My Body Insecurities Make Me Feel Like a Bad Feminist.

Graphic by Maya Swift (@mayaisabelaswift)

‘Thick thighs save lives’

Another Instagram influencer has shared a graphic with this slogan - we are all familiar with the one. It’s often accompanied with cursive, swirly font and pastel brush strokes and to me, the sentiment is beginning to feel increasingly meaningless. I don’t want my thighs to save any lives, I just want them to be less of me. Less large, less dimply, less in the way. 

These thoughts are an obtrusive, awkward reminder that despite what others may perceive, I may not always measure up to the feminism that I espouse. That although I have strong beliefs that body image and insecurity is an affliction peddled by a capitalist, racist beauty industry, I still sometimes want to curl up into a ball when I see my body not fitting into an item of clothing. That my day can be ruined by something as innocuous as my stomach hanging over my jeans, belying that last few millimetres of zip.

These thoughts make me question if I am really the feminist that I thought I was. Feminism has always been something deeply political, and I can apply the praxis to the public world, but when I’m alone in my room it feels more complicated, more knotty, a more difficult hurdle to climb over. My feminism promises to uplift and empower other women, irrespective of class, race or sexuality, but in private, it fails to uplift myself. 

Why can’t I love myself the way mainstream feminists tell me to? 

Feminism has always spoken to the most personal part of our lives. The collective slogan ‘the personal is political’ rings so true.  It is an issue which starts at the home and finishes in the political arenas on a large, national scale. Its evolution from a movement advocating for women’s legal and political rights into now a widespread, intersectional, multifaceted belief that women deserve to advocate and respect their bodies, to fight for their rights and to live their lives with autonomy. It has also affected how we respect our bodies, how we describe our appearances and how we relate these insecurities to the wider world. This can be seen in the body-positive movement, where feminism is linked with the importance of uplifting our bodies and celebrating our perceived imperfections. 

The body positivity movement, for me, can be narrowed down into private vs public dichotomies of feminism. A part of this process involves espousing positivity in how we talk to ourselves in the private moments of our day: as we shower, moisturise, choose our clothes, use the toilet etc. Personally, as I talk to myself and my body, I become hyper-aware of the tensions in my belief: that the fetishisation of thinness is an ultimately capitalist, racist and ridiculous belief and that also I am ugly because my body does not subscribe to this fetishisation that I ridicule. It can be quite claustrophobic to feel like I am failing at feminism by espousing these misogynistic beliefs in my own self-talk. I can publicly decry fat-shaming, but in my own head, I am a failure for not fitting into my trousers. 

I don’t see people discussing this tension enough, but I can’t believe that I am the only one to feel like this.  Social media makes body positivity seem like a commonplace belief.  Instagram influencers seem to happily post photos of their ‘self-love’, of how they adore their unapologetically natural bodies with photos taken showing small, neat rolls of skin and thigh dimples. Even their imperfections seem perfect - like they’ve been artfully sculpted to show a hint of natural.  I can’t internalise these messages, these affirmations that my stretch marks are my tiger stripes, that my tummy rolls are just a quirk of my body and that my cellulite is normal! Natural! But also easily removed with this £30 cream if I want to buy it. 

Stephanie Yeboah, the incredible author of ‘Fattily Ever After’ writes in Vogue about how the body positivity movement has become a “free-for-all”, monetized and politicised by brands and perhaps, this is the crux of the issue. When body positivity deviates from its feminist inspiration, it excludes the people it intended to uplift. Now, influencers represent a version of capitalism masquerading as performative activism, which is in total opposition to the radical roots of body positivity. This kind of body positivity is insidious; it makes me feel small and insignificant because I don’t think it’s realistic to consistently ‘Stay Sassy’ and dance my way to total body positivity. I feel fraudulent like maybe I am actually a front of total misogyny because I can’t delight in my natural body the same way that these influencers can, despite my strong belief in my feminist politics and the work I do to advance feminism in my daily life. 

It feels even more wrong when I start to take a few steps back and remind myself of the deeply racist and misogynistic roots of diet culture and the overwhelming whiteness of Instagram body positivity. White people have benefited from diet cultures; using it as a tool of white supremacy and as a way of categorising ‘inferior’ people. It now feels doubly insidious that body positive movement has almost become appropriated by the same influencers who would perpetuate diet culture – and for me, this process acted as a timely reminder that I can’t match up. Further to this, South Asian people like myself are underdiagnosed and exposed to medical racism due to misguided beliefs about diabetes and being hypochondriacs and because of this, South Asian women are often not represented in the mainstream body positivity movement. Unlike the way, its presented, authentic body positivity isn’t always neatly ‘packageable’. It can be hard to dress up our large hips, stomachs, thick thighs and copious amounts of body hair to an Instagram friendly post. 

Feminism has been amplified; it has been morphed and it has been separated, perhaps more now than ever. The current situation is that feminism now has a monetary allure, it has been appropriated by brands to sell in the capitalist marketplace.  Many of these body positive ‘quick fixes’ stand against many basic tenements of feminism advocated for and by women of colour - an intersectional approach that prioritises community strength and creative uplift and standing in defiance to the exploitative capitalist marketplace. 

This is why we need to find a new way to espouse body positivity which goes deeper, which prioritises our wellbeing and lets us love our bodies outside of the narrow, body-positive Instagram influencer niche.  We need to remind ourselves that we are tired and stressed, we are working overtime in a racist pandemic which is ravaging our communities with a pigheaded government intent on doing the wrong thing, every time. We deserve a bit of self-care, and as I need to remind myself, self-care is not skipping a meal. 

We need to remind ourselves that there can be a disconnect between our public activism and our own personal self-talk and that we are not ‘less than’ because of this. We are on a journey, we are not self-actualised human beings, and body positivity and acceptance is no different to this. Finding peace with our body and understanding our internalised fatphobia is a slow process, a total re-understanding of how we choose to view ourselves in this fraught area. 

Self-love is worth it. It’s worth taking the time and finding new visions of feminism, of delving deeper into who we choose to publicly follow and how we decide to educate ourselves. There’s too much disingenuity in this issue and I’m excited to learn, grow and to find a new way of loving myself as I get older. 

By Anusha Marie

(she/her)

Edited by Makella Ama

Graphic by Maya Swift (she/her)

IG: @mayaisabelaswift