silkidelic

This isn’t a body positivity post. It’s just a post about my body and my mind.

I wasn’t a big pop star fan when I was young, but I wasn’t too cool to listen to pop singles on the radio. Against my wishes, I wasn’t exactly Like the Other Girls in a couple ways, but I wanted to be like others, to find similarity in the starry void of unbelonging. I loved the Spice Girls and that one All Saints album.

And then there was my connection to Britney Spears, nimbused like an angel by her iridescent beaded curtain. Sure, that sense of connection was manufactured in the lab of late 90s commodification. But it became real (if one-sided), a sparkling chemical link.

For this reason, criticisms of Britney Spears’ body were foundational to my fear of my own body. A particular image from a women’s magazine always floats to mind, doubtless altered by my years of memory-fade (I’ve been unable to find it online). Who knows exactly what the text said. All I know is that I still feel the words’ dissecting effects upon my flesh, as sharp as a gray alien’s scalpel.

There was a photograph of Britney Spears sitting in a relaxed posture in a belly shirt and low-slung jeans, with small rolls of skin showing. The scrap of text next to it described all the things she was doing wrong to create this travesty of “fat,” including eating a bagel right after working out. Today, I can concede that elite performers may need to eat a certain way to achieve certain physical abilities. However, this was advice marketed for all women, based on appearance only, and here it was gripping my teenage body with terror. Yet here, behold! In the pages of that very same magazine was a way to soothe that terror with control. What a canny medium for collective abuse, those glossy pictures and punchy words.

As an adult, I see media like that and roll my eyes. As a child, it shaped my self-image. If she was perfect and talented and beloved, and yet she was still an ugly, stupid bagel-chowing slut, what was I? I was close enough to the thin, white, blonde ideal of the time that I believed when I reached it, I would stop feeling afraid and depressed. For so long, I didn’t notice how the ideal always shifted, imperceptibly at first, and then blatantly, scornfully, out of the reach of even the most privileged women.

Today, an army of us have been well trained to continue this manner of food advice on social media. We don’t need mainstream media rags anymore when unlicensed mini-moguls are doing the dirty work, to get their own cut of notoriety and cash.

The women’s magazines of the millennium really messed me up. Twenty-odd years later, I see their fiendish energy recreated daily on social media. And looking back, I remember. When Britney took a bat to the paparazzi as they tried to snap more images that could be torn apart and belittled, I remember. I understand the nuance better today, and it only saddens me that things ever reached that point.

But I remember, back then. Thinking, “Get ‘em, girl.” 

I had the feeling that someone had escaped, and so, maybe I could too someday.