Body fascism directed at young women takes many forms

Are you eating clean? Is your body bikini-ready? Have you contoured your face and washed your mouth out with coconut oil? Have you gone gluten-free?

No? Well, if you are a young woman in Ireland, you probably feel a compulsion to do all of the above. We are surrounded by an image-obsessed white noise in which common sense and clarity are forsaken for a narrative that plays on the insecurities of young, naive and ambitious women.

In today’s world, many of us live our lives out on social media. We scroll through Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram feeds morning, noon and night. We follow the trendiest bloggers and snapchatters, whose focus varies between fashion, food and fitness but whose one common denominator is usually some version of “healthy living”.

We are constantly bombarded with “transformation” pictures of before and after bodies, told how to make rice out of cauliflower and pancakes out of protein. Weighing out and recording every gram of food you eat and calculating its nutritional value is touted not only as normal behaviour but something to strive for. We are told to work hard, sweat more, rise before dawn to meal-prep and lift weights. Train like an athlete and you will look like a ride, scream the motivational quotes that litter my Instagram feeds.

Apparently, green vegetable smoothies are a morning necessity, even though the liquid mulch looks more like something you would find in the grass box of your lawnmower than on the breakfast table.

Some accounts are more beauty-focused, with countless video tutorials on how to contour your face with Sellotape, grow your eyelashes with aloe vera gel and fill out your eyebrows and plump up your lips with the precision of a renaissance painter.

And look, if that’s what you’re into, fair enough. But for swathes of young women, the reality of the constant bombardment of other people’s life choices is that it is hard to keep ignoring it. Harmless enough as it sounds here in writing, it is difficult not to start thinking you are a lesser woman for not aspiring to this mantra.

Even if we make a conscious decision to block out the constant cacophony, targeted online marketing still manages to put the message in front of us.

There is no editorial balance in this new digital age of media – we are not presented with as well-rounded a product as we were in the age of print. Instead we get a feed with no health warning as to its content, no judgment on how much is too much.

Guilt trip
The normalisation of this kind of behaviour became shockingly clear to me when I recently revisited the page of a fitness blogger whom I had unfollowed months previously. I had found myself becoming increasingly affected by the daily Snapchat and Facebook updates of her holiday workouts and pre-dawn turkey burgers, and started to feel guilty for not striving for her levels of perfection.

If the majority of her followers are in the same bracket as me – young, naive and slightly insecure about body image – then maybe I wasn’t the only one to feel belittled by her image-orientated posts. When I returned to the page last week, I was truly taken aback to see she had just undergone breast augmentation surgery.

She explained her decision by saying her number one motivation for eating healthily and training hard was to look good – health and happiness came second – and so this surgery was a natural progression of that mindset.

It was at that moment I realised, God, what a load of muck. There I was, comparing myself with a woman who had a more flawed perception of self than I ever did. I had felt guilty for not leading what I saw as her idealist lifestyle – but maybe that lifestyle was not healthy at all. Maybe this was actually someone who had such deep-rooted insecurities that she had undergone surgery to try to remedy it.

She had been at the top of the healthy-living totem pole I had created in my mind, and I was at the bottom – but where did this leave us now?

Perhaps my lifestyle is not so bad after all. Maybe spending the week packing lunches and attempting the odd jog in the park before eating my Mum’s chocolate brownies at the weekend is not so loathsome. Maybe my body – which I wouldn’t describe as fat, overweight or unhealthy – is just that of an average twentysomething whose talents lie in areas other than sport and nutrition – and maybe that’s okay. Granted, I’m a little soft around the edges, but who wants edges anyway? My granny always told me “The little bit of weight suits you”, and maybe she was right.

Not all of us are athletes, nor are we all overweight. The majority of us sit somewhere in the middle, but who wants to hear about the size-12 girl who eats spuds and likes a nice evening walk? In this media of extremes, there is little space for the moderates.