Cry freedom
Exposing the secret behind being happy in one’s own skin
If you’d told me three years ago that the thing to help most with my body acceptance would be taking my clothes off in front of strangers, I’d have snorted so hard you’d hear the phlegm hit the back of my throat.
It’s not the most obvious solution to the eternal, infernal problem of how you stop women hating their bodies. (And, increasingly, young men.) Getting naked in front of people is terrifying anyway, let alone for people who already hate their blobby bits.
Besides, we’re all supposed to have been saved now by the body-positivity movement. The sanctimonious #selfacceptance that’s been marching around like yoga-teacher-meets-armyinstructor, screaming at us to love ourselves, goddammit!
If you couldn’t tell, I think body-positivity is one the biggest busts of my generation. I’ve written about it before, but in a nutshell, it fails as an ideological revolution because it does absolutely nothing to stop us wanting to be thin.
Oh, sure, it helps us accept other people’s bodies, which is still better than the judgey, heroin-chic naughties. But it doesn’t make us accept our own – as I realised the other day when I realised how much weight I’d put on over Covid, how much I hated it, and how much I hated that I couldn’t #selflove myself. Fat lot of good body-positivity did me, eh?
But then, after a few days of wallowing, I realised that actually something was different. And, in comparison to a few years ago, I was more accepting. But it wasn’t from body-positivity.
I now had a small, clear, aloofly glamorous voice that kept interrupting my self-pity sessions to sigh pointedly, ‘‘But why would you want to be thin anyway? Why be commercially attractive when you can be genuinely attractive?’’
It’s a fantastic question. One that the body-positivity movement never bothered to ask. And it comes from the husky-voiced woman reclining in my head with a martini. The voice of burlesque. Burlesque, for those who haven’t yet bathed in its sparkly waters, is a mixture of dance, cabaret, satire, bump-and-grind, and vintage tease. It’s the art of flirtation and seduction, smothered in feathers and rhinestones, performed largely by women for women as a celebration and reclamation of our sensuality.
Although the provocative routine isn’t to be confused with stripping, per se, performers do take clothing off – even if it’s only one stocking. Picture a fabulous velvet gown, whipped off to reveal a skimpy bejewelled cut-out bodysuit. The most you’ll see is some nipple pasties and a g-string.
While Americans insist on taking most of your kit off, Kiwis are more laissez-faire – which suits me just fine. I once did a set in rhinestoned activewear and the big reveal was my sports bra.
Basically, it’s a thinking woman’s night out. Empowering and liberating, but you can bring your boyfriend because it’s hot enough for him to forget the feminist subtext.
I started doing it a few years ago because I was both bored of my life, and also hoping to learn how to accept my ever-changing weight. And burlesque has been celebrating plus-sized women for decades before body-positivity even dreamt up its first hashtag. So I figured that they probably knew a few things.
And they sure do. For a start, the crowds at shows are insanely supportive. My first ever set was horrific. I dressed up like Harry Potter, took off only one Hogwarts robe, and slaughtered Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff like a hyperactive Zumba instructor.
It was an artistic travesty, but the crowd screamed and stomped with the boundless enthusiasm of a mum at their talentless five-year-old’s first school play. That’s because the crowds are largely women who are all wrestling with their own body demons. So they’re immensely supportive of any other woman who’ll get on stage and slay a common enemy. And the catharsis itself is a helluva hit.
But, sugar rush aside, it’s also great at pointing out something that I’d never realised before. Namely, that being commercially hot (skinny, abs, etc.) really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Even as someone of the Millennial/Gen Z era, I still grew up thinking that being conventionally hot was the secret to winning in life. And, if I’m being honest, being shaggable. So if I wanted to be an attractive human, both to partners and in life, I needed to be thinner.
Burlesque snorts in the face of this, like an older sister listening to the pretty, popular-kid sister saying that only hot people get laid. It knows that being commercially hot really isn’t the secret to anything except a laxative tea Insta-deal.
It’s certainly not the secret to genuine attractiveness, desirability, sex, power or even admiration. It knows that in real life, human desire is far smarter, wilder, unorthodox and brilliant than that.
See, in burlesque, being conventionally hot is no guarantee you’ll be admired, desired or even very good. I’ve seen stunning performers with Insta-perfect bodies be absolutely, shockingly, painfully boring. And they’ll come offstage to tepid enthusiasm and conciliatory, well, you gave it a go, polite disinterest.
Likewise, I’ve seen plus-sized performers get on stage and erupt in a sulphuric, molten explosion of heat, sex and joie de vivre that rips the breath out of your lungs before you can gasp. They’re the ones who come off stage and have such deep, irresistible gravitational pull that the entire room orbits around them. People are fascinated, inspired and intoxicated by them.
It slaps you around the face repeatedly with the realisation that the secret to desirability in real life is confidence, enthusiasm and lashings of talent. (And in burlesque, you can get by like I do on just having heaps of the first two.)
Burlesque is the proof that in the real world, what humans are irresistibly drawn to most is people who have cracked the eternally elusive secret of being happy in one’s own skin. (Even if it’s just the illusion of it.)
That revelation has been the most irrefutable, watertight counter-argument to being skinny that I’ve ever heard. Now when I start thinking it’d be better if I lost weight, the voice drawls, ‘‘Well, sure. You’d get some superficial compliments from superficial people because we live in a superficial world,’’ – a poignant pause, punctured by a deep swig of a martini, before continuing – ‘‘But do you really want that? It’s a lot of effort, and it doesn’t get you what you really want...’’
If, the voice goes, it’s the real, exotic, hypnotic human magnetism you’re after then that comes from totally embracing your imperfections. And what better way than going out there with the balls-swinging confidence of a human hurricane on stage?
Now no, obviously burlesque is not a magic solution to everything. My own, and every woman’s, self acceptance is always going to be an ongoing, mutating, deeply complicated, internal debate. And no, desirability isn’t the only consideration in the whole messy affair of self-acceptance anyway (there’s also things like shame, health and the myth that being thinner shows you have more moral grit.)
But yes, it’s a helluva lot better as a philosophy grounded in the real world with real humans with real emotion. Not in some pastel palace of yoga selfies and sanctimoniousness.
The crowds are largely women who are all wrestling with their own body demons. So they’re immensely supportive of any other woman who’ll get on stage and slay a common enemy.