Body Negativity

when the bully is you, no diet can help

I am not a paragon of virtue, particularly when it comes to body positivity. I have rarely been satisfied by what I see in the mirror. I will avoid photos or crop myself out when I can’t hide. I wish I could tell you that this is a new phenomenon brought on by my approaching 40^th birthday or carrying my quarantine weight well after everybody put away their masks, but it’s not. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I’m a millennial and for many of us, body positivity meant learning to love all kinds of other bodies, but never ourselves. Intellectually, I know I’m being ridiculous. For most of my life I have embodied what our culture holds up as ideal: tall, thin while still having an hourglass figure, feminine presenting, and white. What the fuck do I have to complain about? But it was never good enough. No amount of praise or attention could ever counter the countless ways that our culture demands that people, particularly women, remain unhappy with their appearance. Hating ourselves is a natural state in a society that’s deeply misogynistic. It feels like home. As pop culture moves back to loudly advocating for thin bodies, I can feel my anxiety growing. We deserve better. The latest diets, pharmaceuticals, injectables, workouts, clothing, creams, and supplements all promise salvation but when the bully lives in your head, you’re never safe.

I have been beating myself up for decades. My love of food and my desire to be seen as good are at odds all the time. Good, thin girls aren’t the first ones to grab seconds, order fries, or cook food they plan on eating. And all good girls have to be thin. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about this in her piece on Ozempic last year for The New York Times. “Thinness is a way to perform moral discipline, even if one pursues it through morally ambiguous means. Subconsciously, consciously, politically, economically and culturally, obesity signals moral laxity.” When you tie weight to morality, it’s a weapon. We use it to hurt ourselves first before we learn to use it against others. I was not a better person when I was thinner, nor am I a better person now that I carry more weight- but that doesn’t stop me from chastising myself for not doing enough to keep up a standard of beauty that is always just out of reach. I hear women at every age and size complain about all the ways they hate themselves and their appearance. It’s a rite of passage into womanhood.

I think about this episode all the time

One of the most popular shows of my youth was Friends, where Monica’s old, larger body was frequently a punchline. Looking back, I can’t believe how hard we all laughed when Courtney Cox would put on a fat suit that made her look like so many of the women in my life. Were we just crueler then, or perversely, more honest about how we felt? Geraldine DeRuiter points out that it was precisely because Monica was framed as a success story that it was ok to laugh at her. “Monica’s weight was a punchline – made possible not only because the fatness was part of her past, but because it was a fiction for even the actress who played her. Cox has been skinny ever since she entered the public eye.” The messaging was clear. The body shaming aimed at Oprah, Nicole Richie, Britney Spears at the 2007 VMAs, and all the fat jokes written about Renée Zellweger’s character in the Bridget Jones movies didn’t leave us with many doubts about what people whispered about behind our backs. We whispered about them too. Everybody was allowed to be tortured if they dared to be anything but as thin as possible. I took it to heart and it’s still in there.

It's hard to find all the terrible covers these mags used to have and Perez Hilton has scrubbed all his images from the internet. Glad they live rent-free in my head.

Millennial women tried our best, but we could never get thin enough, just like our mothers and their mothers too. Body positivity went mainstream around 2012 thanks to Instagram and suddenly everybody acted like they were cured. Nobody learned how to love themselves, their bodies, or improved their relationship with food; they just shut the hell up about it. When we finally got just enough perspective to see how fucked up this cult of thinness was, it was too late. That voice in our head wasn’t going to budge. We tried to simply ignore it.

Mikala Jamison

wrote about the millennial body image curse for her fantastic Substack

Body Type

and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

“A millennial woman I know recently told me she wants to lose some body fat leading up to her wedding, and said she hated herself for wanting that. That kind of statement — one I hear often, when women confess such feelings to me as if they’ve committed homicide — evinces the millennial body image curse: We are disappointed in ourselves for not being thin but are also disappointed in ourselves for wanting to be.”

I don’t think this problem is unique to millennial women, but I do think we got the worst of the old world and the new. We had all the body issues of our mothers and the weight of the internet and social media on our imperfect shoulders. It was A LOT and we’re finally saying something. I hope we can take our pain to heart as much as we did all that criticism.

There are some amazing thought leaders who are pushing back against this latest cultural shift toward thinness like Kate Manne, Dalia Kinsey, Anne Helen Petersen, Chrissy King, and Virginia Sole-Smith. They’re the canaries in the coal mine of our shitty diet culture. If we don’t want to lose the meager process we’ve made away from fatphobia, we need to listen to them. As a society we are just learning that we shouldn’t comment on people’s bodies, no matter how positive we intend it to be. It’s so fucking hard. I’m trying to show myself the same love that I extend towards other people in my life. It’s very slow going and around every corner is a new landmine. I beg the algorithm- please don’t make me care about this- but the ads keep coming for snake oil weight loss hacks. I’m watching celebrities and body positivity influencers shrink every day. It gets in your head.

Improving my body image feels like a Sisyphean task but so does chasing after perfection. I’ve been so many different weights and never been happy with any of them. I want to stop delaying my joy until I lose 10 more pounds. I just want to feel satisfied with this body I’ve been given and use it to chase after things that make me feel more alive, not less. Our hunger should be listened to. I want to fill up my plate and exercise, simply because I enjoy both things. Denying our wants and needs shouldn’t become a habit, but that’s what body negativity demands. I’ve lived on the edge of that for too long and suspect many of you have been perched right there with me. I’ll keep trying to fix myself if you will.

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Tomorrow, the Sunday Recipe Club is whipping up Strawberry Tres Leches which I have dubbed the official sweet of the summer. The cake and the milks are infused with strawberry and then the whole thing is topped with tons of fresh berries. It’s perfect for all your upcoming BBQs. Want the recipe? Become a paid subscriber and join our group of goofy, culinary misfits. Our chat is the best, I swear.

Also, the second episode of my pod with

MaryJane

dropped this week, so check out On the High Road wherever you get your podcasts or right HERE on Substack. This week is all about the American West, Zion curtains, and the madness of Denver. You need a giggle and we’re here to help.

xoxo,

Michelle