This week there was another story making the rounds online about women of all shapes and sizes (except “skinny”, in the interest of full disclosure) celebrating their bodies. Everyone seemed happy, and from the looks of the image, the bodies all seemed reasonably healthy and functioning. This is ample cause for celebration and gratitude. Agreed.
Once smoke from the fireworks cleared, confetti settled, and the deafening roar of “Fabulous!” and “You go, girl!” had died down, a longer-lasting question remained: What makes any of these images and their drivers “Fabulous”?
I ponder this question with all seriousness, but am forced to conclude that each is now a kind of hackneyed, bandwagon story that shamelessly panders to women. Even a baby with a noise making toy quickly learns where the boos and applauses are, and as that baby grows to become an adult engaged in media, the ratings.
Women should be celebrated for much more than their bodies, which is how I believe this well-intentioned movement began, but ALL we do now is talk about their bodies. We talk about how “normal” they are, but a big part of what makes things normal is that we don’t have to keep talking about them.
For this reason I’ve grown sick of these “normal body” stories, that play on the same field by the same rules a game that they claim to hate, while effectively only changing (and changing only) the uniform in which they play. Why do women respond so favorably to this? To me, this is another entry in a competition that women celebrate, yet simultaneously decry as vulgar, demeaning and ridiculous.
Naturally, the criticism of my response will include how valuable the participants are, and what great mothers, citizens, workers, partners etc. were captured in this image. My point is that this is what we should have been hearing about in the first place, which would go considerably further in valuing them. In fact, if we really intend to be honest, we know that statistically and based on what “normal” is, some of them are mediocre in the above attributes at best. I agree – let’s celebrate “normal”.
Finally, the story suggests that the reader will never see these bodies on a billboard, but that we should. I argue that we shouldn’t because normal is already present in abundance, and for free. Your billboard is your mirror – buy into that.
INENARRABLE 