The campaign to normalise arms
The campaign to normalise arms
"We’ve glamorised these skinny arms that… can only be achieved if you’re a literal adolescent"
A few days ago I watched a TikTok video which I now can’t find - though that’s probably a good thing - in which a woman poses, lipstick on, smile ready. The text reads: ‘me getting ready for a nice photo’. Then the video jumps to another shot of her in side profile, her arm resting against her body, covering the width of her ribs in a way that was slightly disproportionate to the rest of her. The text read: ‘my arms’.
It turned out, the creator had photoshopped her arms to be wider. The joke was meant to be that her arms looked big - too big, grossly large - in every photo of her, ruining the picture. People in the comments didn’t laugh. They were angry that she’d essentially used a digital fat suit to laugh at the idea of a having sizeable limbs.
The post, or at least the cries for it to be deleted, went viral, so it may or may not have been a coincidence that a few days later actress Lili Reinhart tweeted (Xed?): “I wish there were more average sized arms represented in mainstream media for women. My body dysmorphia has been going crazy because I feel like my arms need to be half the size they are currently? We’ve glamorised these skinny arms that, for most of us, can only be achieved if you’re a literal adolescent.”
I understand. Just like my mum and my grandma and most of the other women whose genetics I share, my arms are proportionally bigger than my skinny lower body. My arms can do pull ups and carry a weeks worth of shopping home from the supermarket that’s a 25 minute walk away. But I am also aware of them being a different size to the rest of me. I know what kind of top to wear to make them look more flattering. When I’m taking a photo, I know not to press my arm too close to my body.
We’ve seen lots of parts of our bodies being ‘normalised’ recently: the popcorn texture on the back of our thighs, rolls of our stomachs, boobs that don’t sit alert to attention. But the jiggle of arms doesn’t feature on Instagram grids in the same way squidgy bellies, wobbling thighs and silver stretch marks do.
And, compare our attitude to arms to the trajectory we’ve seen butts (bums? glutes? I never know what word to use when talking about that body part) go through, in which people once asked ‘does my bum look big in this’ and now bigger is desired - or fetishised.
The butt conversation is a complex one, but in her book Butts: A Backstory, writer Heather Radke writes that bottoms are “not like elbows or knees, functional body parts that carry few associations beyond their physiological function. Instead, butts, silly as they may often seem, are tremendously complex symbols, fraught with significance and nuance, laden with humour and sex, shame and history. Women’s butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies, as a barometer for the virtues of hard work, and as a measure of sexual desire and availability.”
Arms do not quite carry either of the loads described here. They are not solely functional or else we wouldn’t have words like ‘batwings’ to describe them. But they’re also not sexualised or fetishised - likely a perk of their location, not being close to or holding up sexual organs that make tracing them a tease. They are less nuanced than bums or legs (no one would write a book just about the history of arms) but they’re similarly shameful. Yet they’re not sexy enough, not meaningful enough to normalise.
It means we talk about arms in a way we don’t allow ourselves to with other parts of our bodies. The world comments on Michelle Obama’s well-worked triceps and biceps in a way that would not be appropriate to talk about, say, her legs. We want our upper body to unnaturally shrink while we accept - or even force, via hip thrusts and squats - the other parts of us grow.
But maybe not for much longer. Reinhart’s tweet led to a section of the internet getting honest about our arm anomalies. Influencer and personal trainer Alice Liveing posted to her Instagram that she has “always had a thing about my arms”. She shared a photo of herself sat on the beach, hands placed just behind her hips, her weight leaning into her triceps to hold up her body. Her arms looked normal, kind of like mine or my mum’s, which itself was a surprise.
“Some might naturally have these [slim arms], for others it’s an impossible reality, and so, we spend so much time and energy feeling as though something is wrong with us…I haven’t had very slim arms since I was 10 years old, and I’m absolutely okay with that. It’s my genetics, it’s my refusal to diet myself smaller, it’s my ability to realise there is so much more to life than having less body fat on my upper arms,” she wrote.
I don’t imagine we’ll see celebrities on red carpets or influencers on our screens showing off normal arms in the way they might their wider lower bodies. We’ll likely never manage such a 180 with our arms as we did the desired answer to the question “does my bum look big in this?”. But the campaign for real arms has begun.
Thank you for reading Gray’s Anatomy. Please leave a comment if you have thoughts on arms (or bums or any other body part for that matter). Feel free to share this newsletter with anyone who might like it - and if you’re new, please subscribe, I’d love to have you.