How am I meant to feel positive about putting on weight?
I’ve put on some weight recently. Not much, but enough to make me avoid certain jeans, cling to tops that don’t cling to me, and to use the other set of hooks on my bras. I am resentful, guilty and furious with myself. In entertaining these negative notions about my too, too solid flesh, I am, however, being thoroughly unfashionable and unfeminist. We are all supposed to be “body-positive” now.
Ever since Dove launched the first “Real Beauty” campaign back in 2004, which used women slightly closer to the average UK female size and shape than the traditional twiggy 12-year-old, the pressure has been on to accept ourselves in all our glory.
Somehow, brands’ willingness to let a chink of daylight in upon hitherto unrelentingly manipulative magic has transmogrified into our duty to free ourselves instantly from decades of internalised messages about the overwhelming desirability of thinness, and not just embrace our flaws but stop seeing them as flaws at all.
That is a lot of work to do with very, very little. For example, the vast majority of the “real” models in use in these sorts of campaigns only minimally challenge the status quo. They are still proportionate – you are still better off dead than pear-shaped – they are still sound of wind and limb. They are just… not emaciated. We are all supposed to gorge to emotional and physical repletion on these crumbs from the rich man’s table.
These look even smaller when set against the ceaselessly filtered background – though can we really call it background when its influence permeates every aspect of our lives? – of social media.
The body confidence movement requires that we greet every carefully curated picture on Instagram with a full and conscious recognition that it will have gone through innumerable manipulations to achieve its perfection before it reaches us.
But pictures don’t work like that. They have long been said to be worth a thousand words because they affect us more deeply and faster than language. Body positivists are asking us, in essence, to police ourselves by acting quicker than conscious thought.
I do understand that the body positivists’ intention is to break the stranglehold the beauty industry – or, if you draw the circle more widely, the patriarchy – has had over us for too long. But it has seized too quickly on the tiny concessions made by our masters and got ahead of itself.
It asserts what we should feel without having put the steps in for getting us there. So, here I sit in my fat jeans, feeling even worse because I don’t feel
better.
A team of archaeologists has begun digging up the Woodstock site in the hope of pinpointing the exact location of the stage upon which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who strutted their legendary stuff at the legendary three-day festival in 1969. It was dismantled immediately afterwards, because nobody knew quite how legendary it was going to become.
The earth has already yielded up some secrets, including ring pulls dating from the time, and the dig continues.
So. Hippies are now officially history. Would that the same could be said for their legacy (when I am Empress of the World, the sporting of long hair by men and an optimistic attitude by anyone will be punishable by death), but it’s a start.
I’ve made a new friend! I know, I can’t believe it either. At 43, I thought all that kind of thing was behind me. The last one I made was seven years ago, and that was only because we were both new mothers, which made us comrades in adversity rather than (engorged, leaking) bosom buddies. But this one’s real! It’s like having an affair but without all the bits that get you into trouble.
We go to the pub, for example, instead of having sex. And, while it generally takes a couple of years to get to know a (male) partner, we have already disgorged the entirety of our emotional lives to each other and it is the practicalities and tangible details of her life that fascinate me.
She’s very glamorous, for example, and I want to know how that happens. Effort, natural blessing or some patented, potent mixture of the two?
Apart from those two minor differences, it’s exactly the same as an affair. She lives very near and I want to see her all the time but don’t so as not to seem too eager! I put some effort into my emails to her and want to talk about her all the time!
When we meet up, even the most commonplace of conversational topics is born anew. It is deeply pleasurable to know that my aged and largely calcified heart still retains, somewhere deep within, the capacity for feeling once more. Of course, if my libido follows suit, then we’re all in trouble.
The availability of free Wi-fi in cafes, restaurants, hotels and so on is one of the things that make life – or at least freelance life – worth living. But could I make a small suggestion? Could those in charge go the extra step and publicise their passwords so customers don’t have to keep interrupting staff for them, getting them wrong, then having to ask again?
It’s free, it’s available, so just get over whatever corporate psychological hump is still prompting you to exact some kind of payment – this time in effort rather than cash.
Apart from anything else, it’s a massive misunderstanding of the modern consumer mindset. Convenience in these matters is now as much a currency as cash ever was, so save customers the struggle and just print the info, in a generous, openhanded font, somewhere unmissable.
I promise that it will profit you in the end.