A few years ago, after a painful breakup, Mikella Nicol bet what was left of her energy on the fitnessimitating, day after day, the movements and choreographies of influencers sculpted with a knife who, on her computer screen, urged her to hold on, to welcome the pain, to begin a salutary transformation.
“Burning is your friend,” the Popsugar Fitness instructor told her. “Things that make you grow, that make you stronger, aren’t supposed to be easy,” Cassey Ho repeated in another capsule. The writer overworks herself, convinced that she holds in her hands the only handful of control over her existence, the only way to take revenge and heal her pain.
However, despite an increasingly efficient body and the encouragement of influencers, the writer is not doing any better. “The fitness industry dangles us with a form of agency andempowerment completely fake, she tells the Duty. The proof is this summons to never stop. Your identity, what you present to the world, is more and more linked to your performance and to the fact of training seven days a week. So you don’t want to lose what you have acquired, and you let yourself be caught up in an endless spiral. »
Worse, she understands that this model that she seeks so passionately to reach the dessert in the public space, even going so far as to put her in danger. In the street, in the subway or even while travelling, men keep approaching her, flooding her with degrading comments about her appearance, telling her that she will one day have to pay the price for her beauty. “All the time, I was reminded that the power over myself that I worked so hard to achieve didn’t actually exist. All these microaggressions reminded me of my vulnerability. »
Violence and beauty
In Formattingan autobiographical essay that will arrive on bookstore shelves on March 28, Mikella Nicol probes this great paradox, confronting her thoughts with the poetic vacuity of influencers, and the insightful writings of Nelly Arcan, Maggie Nelson, Fanie Demeule, Daphné B. and many others.
If, for most people, the fitness and news industries could not be more diametrically opposed, for Mikella Nicol they are similar in the form of control they exercise over women, particularly in preventing them from appearing and circulating as they see fit in the public space. “I have the intuition that violence and beauty define femininity,” she writes, thus establishing the premise of her reflection.
“My brain was consolidated like this from childhood,” she says. I grew up on the one hand with the beauty imperatives of the Spice Girls and Britney Spears, and on the other with the true crimes that my grandmother watched on repeat. When I was in elementary school, Julie Boisvenu was kidnapped and killed in Sherbrooke. We started being told to be careful, not to walk alone at night. I internalized this idea that the onus was on us women, that it was up to us to take responsibility for our beauty and our eventual demise. »
Yet, despite what the world of criminal fiction would have us believe — which thrives on senseless disappearances and random assaults — more than half of sexual violence against women takes place in a home or private property. , and nearly 80% of victims know their attacker.
“Everything in popular culture sends us back to this idea that the streets are hostile to women. This discourse reinforces the patriarchal discourse and the institutions of the couple and the nuclear family, with this idea that women’s place is at home,” she continues.
literary revenge
The neoliberal wellness industry, of which the fitness industry is a part, also participates in this confinement of women to the intimate sphere. “By dangling the prospect of regaining control of our bodies and our lives, she takes the struggles of the women who have preceded us for granted: equal opportunities, access to contraception, to the world of work, normalization different maternity models, etc. Its inherently individualistic focus distracts us from collective movements,” writes Mikella Nicol.
“We are very much in the self-project, in personal growth at the moment, explains the author. We take responsibility for society’s problems, and we try to solve them individually. In fitness, you can easily forget that you don’t have to look like the models offered, you can make yourself believe that you are working on your health, when it is completely false. We end up being totally disconnected from the idea that the solution to get out of this infernal wheel is collective. »
Mikella Nicol finds in reading and writing the key to reconciling all these paradoxes, drawing, from the communion of souls and thoughts in motion, the strength to transform. “Since childhood, we have been shown that the scales of transformation available to women are physical in nature. So it’s normal that it also becomes our ideal when we experience bereavement or failure. However, true transformation should allow us to be reborn differently, to transform the elements given to us into something fruitful. Literature is a means of taking my revenge on beauty. »