the myth of "natural" beauty
our bodies were never meant to be in pain like this!! they were meant only for love!!
cw: discussion of negative body image & eating disorders
Recently, I saw a tweet expressing discontentment with the cultural shift away from unwaveringly deifying thin, straight bodies as the pinnacle of beauty and towards funneling the same worrisome rhetoric and behavior upon curvy, hourglass-shaped bodies. The author specifically notes their frustration with how “realistic & feasible” the dream figures of the 2000s were, and continues on by saying that while working towards either is “unsustainable”, they agree that is a certain normalcy to supermodels’ bodies that I assume must be…comforting?
And although the controversial opinion has been met with a fair amount of warranted backlash, most of which can be summarized neatly by the phrase: “let’s stop promoting any one female body type as the ideal”, the tweet still boosts nearly a thousand likes for a reason, which I hope to unpack today!
First of all, it is unbelievably fucked up that women’s bodies are so heavily scrutinized that we can be so effortlessly sorted into categories, nearly all of which are considered largely undesirable. These labels are so pervasive and all-consuming that escaping them seems not only like a futile endeavor, but a foolish one. After all, there is nothing worse than a woman who hasn’t criticized herself so wholly that she is unaware of all her micro-faults — and subsequently powerless to eradicate them. We find her embarrassing, ignorant, pitiful. So more than anything, women must stay vigilant about our appearances, but especially about our bodies. We must know the exact names of our silhouettes so we can dress accordingly (my identity as an inverted triangle girl was probably stronger than any other sense of self I had when I was twelve), what types of jewelry and colors of clothing match our skin tones, what kinds of shape-wear to purchase so we can contort ourselves into more acceptable versions, and about a million other different things that, once identified, can help us feel as though we are working towards a better, more put-together version of ourselves. We are simultaneously made to feel narcissistic and shallow for keeping track of all this, for making constant mental notes whenever we discover new and unwanted parts of ourselves and obsessively striving to fix them.
Keeping this in mind, it’s no wonder we’ve all heard phrases before about people being validated, almost euphoric at the knowledge that their specific body type is either in fashion, has been in fashion, or will come back into fashion. For example, as much as I’ve seen girls and women feeling discontent and defeated by the rise of plastic surgery meant to make us look fuller and curvier, I’ve also seen a plethora of many finally express relief at the fact that they finally feel represented on magazine covers. For those who have never felt seen or accepted in the modern era (although the surge of body positivity and fat acceptance is promising, sometimes I feel disheartened at how insular my own bubble is…I forget the majority of the world is hateful and cruel and shitty), there’s always the allure of poring through historical artwork and realizing that your body was once worthy of being adored and revered too. It’s natural, to chase after this confirmation that your body can be good, because sometimes it feels like that’s all that matters about us!
That being said, celebrating your body type being suddenly popularized across mainstream media is not empowering in the slightest; it may feel momentarily satisfactory to be “seen”, but it entails no sense of intrinsic self-worth and only further increases your dependence on societal trends, which are often heavily bolstered, if not engineered entirely, by the hegemonic and demanding beauty industry. Your body isn’t beautiful because it kind of looks like the body of a luxurious woman from a Renaissance painting, it’s just plain beautiful in the first place!1
Now that we’ve sufficiently laid out my thoughts on the matter, I wanted to delve into the contrast between the two competing body types we’ve seen in the last couple decades. First, there’s the classic supermodel type — tall and thin, usually pale (white), with athletic figures and sharp edges so as to look elegant. Then, there’s the more recent Instagram influencer (??) type — shorter and curvier (aka slim-thick, which is a word I hate saying), typically with tanned (but not dark) skin, with hourglass silhouettes and soft features so as to look feminine. Contrary to popular belief, neither is more “progressive” than the other. Both body types insist upon hairlessness, a lack of stretch marks/cellulite, and most importantly, the elusive flat stomach. They are, beyond all else, objects palatable enough to be lusted after and rare enough to incite jealousy and insecurity.
The awful thing about certain body types being universally spared from the humiliation and ridicule that others receive is as such: we see them more than we ever would in real life. And with the increasing amount of time we spend online, we don’t pay enough attention to what the people around us actually look like — instead, we become fixated on the perfect, pixelated bodies that are innocently shoved in our faces every day. They pop up on our magazines, our social media feeds, our advertisements. Sometimes these women are somewhat at fault for degrading our self-worth (micro-influencers trying to sell me weight-loss teas/supplements and using their figures as proof that the products work), sometimes they aren’t (sixteen-year olds on TikTok who happen to be skinny and just want to show me their cute outfit). Still, we are almost made to feel as though everyone is currently working towards this body (or has already attained it!), and that we ought to get a move on before we’re left the last one standing. In general, I feel like beauty culture (including skincare, makeup, and overall physical wellness sectors) thrives off of our fear of the unknown — no matter how much we struggle to keep up, we will never own every product we think we need. And there, within that gap between the extensive regimens we’ve cultivated to make ourselves “presentable” and the superior routines that will make us truly beautiful, lies the festering shame.
