What's the point of these posts?

"Look how bad it was (and still is)!"

Body Type brings you insights about body image and body culture from an independent health journalist who’s worked in the fitness industry. Join me in wading through it all:

Some quick housekeeping: Ask me anything about the topics I cover in Body Type in this post. Take 10% off a paid subscription this year here; I’m going to close the special in February and more paid posts are coming! And scroll my Notes posts for more of my body culture takes.

---

In following social media accounts that post about body culture, I’ve frequently come across a type of post that’s started to bother me.

I’ll call it the “Look how bad it was!” post, wherein the creator highlights a movie/TV show/tabloid item from years past (usually the ‘90s or aughts) that displays egregious body shaming, diet culture madness, or blatant fatphobia. Clips from Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually are heavy hitters in this space:

alexlight_ldn

A post shared by @alexlight_ldn

That creator recently dedicated an episode of her podcast to the odious tabloids of that era and promoted it on Instagram with an image of Mariah Carey alongside text basically calling her a fat pig¹. A deeper dive around this topic in a podcast is a good idea, but when I see “Look how bad it was!” short videos or still images with little more messaging than “Remember this? It sucked!” I wonder how much it’s helping us. Is that image of Mariah really offering me anything but the opportunity to realize the upper limit of my blood pressure? After a certain saturation point, are we just … dwelling?

Don’t get me wrong, examining and critiquing the body culture of years past (which inevitably shaped and continues to shape how we see ourselves now) is a valuable practice. I’ve done it myself:

The millennial body image curse

And creators who post this sort of thing are clearly well-intentioned in their captions:

“It’s important to identify and acknowledge some of the more damaging, toxic storylines that unfortunately perpetuated harmful narratives about our own bodies and our collective body image.”

Yes, for sure, those who fail to learn from history are doomed and so forth. Speaking for myself, though: Consider it identified and acknowledged. Got it. Copy that. It sunk in after around the 865th time I saw a variation on this post².

I’m just not sure that all this acknowledgement is doing much without more examination and conversation than a single post can provide. Yes, that one picture of Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie fueled an entire generation’s body dysmorphia; yes, it was so crazy they called Jessica Simpson fat in that one pair of jeans. These things are true, but goddamn it, is there anything else for us to do on Millennial Body Positivity Instagram than reopen the wounds of our youth?

I understand why there are so many posts like this: creators will keep making them because each could reach new users who haven’t considered these things before. Even if some of us already get it, others are being newly exposed to the idea that the media they consumed as young people has something lasting to do with their body image. That can be a helpful step in cultivating better body image now.

It’s dispiriting, though, that “Look how bad it was!” content is so much more popular (or existent at all) than “Here’s how we move forward” content is. That’s likely because we don’t really know how to move forward, and we know we haven’t. That truth can be observed in the twin sister of the “Look how bad it was!” post: The “Look how bad it still is!” post.

alexlight_ldn

A post shared by @alexlight_ldn

Great, so it was bad then and bad now. I’m so glad I logged on!

What really keeps us clicking on these depressing-ass things? Perhaps because for some of us, these posts affirm the pain and rage we have about our bodies. They remind us that those feelings are there for a reason. They make us feel less insane or uniquely damaged for having body image issues, because they say, Look at the mess we grew up in and still live in. How could we not? Maybe these posts just provide a space to commiserate in the comments.

Multiple things are true — these posts can serve those functions and yank our attention and energy away from what truly helps: identifying our own self-image values and taking actions that make us feel more embodied. We can’t do those things very well when we’re caught up in opening the apps to give our memories a million little paper cuts.

Ultimately these posts bother me because they make people (the creators and the audience) feel like we’re doing a little more than we actually are; they make us feel our viewership is a more meaningful form of activism than it is. While this post by

eliza mclamb

is related to the horrors of the world much more significant than body culture posts on Instagram, it makes such a striking related point that I hope you’ll indulge me:

I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.

Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about.

I think when we see “Look how bad it was/still is!” posts, we feel guilty that we once laughed at those scenes, that we blithely flipped through the magazines calling women disgusting, that we ever felt the same way about others or ourselves, that we accepted fat jokes as entertainment, that we nearly killed ourselves to protect against being the target of one. We don’t know what to do with all that guilt, but identifying and acknowledging feels like doing something.

If you’re familiar with the sort of posts I’m writing about here, know this: You’ve already identified. You’ve already acknowledged. You already know you’re not crazy, your pain and shame are there for a reason. How much more do you really need to see? How much more do you really need to keep hurting yourself?

Enough. For so many years, it’s been enough.

What do you think about “Look how bad it was/still is!” posts? Do they make you feel better or worse? Did this post make you think any differently about them? Let me know in the comments.

1. Those legs. I just … it makes no sense.

2. As I wrote about this here, “Yes, early aughts body culture was fucked, but behind these posts is the desire to litigate whether we would be considered fat, too, and we probably need to analyze that anxiety.”