I had already started writing this text when Josée Blanchette published a column addressing certain issues linked to weight and physical appearance in The duty. I was touched by her personal story and shaken, once again, to see that many of us experience these daily struggles. This demonstrates the extent to which we find ourselves more than ever under the influence of systems to which we have been conditioned and to which we contribute in various ways.
At a brunch with friends, conversations went in all directions. Inquiring about the life of one, the news of the other, the pregnancy of so-and-so, we inevitably came to the subject that I was dreading. The weight. Stretch marks. The postnatal body. Physical appearance in general. It pained me to listen to them, to feel the restrictions of some, the inner struggles which underlie these subjects of small talk around a meal. Because I know only too well this path of pain of a body that we wish was different, that we find ugly.
I am just touching on liberation from this prison that obsession with the body in its smallest folds can, too easily, become. I now understand that I had a physique that could be described as “privileged”. I just didn’t see it. Let us add that, in our collective imagination, a thin woman certainly cannot suffer from her appearance. I just wanted to inhabit a space other than my own. I didn’t even consider that I might be struggling with an eating disorder, not identifying with what we heard about when I was growing up, which was limited to anorexia and bulimia. (I was also fascinated by Janette Bertrand’s episode on the subject.) I wasn’t in any of these boxes, so everything was fine.
Perhaps you recognize yourself in these lines. In this image of yourself, distorted compared to what reality reflects, looked at through the magnifying glass of capitalism and the weight loss industry. Preconceived and internalized ideas. Cultural dogmas. Performance. Of an ideal that drives the economy of plastic surgery and so-called aesthetic interventions. Medications, appetite suppressants, miracle products that promise us the instantaneousness of the body we dream of, without effort and in record time.
A real industry
We are continually bombarded with a variety of seemingly banal messages on magazine covers (with a predominantly female readership), beauty product advertisements, and food packaging, whose undisguised target remains the female population. More than 95% of women fall into the proportion seen as “different”, while only less than 5% correspond to the beauty standards imposed by our society, marketing and the slimming industry in North America.
Five percent. I repeat this number to myself every time I have a difficult day, to remind myself that a big machine exerts constant pressure on us and fuels perpetual discomfort.
According to a 2021 report from the Association for Public Health of Quebec, the weight loss industry brought in US$176 billion in 2017 globally and could rise to US$246 billion globally. year 2022. In 2017, a study revealed that eating disorders affect more than 300,000 Quebecers and that four out of five women are dissatisfied with their weight.
It’s an “industry”. So this means that there is a ton of market research, psychological analysis done to maximize brand positioning, sales and communication strategies related to these products and trends. In short, they generate a “problem” to which they then respond by selling us the miracle solution, accumulating billions in profits. Influencers also interfere, who, under the appearance of idealized happiness, luxury, perfection, fuel cognitive dissonances, cognitive biases, which alter our reality and lead us to adhere to what they want to sell to us (for our well-being, obviously!). It’s so easy to let yourself believe it.
Overeating, body hyperawareness, social pressure, guilt, voluntary or imposed exclusion, loneliness are commonplace for many people living with eating disorders, with dissatisfaction with their body image, in a body fat or different from the valued social norms and models conveyed by the slimming industry. These are literally aspects that are now considered a public health problem. I will not go into the vast world of plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures here.
A collective denial
Beyond the woman’s body, already so many times stigmatized, violated, attacked, objectified, diminished, dominated, possessed, exploited in so many different ways, we live in an era characterized by generalized unease drawing its sources from even the systemic, environmental and societal crisis. Exacerbated by digital technology, certainly, and nourished from all sides.
There is no filter on the acceleration that access to all information provides us permanently. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are digital platforms where a slick or even altered image and presentation are commonplace and extremely tempting. These same apps represent a whole world of opportunities for social and physical comparisons that border on obsession and generate great anxiety. This is often accompanied by a feeling of failure regarding our level of professional and personal success, in addition to increasing our body dissatisfaction.
This charade ends up taking on the air of an Olympian performance that few of us have the capacity to maintain and which, in any case, is not healthy for anyone. These criteria of “social success” are also strongly associated with beauty standards and thin bodies for women, and have been for too many years.
We live in collective denial on so many levels that it becomes more and more difficult to feel connected to something true. The denser the fog, the easier it is to be dominated by what is outside of us, hoping to finally be relieved of our “illness”.
I would like us to have the mental space to become collectively aware of the way we talk about ourselves, to qualify the physical appearance of our colleagues and friends, of TV stars, of strangers in the street. I would like to hear us think differently about these bodies which are ours and which carry us every day of our lives, allowing us to accomplish extraordinary things. To embrace, to love, to defend, to fight, to work, to give birth, to have pleasure, whatever their format. I wish us to be sufficiently lucid to no longer accept the restrictive framework of the cult of thinness and beauty at the cost of our misfortune, to refuse these parameters based on stereotypes corresponding to a small proportion of the world population and having been defined as the goal to achieve in order to be well, happy and happy, and to achieve the expected success.
We are so much more than that.