Five-year old Sonali never thought about shaving her legs, or wearing makeup, or tweezing her eyebrows, or spritzing on perfume, or applying scented lotion, or using a body scrub, or applying a hair mask, or whitening her teeth, or whether or not her shoulders were too big for puffy-sleeved dresses. Twenty-year old Sonali does — every day, all the time — and it invokes a nauseating feeling of dread that sits deep in my stomach. On one hand, I feel shameful for devoting so much time to these thoughts in the first place — on the other, I worry I don’t think about them enough. Maybe I should get eyelash extensions, or highlights, or a manicure, or permanent lipstick! Or maybe I should give up and rot in bed forever because I can’t keep up with this shit anymore! It’s a little impossible to live with, so it almost seems almost unreal that we all not only live with it, but perpetuate it seemingly happily…which I’m not exempt from! Sometimes I’ll catch myself getting overly excited about like…an expensive eyelash serum and then be like “oh my god, what am I doing, why is this important to me, why do I care if my eyelashes are a millimeter longer than normal…I’d probably feel so shitty if I ran out of this and stopped buying it…what have I done!?!??!?!!?”
Alright, alright, I digress. Onto the crux of my argument: there is a disturbing moralization of naturalness as it relates to physical beauty. Yes, lip fillers and BBLs had their moment in the spotlight, but the language around plastic surgery is so unflinchingly harsh that it seemed inevitable we’d collectively experience the pendulum to swing back into the other direction — nowadays, celebrities are getting their procedures undone and now turning to the rapidly-evolving wellness culture in pursuit of meeting standards for social acceptability. Truthfully, the “clean” and “pure” look has never really gone out of style, it’s just slowly usurping any competing standards of attractiveness and coming back into the mainstream in a big way.
The bottom line of this old-wave-masquerading-as-a-new-wave ideology is as such: it is not enough to be beautiful, you must be naturally beautiful. You must come equipped with wide eyes, a slim nose, full lips, glossy hair, and the Perfect Body. If you’re wealthy enough, you can buy your way to the top without appearing as though you’ve done so. Your will have the highest-quality skincare and makeup products, hair vitamins, plastic surgeries, personal trainers, etc. If you aren’t wealthy enough, performing femininity at this extreme level is downright impossible — and even if you stretch your dollars to meet these social desirability standards, your endeavors will be far more obvious to the public eye and ridiculed as a result — they will call your makeup clownish, your clothes trashy, your surgeries botched. The beauty tax of today is far more insidious than ever. It feels like with every day that passes by, there is a new procedure or consumer item we are encouraged to save our money for in the hopes of, one day, feeling sufficient proximity to the uber-rich.
So there’s most certainly a class aspect to the disgust around plastic surgery and other “unnatural” procedures and treatments. Much of the conversation in the aforementioned thread circles back to the point that at least supermodel bodies are somewhat attainable — that they still feel real and human. This line of thinking is not only blatantly false, but it would do us well to examine why we even care about such a thing in the first place.
We desperately need to confront the fetishization of naturalness as it pertains to women’s appearance, not only as it permeates throughout the world but as it ferments inside ourselves. The truth, as a lovely/intelligent/incomparable friend of mine put it, is this: “ALL BEAUTY IS ARTIFICIAL! IT IS ALL MADE UP!” Yes, there are some beauty rituals and procedures that are more permanent than others, but for the most part, none of us are a hundred percent fucking real. We are all a little fake, a little polished, a little plastic. We’ve drawn an imaginary line between which cosmetic practices are socially acceptable and which warrant a cornucopia of shame and humiliation. And we’ve cloaked the former conventions in language that evokes purity. For instance, make-up isn’t supposed to change what you look like — it’s just supposed to enhance your natural beauty, right? Except it isn’t, at least not the way that it’s marketed towards us. We aren’t taught to emphasize our ethnic features nor our dark circles, wrinkles, and fine lines. Instead, there are very specific aspects of ourselves that are worthy of being put on display (the ones that make us look young and white!) — and others we must beat into submission, into hiding.
And when it comes to bodies? Oh, the desire for “natural thinness” is sickening. Achieving the ideal small body in “artificial” ways is akin to cheating, to taking the easy way out. We are warned against plastic surgery not because of its numerous health risks (including death!!!), but because it’ll look fake and ugly. Instead, we are taught to starve. Depriving yourself of nourishment is both financially accessible and socially rewarded. It’s fucking deadly. Sometimes, it feels like to be a woman is to be in pain all the time, biting the inside of your cheek and swallowing the blood for an eternity.
I can clearly (and uncomfortably) recall the day I learned I was dying.
