The most ridiculous body-related thing I've seen online
And what it says about our body culture.
Happy new year, Body Typers! I have so much good stuff coming for you this year, I can hardly stand it. I have a Q&A with the hilarious and thoughtful
on the way this month, my first guest-authored post (new voices besides mine, yay!) is coming in February, and I’ll be unveiling what I’m calling the Take Your Body Back Initiative — that’s all I’ll say for now.In case you missed it, here were the top-five most popular posts in 2023:
I dress sexy for other people, and so do you
I’m cute, but you guys get it
America’s small dick joke problem
Oprah and me
Is any woman *not* a little fucked up about her body?
If you’d like to support this lady-run, independent publishing enterprise and read paid subscriber-only posts — more of those are coming in 2024! — consider upgrading for $5/month or $50/year. Thank you so very much.
Before I get to the rest of this post, some other social media body chatter. Some tweets about Christina Aguilera along these lines were going around the other day:
Basically: Some gay guys were making noise about how Xtina is thinner again in 2024, because that’s how they like her, that means she’s “back,” whatever. Gross, to be sure! But pushing back against the thinness worship that hurts women by suggesting that all women’s weight loss is the result of eating disorders … also hurts women.
As I wrote on Notes:
I am SO uncomfortable with people’s willingness to assume that any and all weight loss is indicative of an eating disorder/anorexia, as if no woman could ever exercise her bodily autonomy and make non-harmful choices that are concurrent with weight loss. People think they’re speaking out against diet culture or something, but really what this does is position women as perpetual victims.
Another tweet said, “I don’t think it’s good for a woman in her 40s to be the same size as she was when she was 19.” Lambasting the judgement of women’s bodies by judging women’s bodies — another interesting strategy! I’m a woman in my mid-30s who is smaller now than I was at 19 because I stopped binge eating and drinking after college. Guess I’m bad :(
I’ll generously assume their point is that no woman should feel she has to be the same size in her 40s as she was at 19, but words mean things. Well, they don’t on Twitter anymore, but they do here.
Now, some thoughts about an image I bookmarked last year and stumbled upon while tidying my archives (new year, new files). It’s one of the most ridiculous body-related things I’ve seen on the internet, and it represents a lot of what’s wrong with our body culture. It also exemplifies how a single image/graphic, short video, or one-line tweet often fail to communicate important points about bodies and body image, because those are thorny topics that require more nuance than social media affords. That’s why I’m writing a newsletter and a book 😎
Here it is: