2: Faces and bodies
Plus, maintenance body work and stomach bulges
Hello!
I’m currently struggling to get my thoughts together properly. It’s probably a combination of jet lag and an a sharp decline in vitamin D after returning from Mexico to England, but I also feel like I have delayed-onset new year restlessness.
I was working remotely for most of January and February, so the ‘what am I doing?’ feeling that hits you at the dawn of the new year was dulled, but now it’s here. You know when you’re sat on an unmoving train and another goes past the window at such a speed it rattles your carriage? I feel like I am the train at the red light and my thoughts are the one rushing by.
As such, I’m digging into three topics today. Please enjoy them as a buffet of my brain (ngl, my dream buffet right now is just a variety pack of 70% chocolate and several different vats of herbal teas).
Faces vs bodies
What is happening with the discourse about our faces right now? While I’ve been away, there have been enough hot takes on tweakments to keep us burning in hell for eternity, so I will spare you my own. But I do want to say: it feels hypocritical and/or ignorant to be slating these new ways to mould our faces when we exist in a society where moulding our bodies is so ingrained.
Of course, we’ve always had beauty standards for our faces. Serums, facials, make-up and other products have kept us financially and intellectually chasing beauty standards, and surgery isn’t common but it isn’t rare. Neither are quite the same as the easy reshape that the rise of semi-invasive procedures like Botox and fillers promises.
Those tweakments are more similar to the manipulation and contortion that we are promised from exercise culture (different from the act of exercise!) which is accessible but exclusive, encouraging us to mould our physiques to a narrow ideal: burning, shrinking, sculpting, lengthening our muscles. It’s Instagram influencers telling us to build certain parts of our body (our glutes and shoulders) while shrinking others (our waists, stomachs, arms) as though we are made of lego and can be broken down and rebuilt.
It feels natural that these demands would extend to our cheeks, lips, noses and foreheads, but the think pieces on celebrities ‘new faces’ (the worst phrase in the English language!) feel shrug-worthy when we’re already encouraged to do the same to our bodies. Even though the body positivity movement and anti-diet movements are growing, they’re still alternative, and on the whole exercise culture garners little mainstream critique.
It made me wonder if perhaps there’s a difference between how we see the face and the body - why one is more acceptable to mould and sculpt than the other. For Professor Heather Widdows, a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick who specialises in the modification of bodies and the rising demands of beauty, it’s about language:
“It comes down to the reasons we justify what we want. We all have language to justify working on the body for health purposes and I'm deeply suspicious of the way we use health to cover up our desire for bodily beauty. There is no parallel justification for facial modification,” she tells me.
I, too, can’t trust the co-opting of health by people selling harm. Yes, exercise and eating nutritious foods are health-promoting behaviours and you don’t need me to quote studies on that. But fitness culture-mandated workouts and low calorie diets are just as worrying as tweakments.
Studies suggest that 16-23% of people seeking cosmetic surgery are suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), rising to 25% of people seeking ‘tweakments’ but skyrocketing to 38% of people who work out. Dieting is also one of the strongest predictors of the development of an eating disorder.
In my talk with Professor Widdows, she kept returning to the need to stop commenting on what women look like or the choices they make about their body and face, which is a rule I try to live my life by and I will probably write more in-depth about in this newsletter.
“My view is that blaming individuals for what they do or don’t do is the wrong place to address what's an increasingly demanding beauty ideal,” she says. “It leaves us all increasingly bodily conscious and scared of being judged for what we do or don't do. It’s completely unrealistic, impossible and unacceptable to ask people to manage these ideals and somehow feel good about ourselves.
“Instead, the way to push back is by doing things collectively - absolutely refusing to criticise and shame other people (who are usually women, but not always) will lead to a culture change.”
Last word on it from me, then. In a recent edition of The Unpublishable, Jessica Di Fino wrote about the hypocrisy of widespread offence at CNN anchor Don Lemon saying 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley “isn’t in her prime.” She said: “If you reject the thought that a woman is in her prime in her 20s and 30s when it’s explicitly stated à la Lemon, you should reject it when it’s implicitly stated à la beauty culture.”
I’d like to extend the same phrase - if you reject the thought that a woman should be sculpted when it’s explicitly stated à la the tweakment industry, you should reject it when it’s implicitly stated à la the fitness industry.
Maintenance body work
On a more positive note! I loved this piece by Rae Katz from her Substack Inner Workings on the ‘three legs of living’. In it, she explains how we all need to balance paid work, creative work (the non-side hustle activities) and maintenance work (cleaning, tidying, shopping, etc). I’ll admit that I, a woman with no children and no real responsibilities, struggle with the latter! I find menial tasks very overwhelming, potentially as a result of errand paralysis or the deep-rooted belief that other types of work are more important or maybe because I’m lazy!
The newsletter is insightful and makes important points about how we value work, so I’m probably bastardising it by thinking about the concept in relation to our bodies, but hear me out.
There’s a similar need for our bodies to have a three pronged approach of necessary/enjoyable/maintenance work. For example, you have to sit at a desk for eight hours every day or walk the dog every morning. Necessary. You might love using your body to dance, have sex, run, curl up under a blanket. Enjoyable.
The body maintenance things are the activities that mean we’re able to do the former two categories without pain, discomfort, annoyance, etc. Things like doing mobility exercises because otherwise your ankles roll when you jog or lifting weights so that your body has the strength to hold itself in that shrimp-like pose you sit in all day.
Like we skip life maintenance, we often skip body maintenance because it’s boring or too slow or fast for our preferences. But, as Katz writes, “The work we are prone to consider menial is foundational to a life, and I am suggesting a narrative where these tasks offer a break from other, more fast-paced modes of living, requiring a different type of energy and offering different rewards.”
Stomach pouches
And finally, there was a tweet doing the rounds last week about how women’s lower stomach bulge “ruins outfits”. I couldn’t escape it (though I’m not going to share it here because it was honestly too gross) so of course I formed too much of an opinion about what was likely a thoughtless tweet by someone who has no real buffed-out argument to back up their claim.
There’s no body part that generates as much shame as a stomach. My generation grew up with the ideal being a straight line running from your under-boob to your pubic bone and, even today, posts and videos encourage us to crunch it away as though we have any real control over fat distribution (spoiler: we don’t!).
In my own experience, the roundness of my stomach was a point of hyper fixation for years. During the universal adolescent self-esteem crash, when most girls became addicted to the scale, I was more obsessed with whether or not my lower stomach was protruding. I rarely wore bodycon despite the fashion for sock-fitting skirts and dresses. As a girl with periods and IBS, the chase for flatness was impossible - something would blow my belly up eventually, and it was miserable when it did.
Embracing the lower body bulge was the most important step towards not hating my body. I know that I’m a size 8, haven’t had children, that any roundness in my stomach isn’t always visible to others when I’m clothed and I can suck in or tense with ease, so I’m loathe to tell you to ‘love’ a belly I don’t have.
But thinking about the health agenda of the pouch helped me. Women need to have fat on their lower stomachs to protect their reproductive organs. It was the first place that I noticed padding out when my period came back after months without bleeding, and it makes me feel quite human when I watch the texture of it change around my cycle, from the rock hardness of PMS to the softness of post-period belly.
I honestly can’t stop thinking about a chocolate buffet now, so dark chocolate recommendations are encouraged in the comments section.
Oooo Lindt Sea Salt!! Honestly can't get enough of it!
Love this! Forever going to think about body work as necessary/enjoyable/maintenance now .. And Montezumas chocolate 😍