My nurse practitioner sat me down that morning and said, quite apprehensively, that I needed to be hospitalized or flown home for immediate medical attention immediately. And I remember gazing back into her eyes as innocently as possible, allowing my voice to take on sort of a polite and corporate tone, telling her I was so sorry for worrying her, and that I would definitely “make some changes!” (I’d been saying I would make some changes for a while.) Looking back, it’s almost comical how much we weren’t reaching each other; here was this very kind woman, genuinely terrified on my behalf as she anxiously scrambled to figure out an action plan — and me, nodding along like a grown-up playing along to a child’s whimsical storytelling, feeling as though I’d floated away from my body as soon as the conversation began.
I left that day wondering if it was worth it to skim the readings for my Intro to Gender Studies class, or if I should just show up and bullshit my way through. And I thought nothing of the impending death sentence not just because I didn’t believe it, but more so because I’d already made peace with it. I guess I’m dying. That’s unfortunate. Girls with eating disorders die. It just happens, you know?
Reliving the nonchalance, the lack of urgency I felt…it’s a little haunting, to say the least. And it’s all because the way I existed was completely natural to me — every ounce of physical and emotional stress I endured seemed like an inevitable risk of an otherwise acceptable and healthy lifestyle. If those Victoria Secret models lived anything like the way I did (they did), then they were constantly sleep-deprived, aching, irritated, standoffish, dizzy, distracted, lethargic, headachey, lonely, and utterly desolate. Adhering to their strict rules and routines might, in theory, be “more feasible” than keeping up with new-age beauty practices that demand a considerable amount of capital (especially for children, who have so few outlets to vent about body dysmorphia and insecurity), but there is no good ending here. There is only a gnawing feeling in your stomach, telling you that you can do better. Because you will never quite have sight of a clear, tangible, neatly-defined goal; it’s ephemeral, it’s ever-changing, it’s shaped by literally everything — from nonchalant passing comments to offensively garish advertisements. You can never win, especially not against yourself!!
But womanhood cannot be pain — we deserve more than that. Just as it is unsustainable of us to pour our money into permanent cosmetic procedures, it is exceedingly perilous of us to convince ourselves that we can over-exercise and starve our way to flawlessness. And even then, I’m using such extreme language! The “ideal body” should not be achievable through even a little bit of dieting, through supplements and workout routines, through waist trainers and corsets. They are all insidious tools of an industry that thrives off of selling us products to ameliorate imagined deficiencies…I’m sick of it! We all deserve a world of sympathy and softness; we are all victims to forces that are greater, louder, crueler than us.
My advice, for when you feel yourself falling into these regressive and misogynistic thinking patterns, is this: investigate everything. Think about everything you think about a second time, or a third. It is tedious; it is an annoyance. It feels really terrible for a long time; it will probably feel a little terrible forever! But the things you say about yourself (and others!) cannot go unquestioned. You may think awful things, and that’s okay. I can’t even begin to convey the massive amount of guilt I harbor for all my accidental anti-feminist thoughts, but they live in my head for a reason! First, I’ve been conditioned to think that way. Second, it makes me uncomfortable to question them. And yet, it’s freeing to be a little more critical of even the most innocuous beliefs and practices you hold — I’ve realized I don’t want to spend my whole life waiting to magically transform into the “perfect” girl. I just want to be myself for once, as cheesy as that sounds.
I will be shamefully honest about something, however. Feeling like you resemble the “ideal body type” is a little euphoric, at least for a little while. You will be chasing that high until your dying breath, spiraling more and more into a version of yourself you cannot fucking stand, but I cannot deny that it’s real. I will say this, though. Nothing beats feeling alive…waking up in the morning without hunger gnawing at your stomach, without freezing cold hands and a foggy head and indescribable loathing pulsing through your veins. Right now, my body is as ideal as it needs to be; I can eat, laugh, dance, and sleep feeling warm and full, knowing that I will wake up tomorrow. That’s as natural as it gets!
As always, thank you so much for reading and indulging my sleepy rants — I am a little iffy on how haphazard/personal this is so I might panic and edit it all again tomorrow (?), but for now I love you all (in a very normal non-parasocial way) and hope you’ve been feeling extremely gay (that was supposed to be like a wholesome double entendre but I’m too sleepy to execute it well so whatever) and beautiful as we close out Pride Month! Also, huzzah for the end of the week! (I’m finally a working woman so I can actually appreciate upcoming Fridays…been feeling very exhausted in a good way recently!)
<3,
sonali
Side note: I know not everyone finds body positivity useful, and I think that body neutrality is a really interesting and effective alternative ideology that works for a ton of people! Yes, we don’t need to feel beautiful to ourselves (or to anyone else) in order to be worthy of love and attention etc., but I feel like it’s a little hard for me to always put that into practice. Personally, I’ve spent a lifetime thinking my body was ugly and monstrous, so I’m ready to finally start thinking it’s lovely and perfect!
"my body is only meant for love" is exactly the message i needed. i am tired of living in a world that tells me there is a right way to be a body; specifically, a woman's body. i continually have to investigate the factors that have made me believe in the mythology of the ideal woman, and like you said, it's not easy. it's a long and arduous process of unlearning. thank you for this beautiful and very affirming piece <3