and then actually got to visit human life on Earth, they would be terrified. They would be exposed to real people. Real people, who were mostly larger than a size 6, who were shorter than 5’8, or taller than 5’8, who’s legs wobbled when they ran, who had skin with blemishes, who were from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds, who had braces, who had disabilities, who had boobs that didn’t somehow defy gravity. It would be scary for the alien, because they will have prepared themselves for a very different-looking population to the one they would find.

Essentially - the ideal makes the entire Western population feel like a catfish. It makes us feel that we should look like this ‘thing’ that we are not, even if that ‘thing’ is physically impossible to achieve. This is what makes me most angry: the normalisation of a MADE. UP. BODY. Because what comes with it is the normalisation of self-hatred. When, in her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes, “dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity”, she isn’t just saying that us girls like to diet; she is suggesting that body dissatisfaction is now a core element of being a woman. 

But why is it normal for every female to dislike her body? I mean, I’m no Einstein but maybe it’s because we have been taught to measure ourselves up against a standard that none of us will ever be able to reach, leaving us feeling forever inadequate? Just a theory. The cliché saying goes, “Even the girl on the magazine cover doesn’t look like the girl on the magazine cover”…And although deep down we do know this is true, we still carry with us a deep hunger to attain the unattainable, because we have been indoctrinated to believe that the girl on the magazine cover is real.

With the help of CGI, even the bodies of actors on-screen and singers in music videos are riddled with photoshop. We can now edit photos with a mere tap of a button on our phones. We are so completely and utterly surrounded by an augmented ideal body, that we are living in a virtual reality where these fictional bodies are deemed normal. Well, for anyone who needs to hear it (including me) - THEY ARE NOT NORMAL - if they were, given that in 2013, 29 million Britons went on a diet to lose weight (that is 55% of the entire adult population) (4), I think a hell of a lot more real-life women would look like Bella Hadid on the cover of Vogue by now.

It’s not a coincidence that the average age a girl starts dieting is age 8. EIGHT!!! (5) It’s not a happy coincidence for the CEOs of weight management organisations that thin = better. It is because we have been taught to believe this is so. For most of us, this education started around age 3. Fat is bad. Thin is good. And with the power of diet culture and much of our healthcare system bolstering this argument, why wouldn’t we believe it? No wonder we have a mental health crisis, when anyone who is subjected to media of any kind has a deeply embedded sense of unworthiness. It is not your fault if you hate your body. It is not your body’s fault either, no matter how much we are told it is.

REFERENCES:

1 - www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-body-image

2 - Becker, Anne E., Burwell, Rebecca A., Gilman, Stephen E., Herzog, David B., Hamberg, Paul, “Eating Behaviours and Attitudes Following Prolonged Exposure to Television Among Ethnic Fijian Adolescent Girls” 2002

3 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/347367.stm

4 - www.mintel.com/press-centre/social-and-lifestyle/dieting-in-2014-you-are-not-alone

5 - www.refinery29.com/2015/01/81288/children-dieting-body-image