Ah shit! We let pedophiles decide our beauty standards.
Post the release of the harrowing Epstein files, and the powerful men in media and fashion, considered possible accomplices, it feels fair to say this with more gusto!
I am writing to you from the funeral of a short lived trend called “The Body Positivity movement.” It was this brief, sort of, manic episode (?) of self sovereignty and respect, in which we had a little holiday from shaming, open bullying, and unrelenting self hatred. Totally ridiculous. Women were embracing these things called… thighs. They had more time in the day to focus on fun things, hobbies, work, relationships…etc. They were no longer allowing a weighing scale to dictate whether or not today was allowed to be a good day. Mothers didn’t feel rushed to lose their baby weight within 5-7 business days of delivery. Our timelines were not full to the brim with thin people frantically selling us weight loss methods. We were exhaling at beaches worldwide. It was a pandemic of chill. Total fucking pandemonium. Really, really scary.
It was dangerous. People were promoting a lifestyle of having an identity outside of your body shape. They were encouraging people to leave the house over a size 8. They were allowing for women to have body parts synonymous with being a woman and not a little girl. They really hurt people. Namely, people who work in the predatory multi billion dollar diet industry, and people who want to have sex with teenagers, but don’t want it to seem weird, so they promote “Teenager” as the beauty standard for all women of all ages.
Women were not only allowing for breasts, hips, stomachs etc… but they had the nerve to extend the new standard to embracing body hair, pimples, wrinkles etc. Covid brought about a year in which people could not get fillers/botox, and started to… (holds back vomit) embrace a moving, aging, face. They started wearing less make up. More comfortable shoes. So now the danger was extending to the precious multi multi billion dollar aesthetics industry. SAD!!!
And these are all the industries that largely fund our media. Especially women’s media. Who were also suffering. WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE POOR MEDIA?!
When I was young, I thought it was just about controlling and distracting women by giving them the infinite task of fighting time and gravity… and I think I was right, but over time, and after enough time behind the curtain, I realize it is far more sinister.
The prescription for grown women to be hairless, smooth, curve-less, and ageless is a response to a pedophile-dominant media/entertainment industry, and they’ve found a smart way to exploit the image of the very young. They set a standard so difficult to achieve for most grown women, that it’s naturally, and most conveniently, “easier” to just put teenagers in the spotlight. Namely magazines and campaigns, wearing clothes and accessories that other teenagers can’t afford. It would be crazy to actually try to appeal to your market, the one that has disposable income. Much better to show them the clothes, make up, and sunglasses on bodies and faces that don’t resemble theirs at all, so that they have no idea what they would look like in these things, and then feel alienated and foolish for even considering such a thing. (I can’t imagine why these industries are all failing now?) What is the motivation to keep doing it though? I really think: pedophilia.
Look at how this industry has not only normalized the pedo horror story Lolita, but instead glamorized it. It’s a desired aesthetic, a sub culture… modeled by teens, and child-like young adult women even. FOR DECADES now. All in dedication to a book about a 12 year old groomed, and then raped, byre middle aged step father.
To this day, post the #Metoo movement, many women, grown women, even ones in their thirties, now go far out of their way to adjust their aesthetics, faces, bodies, voice and mannerisms, to mimic that of a pre pubescent girl. For the male gaze.
Only…not all men are into little girls. In fact I daresay the majority of grown men prefer grown women. Men who are secretly pedophiles, who have podcasts, will try and tell you that it’s normal for a man of any age to desire a teenager due to her increased chance of fertility. They’ll claim their perversion is simply a natural symptom of evolution. Which is interesting, and begs the question of how Marilyn in her thirties was at the height of her globally certified sex appeal. As was Sophia Loren. Nigella Lawson, a curvaceous British chef, has had men in a chokehold since her late thirties through to now. Most men still felt extremely aroused by Helen Mirren into her 60’s and 70’s. Kim Kardashian originally rose to fame because her womanly curves were so refreshing and desirable to so many men. I see men literally slobbering all over themselves for Ashley Graham, the plus size model in her thirties.
What’s so impressive, is that our culture has almost implied over the years, that men who like grown women are the freaks and perverts. Honestly, bravo. Spectacular sorcery. Let’s take pubic hair as an example… do you remember pubic hair? Women aren’t supposed to have it. Only men. Nothing says “fertility” like a bald vagina that looks like it has not yet reached puberty. It was perfectly acceptable, almost hot, to have natural protective, evolutionarily designed hair on your female genitals, not so long ago. Now if you like it, it’s some sort of a “Kink.” You’re freaky. You wanna fuck your mum. If you like women who are curvaceous, it’s a kink. You’re a “chubby chaser.” You must be some sort of feeder. If you like an older man, you have sophisticated taste, if you like an older woman… you’re into COUGARS, you are a GRAVE ROBBER, you are a granny chaser. Men actually shame other men over who they are attracted to. Do you remember the incident of a famous footballer, Declan Rice, with a wife who doesn’t look like the WAG archetype of a skinny, painted, blow up sex doll, be trolled by an entire STADIUM over the appearance of the love of his life. Nothing to do with the sport. Men made up, and sang chants, about their disgust for this human woman who looks like she was made in a womb, not a lab, who is nothing to do with the match. She’s just existing outside of patriarchal demands. And loved and desired by a powerful, successful man for it. CRAZY.
