'LOVE YOURSELF! LOVE YOURSELF! LOVE YOURSELF!'
Why are we being made to feel bad for feeling bad?
Photo: HBO/Euphoria/@ooceuphoria on Twitter
I can’t stop thinking about a recent episode of “Euphoria” on HBO, the highly stylized and often sartorially unrealistic portrayal of high schoolers and their sex lives, drug use, and inner turmoil.
While I can’t relate to being a smoldering hot teen with the time to glue Swarovski crystals to my eyelids every morning before the classes I don’t go to, I totally connect with a scene in season two, episode two, featuring the character Kat, who doesn’t understand why she doesn’t love the sweet boy she’s dating. She’s depressed.
The scene:
Kat’s in bed miserably eating snacks and watching videos.
Main character Rue’s voiceover: “Kat hated herself. But the problem with hating yourself is you can’t really talk about it. Because at some point recently the whole world joined a self-help cult and won’t shut the fuck up about it.”
Suddenly, the vision of a statuesque woman in a thong bikini appears in Kat’s bathroom. “Kat, you’re one of the bravest, most beautiful human beings I have ever seen.”
Kat replies: “That’s not true.”
“Yes it is. I wish I had your confidence.”
“But I don’t, like, feel healthy.”
“Yes, you are!”
“No like, seriously I’m not.”
“Kat, you just have to love yourself!”
“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you, I fucking hate myself!”
Another gorgeous, thin woman appears next to Kat’s bed, and says, “Every day, you get out of bed, it’s an act of courage.”
Kat: “That’s easy for you to say, you don’t have like fucking mental problems.”
“Yes I do. Why do you think I look like this?”
“Are you kidding? I wish my mental problems made me look like you!”
“Trust me, you don’t.”
“Trust me, I do, you’re like the most beautiful person I’ve ever fucking seen!”
“Maybe by a white, cis, male, heteronormative standard.”
“Oh my god, are you fucking joking, just shut the fuck up!”
Another woman appears over Kat’s bed, screaming: “Kat! Are you fucking serious, that’s not you fucking talking, that’s the patriarchy!”
Kat: “It is me talking, you are not listening!”
“No, society puts things into your mind!”
“I don’t care about society. I. FEEL. LIKE. SHIT!”
Another woman in a chic outfit and gigantic sun hat appears: “Kat, you need to smash all beauty standards!”
Kat: “But I can’t even get out of bed!”
Another appears: “You have to love yourself!”
Another: “You need to find your inner fucking warrior!”
Another: “Become a bad bitch!”
Another: “Just like you did last year!” (In season one, Kat had a kind of self-esteem glow-up, and was wearing leather harnesses to school, as one does.)
Kat: “But that wasn’t even real!”
Another: “It looked real.”
Kat: “That was the point!”
Another: “I found it inspiring!”
Kat, screaming: “Shut the fuck up!”
The women chase Kat into her bathroom, screaming and chanting: “Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself!”
What else can be said but oof? “Euphoria” came for toxic positivity. It came for the limitations of the body-positive movement. It came for notions I sometimes observe in body-acceptance spaces:
If you say out loud that you’re unhappy with aspects of yourself and your life, that means: 1.) You’re not consciously elevated enough to have embraced “self-love,” and need to be reminded/reprimanded, and 2.) You’re standing in judgment of anyone else who looks or lives like you, and that makes you a bad ally and a bad person.
As Amanda Mull wrote for Vox in 2018 in her article, “Body positivity is a scam”: “Nothing has changed in how most people feel about themselves; instead, it’s simply become very gauche to articulate any of those negative feelings. That wouldn’t be very body-positive of you.”
Bodily acceptance movements will go nowhere if we disallow people’s insecurities or inclinations to change their external selves in some way. People will not want to meaningfully engage with these movements if they fear being called out for not loving themselves enough as they are, or if they’re made to feel like something’s “wrong” with them for ever wanting to lose weight, get Botox, get implants, dye their gray hair, or anything else.
When it comes to loving oneself, as Kat said to the one imaginary woman in the scene: “That’s easy for you to say”–often, the same people who chide us for not loving ourselves are afforded the luxury of being what our society considers easy to love or look at, or they’ve taken steps to get that way while simultaneously telling you to love yourself naturally, as you are.
I don’t like to tell people what’s morally or ideologically “right” or “wrong” to do with their bodies because it’s easy for me to say–my body changed into one that’s more widely accepted in our culture. I didn’t lose weight by going on a short-term fad diet or just because I wanted to be skinny, but if you want to, will I yell at you for being too ignorant to love yourself as you are? No. I could tell you why I don’t think that’s a good idea, but how could I reprimand your desire to change your body to one that’s easier to live in–because the reality of our twisted society is that it is so much easier in terms of accessibility, health care, and how others treat you to live in a smaller body–when I did exactly the same thing, regardless of my motivations and actions?
We don’t always know other people’s motivations and actions but we’re so quick to judge their results. I quoted Ashlee Marie Preston here when writing about the TikTok creator who posted about his weight loss and was raked over the coals for being fatphobic: “The threat of being exiled to social Siberia for losing weight is real.”
What’s interesting to me is that this seems to apply to changing one’s body more than changing other things–as I discussed in this tweet thread in response to Jessica DeFino’s piece, “Skincare is Just Dewy Diet Culture,” I get why in body-positive culture we’re toppling diet regimens and products from their pedestal. I don’t get why we’re continuing to simultaneously elevate anti-aging regimens/products without pointing out how these are cut from the same cloth.
What’s the message if we’re more accepting of anti-aging skincare than diets? Is it “Love your body no matter what, but if you don’t love your face, well, that’s fine, drop your skincare routine”?
As “Euphoria” demonstrates, we have some clunky, inconsiderate, incomplete, conflicting “love yourself” messaging. That’s OK and expected–what could be more fraught or complicated than loving yourself in a culture that demands you don’t?
So: How about we just acknowledge that loving yourself is hard, it’s going to take a long time for society to catch up to the idea that beauty is not exclusive to young, thin, white people, and that if you want to sometimes sit around just moving through your self-loathing feelings, or make changes to yourself because you’re not feeling so great, that’s normal and fine?
We can and should rationally discuss the harms and risks of specific types of diets, surgeries, procedures, etc.; why our culture imposes certain beauty ideals on us and how we might change it; and how promoting and selling diets, surgeries, etc. has different implications than an individual doing it themselves. We can do all this without screaming at people that they should feel bad for feeling bad.
It’s OK to not love yourself while also trying to–you don’t have to arrive to the lesson already knowing it. Those who feel self-acceptance or love more consistently need to be more understanding of those who aren’t there yet. Those who got there without changing anything but their attitudes are people we can learn from. I envy them.
I also want them to afford me the same thing they demand of anyone who thinks they should change how they are or look: Allow me to be different than you are.
Yesssss, this is such a great take. Thank you for the shout-out!