what was with all that body image stuff

in school and whatnot

in retrospect wasn’t all that positive body image stuff pretty weird? am i crazy? i feel like one of the major principles that school & various other institutions were trying to impart to us was that it was like *morally* good to feel pretty and IT DIDNT EVEN WORK

sometimes i imagine trying to explain all of this to like, queen guenevere or st teresa of avila or something. it’s just so new and so strange and so backwards from how people have ever thought that you should ethically engage with how you look. morally sanctioned vanity. except that with vanity i think you’re supposed to be trying to look as nice as you reasonably can, & i don’t think you’re supposed to do that when you’re trying to have a positive self image

i think it might be better to be vain. i mean, being vain only works for so long¹, but it’s lindy. it works for what it works for.

beauty is good & it’s good if people are trying reasonably to be & feel beautiful. i think what bothers me about the positive body image thing is like….people will try to be and feel beautiful, it’s an obvious thing to do. & at least the concept of vanity gave you a way to take a break from it if that makes sense. i feel like a lot of moral stuff functions like this (& that’s one of the things i didn’t get as a kid when i took things very very literally)²—to give ppl a way to kind of get together to put the brakes on arms races, not to just totally stop you from trying to compete on whatever axis, just to keep the competition on a reasonable level

no matter what, for tons of reasons, girls & women in the recent past would be feeling more & more bad about how they looked than women had historically. the nutrition transition, the mass image culture, etc. but i think that all of the positive body image teaching actively made it worse. because, in concert w the mass image culture, it instructed us that feeling pretty was really, really important. & it also made “not feeling pretty” feel like a moral failure. i’ve met so many women who talk about the pain-of-feeling-ugly being compounded by the pain of feeling that they are failing & fucking up & maybe even letting down other women by feeling ugly

i’m also surprised by how often “i did it to feel beautiful” is taken as not only an understandable explanation for taking some action, but as like a laudable explanation

i don’t know what i suggest doing instead but this whole thing is weird

1. although i’m curious whether the positive body image thing will age any better than vanity. in terms of like, individual women’s lives. idk if it’s been around long enough yet for there to be many old women who were raised this way….i wouldn’t be surprised if it just totally falls apart in the face of aging

2. another dumb story from my overly literal childhood: when i was 13 my mother bought me proactiv for my newly greasy face & i earnestly asked her if it wasn’t vain to use it. i wasn’t trying to be a smartass either, i didn’t think she would ask me to do it unless she had a good answer to the question. my poor mother did not. but i used it anyway because she told me to. & i wish i hadn’t it made my face feel so tight & dry & horrible all the time!