With the arrival of vacation season, lifestyle publications fill up with articles about the best ways to achieve a bikini body.
There is an implicit prescription involving bodies that are deemed suitable for wearing a bikini and those that are not, when the main criterion for wearing a bikini—or a swimsuit, in the case of men—should simply be whether the person wants to and feels comfortable. Evidently, this is not how it works. What are the logics behind these pressures about how a body should look?
Alongside the social stigma attached to an obese body, the cult of sculpted bodies in our era takes on moral undertones. Behind all the discourses analyzed about the body, there is the implicit understanding that today the body is something to be controlled, dominated, and kept in check to reach its best manifestation. Many latent discourses imply that having a sculpted body is a matter of individual willpower and discipline: on one hand, to keep bodily impulses at bay, and on the other, to exercise and dominate it so as to achieve that archetype of beauty, like Michelangelo’s David for men. For women, defining this ideal is paradoxically even more unattainable due to the absence of a single archetypal model of the perfect body. Today’s ideal body ranges from the fit, muscular yet slim body—like Jennifer Aniston’s—to the impossibly natural curves of Kim Kardashian, and even ultra-thin bodies that evoke a prepubescent stage rather than a reproductive-age woman. All these archetypes are desirable today. Although the media suggests that the ideal body has become less mass-centric over the years, we find that rather than a cult of thin bodies, there is now a multiplicity of idealized body models, and choosing one as ideal depends largely on culture and personal idiosyncrasy, with gender being a major determinant of what is considered attractive. Thus, while a curvier body is more valued for men, for some women the absence of curves is the ideal.
Adding another component to the equation of idealized models, many discourses sell the idea that achieving the ideal body depends solely on discipline and willpower. Discipline for daily exercise, weightlifting, and willpower to resist, paradoxically, the body’s impulses for pleasure from food. Almost invariably, pleasure in food is linked to foods the body should “do without” to achieve the desired silhouette. Without even delving into how these unattainable beauty models are perpetuated, it is evident that social pressure and control over a desirable body fall more heavily on women than on men. From a young age, girls internalize the idea that part of “femininity” lies precisely in the body, not in the intellect.
In a context where we are constantly exposed to messages about how we should live, how we should look, what we should eat, and what we should have to belong, it is easy to lose sight of what brings us well-being. It is clear that eating that provides pleasure and well-being, and engaging in physical activity as a source of health and happiness, are two axes that today can easily cross the line from providing happiness to becoming an obsession.
#body #bodyperception #beautyideals #wellbeing
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.