Can we please stop hating our bodies
The other day I was watching a BBC documentary about apetamine. It’s this Instagram-famous drug in syrup form that makes people gain weight in order to achieve a “slim-thick” body. Think Cardi B, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian! It was appalling to find out that this drug is so easily available online and off, and that the side effects are not a joke.
At the core of it is this incredible, insane pressure for women to look a certain way. We’ve internalized this pressure, despite recent cultural movements that have seemingly persuaded us to love ourselves for all our flaws. We are supposed to accept ourselves for who we are and to love our bodies no matter what. But do we, really?
We have influencers documenting their whitening, weight loss, waist trainer, botox, and nose job journeys, normalizing to their followers that it’s ok to not like yourself because if you throw money at it you can do something about it. And you know what - it is true. I’ve always believed that we should try to improve those parts of ourselves that we don’t feel happy about. If a straighter nose brings us the face that we think we deserve, then no one has the right to make us feel bad about it. There are advantages to being conventionally beautiful and why should we not take those if we could? Our body, our choice.
However, it’s insidious how this form of empowerment has twisted upon itself and become a prison too. We have all these young women thinking that they don’t look beautiful enough, Instagram-perfect enough. In a world where photos and videos shape reality and not the other way around, digital appearances are everything. Often, the nuance of body positivity is lost, and the message becomes corrupted.
When you have women taking illegal drugs because influencers told them to, drinking laxatives everyday because influencers told them to, and asking their parents for a nose lift as a birthday or graduation gift, then the message is lost. Whatever good intentions there may be are lost in the misty, mysterious realms of algorithm.
I don’t have the answers. It’s not easy to just tell ourselves to stop hating our bodies. Goodness knows how I sometimes look in the mirror and wonder how is it that I’ve become so, so terribly fat. But I’ve always believed that the first step is accepting that it’s okay to be ugly, that is, to be not conventionally beautiful. We have to give ourselves permission to be ugly. We have to truly let go of the standards of beauty that exist right now and redefine it for ourselves, beyond of the cacophony of noises forcing their way in to shape it for us.
We have to do this for ourselves - not for social media, and certainly not for others who will value us more if we look a certain way. To do it we have to be self-aware, well-read, and well-versed with social issues because we don’t exist in a vacuum. This is a privilege that not everyone has, I understand. But we owe it to ourselves and those who follow after us to try.
When I wrote “It’s okay to be ugly” two years ago, a lot of people privately told me that no, I am beautiful, and I shouldn’t think I’m ugly. I chafed under those comments from well-meaning people. The most freeing thing I’ve ever told myself is that I don’t need to be conventionally beautiful to be loved or to achieve success. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy beauty or that it’s not part of my narrative.
Just that I try not to need it.
