Mandi Lynn wants to stop body shaming as she joins forces with women to create her film
Mandi Lynn is calling for a stop to body shaming as she joins forces with women from all over the country to create her film Finding Venus. Reporter Carly Thomas stepped into the circle.
It’s the end of a long day. It’s cold – country halls always are – and I am standing in front of a lighting setup. The black-eyed lens of a camera is looking at me. I am naked from the waist up.
I have three words written on my body – strong, capable, feminine – Mandi Lynn wrote them on me in silver paint. She is wearing gold and we sparkle at each other. The black-eyed lens winks at me. I am these words.
Another woman wipes black words from her torso – damaged goods, weak. She is not these words. The word brave takes their place. She raises her chin, her eyes are bullets, her face defiant.
And we have been brave, a hall full of strangers, daughters in tow, travelling from Whanganui, Palmerston North, Wellington and Feilding. We have all come because of one woman, her body-positivity film and her message that we can change the world.
And at the end of the day, laughing, talking in earnest, making plans, there is a feeling that a shift has occurred and it is a powerful one that we now want to urgently take out of this room.
It’s why she does what she does. Lynn is driven to change the way women think about their bodies. She is beyond scared about the negativity in our girls and the way women are portrayed in the media. It’s been a 14-hour day for her. I haven’t seen her sit down once, but this is a battle that she is prepared for and she is not going to stop.
The reason to fight goes way back for Lynn. Originally from the United States, she was in the military for 10 years, where she was regularly measured and weighed. She now hates scales with a vengeance and she doesn’t rate the images that we are thrown on social media either; as an awardwinning photographer she knows just how unreal they can be.
Thigh-gap obsession, photoshopped models, unrealistic body portrayal, body shaming – ‘‘all negative, all destructive’’. Curves, wrinkles, stretch marks, post-breastfeeding boobs, wobbly bums – ‘‘all beautiful, all real’’.
‘‘I went through a journey where I was so negative to myself, I didn’t like what I saw when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t look how I was supposed to look.’’ But when her creativity, her time and her energy were getting sucked into a black hole of extreme doubt, she went on an ‘‘inner world tour’’. Lynn stopped worrying about ‘‘crap that didn’t matter’’.
She decided that the world needed to be stopped in its inherited body-shame ways when her 5-year-old niece asked her, ‘‘Aunty Mandi, am I fat?’’
‘‘It was like looking down the barrel of a gun to have her say that at such a young age.’’
Lynn started researching and talking to women. What she found was that their self-esteem peaks at the age of 9, only 20 per cent of 18-year-old women are happy with their bodies and the body shapes and sizes splashed all over print and social media represent only about 5 per cent of the female population.
The other 95 per cent are represented here, in this hall on a cold day in Bulls. Many say they feel the pressure and the pain of those unreal statistics daily; others say they want to change it and all say they are worried about the next generation. Lynn says her film and her work with women while making it are ways to change the conversation and to create the ‘‘generation mojo’’.
‘‘What if our daughters and our granddaughters took it as a right to be happy in their own skin? What if it seemed really weird and ridiculous that you could hate your own body?’’ – Lynn meets the eyes of a teenage girl, her baseball cap shadowing her face – ‘‘this gift that has been given to you so you can do cool stuff in the world.’’
There are smiles at that – sly, shy ones from the teens and a wide encouraging one from Lynn. ‘‘That’s the generation mojo. That’s the generation we want to not worry about this stuff.
‘‘What I want is to call on mothers to face our own stuff so that we can show our girls a different way. And I don’t know how to make it all stop, but I know it’s possible. If we can dream it, it can happen.’’
The ‘‘stuff’’ and the ‘‘crap’’ are here with us in this hall. We divide into mums, girls, tweens and teens and we are asked questions and told to step to the line if the answer is a yes. It becomes clear that the adults have all felt hate towards their bodies, that we all judge others and many would rather look different than they do.
Our teens are the most affected – they move as an entity to that centre line, a union of negative thoughts. All have been called a nasty name, they have all felt pressured to look a certain way and they all worry about the way they look. The girls under 10? Well, they think they are awesome, they see beauty in others and they all dance their way up to the line when they are asked if they feel more in their bodies than their minds. They are so far free from the ‘‘constant noise of negative thoughts’’.
We belly dance in a circle, we do yoga and we learn from a nutritionist that diets ‘‘absolutely do not work, they just don’t’’. We listen, we write down our ‘‘crap’’, we crumple the pages into an insignificant ball while our kids chit chat their way to being instant friends.
This bunch of strangers share food, we swap ideas and plans on how to take this out into our communities and we do what a group of women do well – we laugh uproariously, we support each other and we create a joint energy that almost hums.
And then we get to here, standing half naked in a cold hall with a woman who is not only writing the word strong on my arm, she is handing on her trust and her absolute conviction that we, as women, can change the inheritance of shame.
Mandi Lynn received funding from Creative Communities for the Finding Venus: Rangitıkei Style day and has backing from the New Zealand Film Commission.
‘‘What if our daughters and our granddaughters took it as a right to be happy in their own skin? What if it seemed really weird and ridiculous that you could hate your own body?’’ Mandi Lynn