I spend hours sometimes, reading Reddit threads of men who are asking if they are weird/have a problem for liking something outside of the barely pubescent beauty standard and other men replying in solidarity with this sick affliction of not wanting to fuck a child. It’s really intense.
The MINUTE we put that poor, traumatized, extra young looking, 16 year old Britney Spears in a school girl outfit, on a world stage, and then in her underwear at 17, holding a teddy bear, on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine… the quiet part made it’s way out loud, and was pushed so hard by the media, at such record speed, that it became acceptable overnight for men to openly fantasize about little girls. Pedophilia’s hyper normalization train left the station. From that day onwards, it became normal to hyper sexualize very young girls, and put them at the forefront of entertainment. To this day there is a fascinating pipeline of female singers, even very young ones having to perform in the same glittery swimsuit on stage once they start reaching success. The bigger the arena, the smaller the costume. It is a prescription, a dossier, handed out to girls and women…
Don’t get me wrong, I think they all look wonderful. I can see they feel powerful. I am just always suspicious of anything homogenized for women. I think because it’s harder to decipher if it’s possible to be a choice, when something is a frantically pushed demand. How do we know what is empowering? Is choosing to submit to the power of patriarchy power? Some will argue that it is, because it is a choice. BUT HOW DO WE KNOW IT IS A CHOICE WHEN AUTONOMY IS NOT AN OPTION, AND RIDICULE/INVISIBILITY IS THE PUNISHMENT FOR NOT FALLING IN LINE?!
Like this fucking face lift conversation. It’s everywhere I turn. It’s all over my timeline. All over the media. Women I know are pre booking their 100-200k facelifts…(WHICH ONLY LAST A FUCKING DECADE BY THE WAY) saving up for them, instead of a house. Some are booking cheaper, riskier ones in countries further off the grid. The kinds of places, where reports have come out, of women going in for a mummy make over, and not knowing a KIDNEY has been removed without their knowledge or consent. Nightmare. How has the conversation within 6 months become “why WOULDN’T you get surgery?” WHO DID THIS?
Why is it a brag to lose weight straight after pregnancy? After your body has created a human inside? Why is the brag not the baby you made? Why is it how fast you can “bounce back?” as if you didn’t just pull off a miracle? How did we let this become a thing? Why do we not squirm with embarrassment when we gas up the “Snap back”???
How did we get this far into feminism and allow for such stupid, vacuous, dangerous nonsense? To encourage it. To sell it to each other? To the next generation of young women? To our own daughters and nieces?
All of this shit is coded to say… erase all signs of woman hood. Age, bodyhair, autonomy, motherhood, thighs, creases. Adopt girlhood as the forever norm. Girlhood good. Womanhood bad.
I think I don’t want to coddle perverts anymore. I don’t want to normalize their grim urges. My voice is getting deeper. My fuse shorter. My laugh lines more defined. My knees resemble Donald Trump a little more each day. My wings are flappier. My arse checked out years ago. I am 40 in the next year. I don’t need to look like a girl because I am with a grown man.
I want to attract a man who likes women.
How much more pain, time, risk, and life savings are we going to give to these creepy manufactured norms? To what end? Who wins? Who PROFITS? Who gets hurt?
How long will we cry that the system enforces these stereotypes and that we are victims, before it occurs to us that we can burn the system down tomorrow, without lifting a finger or getting our hands dirty?
We literally just have to stop buying this stuff.
There is endless documentation of artists painting the epitome of desire being curvaceous grown women, with armpit hair, pubes, normal, uneven tits, and messy hair. None of the goddesses had thigh gaps. We know it happened. We cannot be waterboarded and gaslit out of HISTORY. We can take it all back to that should we choose.
We don’t have to be obedient. We don’t have to take this shit all the way into our thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and beyond.
This gorgeous girl Amelia G Milne (find he on IG) said this on instagram recently, and it summed up our crisis so perfectly. As does the meme below it.
And then the ultimate conundrum for all of us women everywhere. When will we realize as a collective that we don’t have to tolerate this abusive, incessant, EXPENSIVE, coercive control?
What will it take to cause us to fight back en masse. If they demand we chop both arms off? Or call to replace our eyeballs with diamanté ones? Maybe we will have to sew up our arseholes? They’re already normalizing us REMOVING OUR RIBS TO HAVE A FREAKISHLY SMALL WAIST LIKE COME ONNNNN. NOTHING IS OFF THE TABLE ANYMORE. WAKE UPPPPPPP. FUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK.
CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?!
Body Positivity died because not enough people joined the movement out of fear of the consequences of disobedience. Also the movement was FOOLISHLY built on love, instead of spite. You can’t beat evil with love. That is a huge misconception. We need to activate our spite. Spite is the most powerful fuel I’ve ever been able to run on. It is my great protector.
My best friend.
I have nothing valuable to add to the conversation. I just wanted to say how grateful I am that you exist.
I agree with every word of this, and I am working hard to ensure my algorithm on social media keeps feeding me body positivity content rather than the skinny rubbish. I am 45 years old, I have lines (no botox here) my skin is way less elastic than it used to be, my tummy is softer, but honestly WHO CARES. As long as I am a good friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister, as long as I treat people with kindness isn't that the most important thing. My beautiful amazing Dad died 3 years ago of a brain tumour at 67, he was way too young to die, I see aging as a massive privilege not something to be ashamed of and pretend isn't happening!