Beauty Demands

With reports suggesting body image concerns have increased over lockdown, we republish this 2017 post from Nadia Craddock on body appreciation (and how to improve yours).  We need to clear something up when it comes to body positivity. Body positive hashtags are all over the internet. On Instagram alone (at time of writing – July 2017) there are over three million posts tagged with #bodypositive, nearly a million with #bodypositivity, and almost exactly 350,000 posts with #bopo. Don’t get me wrong, it’s BEYOND exciting to think of so much self-love online against the backdrop of diet- and selfie-culture. And I’m totally here for the body positive movement and community, especially at a time where young people report to feeling under more pressure than ever before to look perfect . However, I feel like, occasionally, there is some confusion as to what the term ‘body positivity’ actually means - especially *eye-roll* when certain brands engage in the space for a heartbeat because it’...

Our Beauty Demands blog is 5 years old this year! We have had many brilliant posts over those years, so we're going to revisit some of these, starting with the ever-important topic of social media. Below is Emilie Lawrence's discussion on body positivity, which introduces a paper she presented at our workshop back in 2016:  In this post, Emilie Lawrence (UCL) discusses her work on body positivity discourse as it plays out on social media. The paper I am presenting at the forthcoming Beauty Demands workshop explores social media sites as platforms for creating networked communities (Papacharissi, 2010, 2011 & 2012) notions of the performative body (Butler, 1988) and embodied subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013.) I will explore body positive feminism ( an emerging form of online and offline activism stemming from Love Your Body (LYB) discourse, ‘positive, affirmative, seemingly feminist-inflected media messages, targeted exclusively at girls and women, that exhort us ...

Body positive campaigns have their hearts in the right place. Their messages are good and – you guessed it – positive: Be resilient. Be confident. Love your body. You are beautiful. All bodies are beautiful. These campaigns work for some. Some respond well and do feel more confident. If they work for you, go for it, fantastic and I’m all for it. I am not suggesting we shouldn’t teach resilience, we should. But we should not see it as the answer, we should recognise it is limited. Resilience can be counter-productive. If resilience is something you should do then you feel bad if you can’t quite manage it. What if you are not body confident, what if you don’t feel positive about your body? It is hard to be resilient in the face of a dominant and powerful beauty ideal. In a visual and virtual culture, our bodies are ourselves. Feeling ashamed of our bodies really is being ashamed of our selves. If we are feeling shame, telling us we shouldn’t feel like we do can make it wor...

This post discusses beauty as an ethical ideal as defined by Heather Widdows in her book Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal, particularly focusing on the actions required to meet that ideal, and what happens when you are prevented from doing them. Before going into my argument, I want to clarify that this post does not wish to criticise people with disabilities or chronic illnesses who engage in beautifying behaviours; none of us are really free from beauty as an ethical ideal, including the author, so it would be wrong to condemn anyone who takes part in it. Part of the complexity of beauty is that these practices can genuinely be tools for bonding, self-expression and empowerment; to totally denounce them would be nonsensical. The aim instead is to consider how some of these behaviours support the concept of beauty as an ethical ideal.  Beauty as an ethical ideal involves actions – meaningful pursuits towards a goal. These can include: ‘maintenance’ or routine behaviours to...

[This piece was originally published in Healthy  magazine] We’re encouraged to think of ‘looking good’ as a moral imperative - if you don’t have a great body then there’s a sense that you must have let yourself go ( Widdows, 2018) . While appearance is key to how we present ourselves to the world, most of us are unnecessarily self critical and our relationships with our bodies suffer as a result. There are a number of issues at play here, primarily our urge to measure ourselves against others (social comparison theory). While some measures such as academic achievements are objective – qualifications prove what you can do – comparing appearance is subjective, and difficult to get into proportion. This works in tandem with self-discrepancy theory, which suggests we have three views of the self: the actual, the ideal – what we aspire to look like - and the ought – what we think we ought to look like. Evidence shows that our view of the ‘actual’ self is distorted by the other two...

Selfies have often been associated with the ongoing influence of beauty ideals as an aspirational imperative ( MacCallum and Widdows, 2016 ) but simultaneously have been criticised as forms of narcissism ( Burns 2015 , Walker Rettberg, 2014 ).   In fact, selfies are a diverse form of self-representation that includes images which their creators characterise as ‘ugly’. This is perhaps surprising given that ‘ugly’ carries strongly negative connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective as: Offensive or repulsive to the eye; unpleasing in appearance; of disagreeable or unsightly aspect A word sketch of ‘ugly’ in the British National Corpus confirms that the evaluative negativity of the adjective in its contemporary use, showing that it is used typically to modify unpleasant creatures ( brute, ogre, beast, troll, monster ) or an insult ( motherfucker, bastard, bitch ).   Why then would a person characterise their selfie with the modifier ‘ugly’? ...

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty? 1 S ummer is in full bloom. Our screens are filled with Love Island   and the World Cup. Tanned, toned and athletic bodies are ubiquitous, and as we aspire to achieve these ideals, magazine stands are full of titles that promise to help us achieve beach body fitness (e.g. Men's Health )  and beauty, through a variety of exercise or diet plans .  Emerging from the toxicity of popular media, are movements such as ' I weigh ',   which has shunned conventional societal beauty demands and aims to move away from physical appearance as being a valuable determinant of self-worth. Many ‘body positive’ movements, fitness plans and media sites nonetheless still have at their core a particular physical ideal to which to aspire.  Fitspo  and ‘Strong is the new skinny’ (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016)  strongly associate a specific narrowly defined physical ideal with good health,...

In light of research (e.g. Williams et al., 2013) indicating that beauty concerns can be utilised to reduce unhealthy behaviours such as tanning, smoking and more recently, alcohol consumption, a central question remains about the ethics of doing so. In other words, in a society where appearance increasingly defines who you are, and unrealistic beauty standards are a distinct marker of social class (Grogan, 2016), is it responsible of researchers to further emphasize this? Beauty, and particularly youthfulness, has long been the main standard on which women (and increasingly men, albeit not to the same extent) are judged (Wolf, 1991), but perhaps never as intensively as in a time where media images are omnipresent. Walter (2010) goes as far as suggesting the 21 st century to be the era of “new sexism” - related, but not identical to, Glick & Fiske’s (1996) concept of Benevolent Sexism - where traditional aspects of patriarchy such as objectification and sexualisation of...