Every morning, Marie Dupin slips into the skin of summer, its symbols and their history.
The “summer body”, or rather the injunction to the “summer body”, occupies our spaces with its slimming challenges and its advertisements. This tyranny of the “perfect body on the beach” hides an arbitrariness that does not say its name, “perfect” being obviously synonymous with thinness.
The expression “summer body” first appeared in 1960, in a campaign for a chain of weight loss salons. Another older expression preceded, dating from 1920, at the end of the First World War: “The labors of the body before the summer“.
Women’s newspapers then began to advocate finesse, tone and elegance. In 1933 in the magazine Your Beauty, are even detailed the ideal proportions of women, with tables with figures… It was also in the 1930s that the first competitions for summer queens appeared.
#ObjectifBikini versus #BodyPositive
Since then, women’s bodies have remained subject to collective judgment, preferably without cellulite, and without curves. This is still the case today, since hashtags like #ObjectifBikini or #SummerBodyChallenge have been created. However, the dictate of the perfect body is increasingly challenged, with the birth of a new movement, the “body positive”.
Born in the USA in the 90s, this movement is also called “body-positivism”, “body pos'” or “body positivity”, and it invites you to assume its forms. The hashtag #BodyPositive now refers to millions of posts on Instagram, with its derivatives #FiereDeMonCorps, #CelebrateMySize or even #LoveYourself.
Body positivism against the rest of the world
Since 2021, the Pinterest network has gone further, banning ads with weight loss content. But body positivism is not necessarily easy to put into practice, when the rest of the world continues to convey dictates of beauty: according to a survey published a few weeks ago, nearly 5 out of 10 French people are embarrassed at the idea to end up in a bathing suit on the sand.
The majority of women, who are moreover 60% to start a diet before summer, beyond the diktat of the “summer body”, are obviously still far too often defined by their bodies. However, it could be enough to calm this anxiety for the body to get better.