The Beauty Myth: What’s A ‘Real’ Woman?

There’s a small voice inside my head that I like to call ‘insecurity’. It’s there when I wake up in the morning, when I’m passing another girl on the street, when I’m in between the sheets with someone in the early morning. Over the years, I’ve come to terms with my body, but it hasn’t been easy. I can still list everything that this voice has said: that my breasts are too small, that my hips are too wide, that I’m four inches too tall and that my stomach should be flat. I’d look at my thigh gap and feel a sickening sense of pride, then agonise that perhaps even that wasn’t enough. But enough for what? I was never quite sure.

 You only need to search for ‘thinspiration’ to see the devastating effect that popular culture has had on the collective female consciousness. Our celebrities are scrutinised for the slightest sign of weight gain, our runway models are told that they’re too fat for the current season and, everywhere you turn, there are programs and shakes and ‘secret tips’ to lose those last few kilos. Last week I wandered through the toy aisle in Kmart and saw dolls with waists and thighs that were barely wider than their necks. And the week before that, someone tried to tell me that a random girl on the tram (who couldn’t have been more than a size 12) was fat. What are we trying to do to ourselves? With societal attitudes such as this, it’s sad and unsurprising that I used to count calories at a BMI of 18, crippled from fear of becoming ‘overweight’.

At the same time, another search for ‘sexy’ will show you that simply being thin won’t cut it. Along with the slim waist, washboard stomach and skinny legs, you need perky C-cup breasts and a firm, rounded ass. Think Kate Upton in Sports Illustrated. Clean eating and squats at the gym will only get you so far, and without going under the knife it’s almost impossible to achieve. It’s a fucking genetic lottery and no small wonder that body image is such a huge issue amongst women.

People have started to rally against this damaging and impossible ideal, but in an entirely wrong way. Instead of advocating for body acceptance itself, these campaigns have quickly turned into a hate crusade against the thin. It’s not hard to find images that compare skinny actresses to Marilyn Monroe with the caption, ‘when did this become hotter than this?’ Nor is it uncommon to see comments like ‘eat a fucking burger’, ‘nobody wants to fuck a stick’ and, worst of all, ‘this isn’t what a real woman looks like’.

Hang on. Isn’t the body acceptance movement supposed to highlight that women come in all shapes and sizes? What is this ‘real’ shit? The last time I checked, all women were real. Just because we’re fighting against the mass media standard of size zero doesn’t mean that we can exclude those that happen to fit into it. It’s hypocrisy of the worst kind. I’m always criticized for saying this because it ‘diverts’ from the main focus of the movement—which it does—but there’s no way of ignoring the fact that ‘all women’ really means ‘all’.

But, for those who don’t fit society’s unrealistic expectations, the body acceptance movement still has its flaws. Let’s take the most prominent example of this: the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, in which we are told to love ourselves and see ourselves as beautiful. It sells us the idea that beautiful women can be any dress size (good), any colour (excellent) and any age (brilliant). However, it also portrays the ‘real woman’ as one that somehow doesn’t have a muffin top, stretch marks, cellulite or a cup size smaller than a B. Their depictions of the larger dress sizes are ones with bigger breasts and buttocks, but with almost flat stomachs and not a roll in sight. Ask any man who claims to love ‘curvy’ ladies and this is usually what they mean. These are new standards that are being enforced on what is ‘normal’, and they are just as unrealistic as the ones surrounding current narrow cultural perceptions of ‘beauty’.

But why is it so important that we find ourselves beautiful? Why not smart, funny, brave or kind? Why should our self-worth be based entirely on the objectifying concept of ‘beauty’, rather than the inherent traits that makes us who we are? A guy once told me that he only dated girls with big tits and I hated myself for months until I realised that he was the worthless prick, not me. And I’ve known countless girls who have worried that their fat will give others free license to insult them in the streets, not hire them for jobs and label them as easy, insecure or desperate.

The whole idea of body acceptance is underpinned by exactly that: acceptance of our bodies. It’s not about loving them or broadening the definition of beauty. As corny as this sounds (and I hate being corny), it’s not what’s on the outside that matters—it’s what’s on the inside. We need to learn to stop placing so much importance on something that was largely determined before we were even born. That’s not to say that we should ignore the health risks associated with being either over or underweight; it’s simply a matter of recognising that we might not look like the ideal, and that’s okay. And, more than that, it’s a matter of recognising that the concept of an ideal is fucking stupid. These standards are set by the media and beauty industries to keep us buying their magazines, diets, make-up products and twelve-week programs in order to reach an unattainable goal—or, if we’ve reached it, to pressure us to stay there.

I don’t want to be told that the quality of my life is defined through my measurements. I don’t want to be told that I can be happy if I just objectify myself in a more flattering way. I don’t want to be told that my right to be taken seriously as a human being rests entirely on my appearance. I want to be told that none of this matters. I want to be told that my existence as a woman is not lessened or greatened by the size of my thighs and that we’re made the way that we’re made and that there’s very little we can do about it, so come to terms with it and move on.

This is not to say that the body acceptance movement hasn’t achieved great things; it has. It signifies a shift in cultural attitudes that is an extremely important one. We’re tired of the beauty myth and tired of being told that being overweight equates to being a failure, that the size of our tits is directly proportional to our value as women and that cellulite makes us ugly. Tackling this issue is something that needs to be done. But, for what it’s worth, it needs to be done right.

Written by Michelle Li.