I was about 14 when I read an article in one of my mum’s magazines that really affected me. It was all about how men hated skinny women, and loved ‘real women's bodies’. I remember a beautiful, voluptuous celebrity being interviewed for the piece and saying, ‘No man wants to cuddle up to a bag of bones.’
This was Australia in the 1980s, where apparently the most crucial question regarding a woman’s body was whether or not men were into it. I internalised this, along with the rest of the feature’s message because it made sense to me - it really chimed with the multiple versions of the same thing I was hearing at school. Skinny was the goal, but, all my friends agreed, ‘not as skinny as you, Joanne, I’d hate that.’ Yes I was ‘ugly skinny’, apparently.
One day, a friend of mine came bounding up to me, jubilant, because her older brother had coined a nickname for me that she really loved and was keen to get spread around - ‘starvation on stilts’. It is no exaggeration to say that my ‘ugly, scrawny, bony, twig-like’ body was the subject of discussion every single day.
To be clear, I wasn’t thin because I was depriving myself. Quite the opposite. A genetic quirk amongst the women on my mother’s side, apparently, we all start out in life as thin as rakes.
It was probably just about OK for my mum in the ’60s when Twiggy’s look was the toast of Britain and Australia. By the time I was of age and comparing my looks to others, it was all about Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson - glamazonian supermodels with athletic limbs and an ample bust.
I thought about all this the other day when I read Victoria Beckham’s interview in Grazia magazine. I want to stress right away that this is not at all intended to be a takedown of her or the magazine. I’m just staggered that, despite how hard we’ve worked to be more enlightened beings in recent times, this dreadful misogyny of freely discussing and rating all women’s bodies still rampages unchecked.
Being naturally thin does not, as many people seem to think, give any woman a free pass in this respect. And women are just as complicit in the whole nightmare as men, if unwittingly.
I think Victoria probably did think she was saying something very body-positive. ‘It’s an old fashioned attitude, wanting to be thin,’ she said. ‘I think women today want to look healthy and curvy. They want to have some boobs - and a bum.’
I can imagine that for many it’s a great message, given that generally, as a society we are slaves to the idea that the aesthetic ideal is to be slim. Let’s not forget that for years, Victoria was pilloried in the press and dubbed ‘Skeletal Spice’. It has, from time to time, been decided by the media and the public that she is ‘too thin’. I wonder if comments like ‘skinny is old-fashioned’ are intended to reassure women - bigger women who’ve internalised the bullshit that ‘skinny women are bitches’ and thus been intimidated or even repelled by her svelteness - that all sizes are welcome in her boutiques. I can believe it was a well-intentioned comment.
But…. can we possibly just somehow stop making the topic of women’s bodies something we all weigh in on (sorry) at all?
I want a world where women’s bodies just stop being discussed, assessed, judged and policed in this way, forevermore. I don’t want there to be any talk of which bodies are ‘in’, or ‘out’, which shapes we ‘should’ all be striving to attain.
I’m so bored of commentators being incensed if there’s a big mannequin in the Nike store or a size 18 woman on the cover of Cosmo. The rage is dressed up as a moral concern - ‘THIS IS A BAD EXAMPLE TO WOMEN!’ - and we should be outraged at this infantilising assumption about our feeble, malleable minds. A picture of a body shape somewhere is not a rule about how we ‘should’ all look, as if we all diet or gorge, lemming-like, because of something we’ve seen in the shops.
Victoria Beckham can be thin, Lizzo can be not, and neither shape has to be a comment in any way whatsoever on the way all women are supposed to look. Neither of them are ‘representing’ anything but their good selves.
Society has decided that women’s bodies are, in so many ways, an acceptable way to measure our behaviour and our worth. Whether we’ve become mothers or not. Whether we stayed pregnant or terminated that pregnancy. Whether we are sexually active or spitefully frigid. And yes, whether we are big or small, and then it’s got to be the ‘right’ version of big or small. In all of these things, every way of being in our bodies is somehow wrong, as decreed by… who?
A huge challenge we continue to have as women, is in not unwittingly participating in the discourse. It would be nice if celebrities like Victoria didn’t feel as though they have to pick a side when it comes to discussing body shapes. It would be nice if magazines stopped even asking the question. I know why they do - because it makes it predictably easy to have your interview with the celebrity talked about in national newspapers, who love a bit of women-on on-women baiting about which body is the ‘right’ one.
It was becoming a mother to a daughter, nearly 17 years ago now, that made me realise just how much women’s bodies dominate even casual conversations. Watching The X Factor with some friends, when my daughter was eight, I was struck by how every female performer that came on inspired comments from my assembled friends about their bodies - who was big, who was small, who looked incredible and who had just been in some mag discussing her fad diet. I was absolutely floored once, when discussing Strictly with a gay friend who would consider himself very right-on, that when he couldn’t remember one contestant’s name, he said, ‘You know, the dumpy one’.
It’s bloody relentless. And powerful. I can still get a cold kick in the pit of my guts if I suddenly remember ‘starvation on stilts’. I was 32 before I stopped wearing clothes two sizes too big for me, a bizarre attempt to look fuller of frame.
I realise this is a lot of shit to shovel back into the horse. For sure. I realise I too have played my part as a magazine editor. But could we try? It’s never too late to try a new approach, is it? It’s why I really applaud the work of Jameela Jamil and her i-weigh community. It’s a refreshing attempt to break the spell so many of us are under - that our worth is determined solely by our body shape. Though in my personal utopia, we wouldn’t even need to shout that you’re more than the weight on the scales - everyone would just know this, in the same way we know how to breathe.
I actually tried to find the article that I talk about at the top of this piece. I couldn’t. But I did find an article that said almost exactly the same crap - published in February 2021.
Love love love! As a child of the 80’s fitness video surge my mother was in the cycle of diets, fads and food supplements. Her body dysmorphia definitely trickled through to her children. I’ve made a conscious decision to not comment on my daughters body and she never hears me talk in a derogatory way about my own. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Brilliantly said 👏👏👏