“Strong is the New Skinny” Versus Bridalplasty
.I first came across the “Strong is the New Skinny” concept via CrossFit channels a few months back. The first thing I saw was just the original T-shirt image, and I thought it was a great slogan. I got a little carried away and thought it represented a movement coming out of CrossFit that had found a fantastic way to challenge prevailing norms of female beauty.
That potential is right there in the slogan. “Skinny” is based solely on appearance, and fits in all too well with our culture’s narrow definitions of female beauty. “Strength” is based solely on capability. Even if both terms are rooted in the physical, shifting “beauty” towards what a woman can do, rather than what a woman looks like, would be a great move. Leaving “beauty” out of it and moving the concept of female worth the same way would also be great—the concept of “skinniness” is culturally imposed, rather unhealthily, as a big part of how women are pushed to measure their own worth.
So I was somewhat disappointed to read this interview about the origins of the movement/slogan. To me, what they’re describing isn’t a challenge to that notion of female worth, but attempt to narrowly expand the definitions. Still a positive, but while I respect the individual achievements described in the interview (it took a lot of work to reach them, quite probably more work than I’ve done in my CrossFit time), I was disappointed to see the core of it come down to another “I found a way to lose x pounds” story.
It’s still better to encourage CrossFit and paleo as ways of slimming down than starvation and surgery. It’s better to be slim because you’re strong and capable than because you skip meals and smoke a lot. It might even be better, broadly, if there were a shift to the point where the encouraged aesthetic was about being muscular and fit rather than simply thin. Not better enough, though. Adopting such standards, even if they’re better standards, still essentially supports the notion that women are defined by aesthetics. And that’s why I couldn’t get behind “Strong is the New Skinny”, couldn’t endorse it and do my bit to spread the meme.
That’s okay, though, because it isn’t really for me. As my friend Zac pointed out, it’s not really for people already engaged in a feminist critique of beauty standards and the consumerism that feeds off them—it’s for women who are interested in fitness and who don’t see much at all in the way of positive images of strong, fit, physically capable women, and who are trying to add some of those images to the culture in support of each others’ efforts.
I didn’t think about it for a while, but it came back to me when I stumbled across Bridalplasty, a “reality TV” show about women competing to get plastic surgery of their choice before their wedding day.
I don’t watch much television. I have a certain naivety on the subject; I find it hard to believe that some of these shows are real. Especially something like Bridalplasty. While this Cracked.com article on it has its own issues, the author does a good job of expressing the horror of having to accept that stuff like this not only exists, but occupies a central place in our cultural landscape.
Bridalplasty. This is where our narrowing (and rising) standards for female beauty, and our insistence that all other characteristics of women are subordinate to their appearance, have brought us. A show where women compete with each other so that they can get plastic surgery (probably serious procedures) for their weddings, which are ostensibly to partners who love them, i.e. who presumably are significantly attracted to them without any need for surgery. “Plastic surgery competition for women who can’t seem to find love” would be bad enough as a show concept, but “plastic surgery competition for women who have found love but find it brings no relief from horrific internalized cultural demands” is even more awful.
And in light of that, “Strong is the New Skinny” is absolutely fucking wonderful. In a culture as twisted and toxic as this one, anything headed in the right direction deserves some support and encouragement.
10 Dec 2010 at 02:39
*applauds*
10 Dec 2010 at 11:35
From the Cracked article, “The groom of the winner doesn’t get to see the bride in advance. When he lifts the veil, he will be seeing a brand new person. It’s Nip/Tuck meets Survivor meets nightmares.” Dear god this sounds horrifying!
“It might even be better, broadly, if there were a shift to the point where the encouraged aesthetic was about being muscular and fit rather than simply thin” Team Gorilla is probably closer in that regard.
http://wildgorillaman.blogspot.com/
10 Dec 2010 at 13:22
Tadhg – well said, and it’s true, though sadly many people forget: when you’re with someone that you love and care for, you’re with the ENTIRE person, not just the physical. And let’s face it, it’s all a matter of aging gracefully, naturally, and staying healthy; being strong and fit becomes more important the more time passes.
I’ve never seen Bridalplasty, but the concept is foreign and horrific. Can’t believe that these types of shows play into people’s insecurities and paranoia about self image and worth. But, that’s what gets the ratings, sadly.
10 Dec 2010 at 13:53
Helen: thanks!
Zac: It does sound absolutely horrifying, yes! thanks for the link, that looks a little like something from the “Couch Thread”.
John: Yes, it gets the ratings… but that whole downward spiral is deeply connected to lots of other issues, including media ownership, education, advertising, and consumerism; I also don’t think it gets the producers off the hook in terms of responsibility (or maybe I should say “culpability”).
19 Dec 2010 at 10:31
Tadhg,
You’ve provided a pretty critical opinion of SINS and you didn’t even mention the ORIGINAL article that started the movement: http://practicalpaleolithic.com/paleolithic-diet-blog/is-strong-the-new-skinny. You also didn’t mention the Facebook group that’s now over 9,000 strong and is a thriving community of men and women who support and encourage one another. http://www.facebook.com/StrongIsTheNewSkinny is home to a wide range of people with all different body types.
I’ve hear from people daily who embrace the message and make the message relevant to THEM and THEIR lives. It’s brought a lot of people together on a topic that needed to be brought out into the light.
My interview with Marsha was anything but “another ‘I found a way to lose x pounds’ story.” I’m not really sure where you even got that. Marsha is a strong, genuine and REAL woman who lays her daily struggles out there for the world to read and many women are encouraged by her message.
My ORIGINAL article – the one you didn’t mention – has now been shared over 4,700 times and inspired a lot of women (and men).
Since that article went viral, I’ve received thousands of positive responses. I’ve also received a few negative ones like yours – it should have been done different, it should have been more this, it should have been less that, it should have said this and not that, it was written by a male and it’s bad… And on and on.
Whether or not I did it “right” by your standards I ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. And Marsha and I continue to put ourselves out into the world every day and continue to DO SOMETHING to create change.
Your post tells less than half the story of Strong is the New Skinny and it’s typical of the few negative responses we’ve gotten. How about working WITH us to create change and make things better instead of cherry-picking the message and criticizing?
I’m around if you want to talk…
Adam
21 Dec 2010 at 03:36
Adam,
Thanks for the response. I’m sorry that you take my post as being so critical; I intended it to illustrate my shift from an initial highly critical stance to a more appreciative one, but that seems not to have come across so clearly.
I didn’t link to your original post because I hadn’t read it—I didn’t come across it when I first encountered the concept, and then somehow missed it when I was reading around for this post. Thanks for providing the link to it, and to the Facebook group.
Again, I don’t think my response is a negative one. To quote myself, this was my summary of my initial response to it:
I don’t think that’s either unfair or negative. Neither is my closing sentence:
Not a ringing endorsement, but an endorsement nonetheless. And when I posted it, I meant it as an endorsement to the people who read my blog—primarily my friends. Had I simply posted an uncritical link or article, my audience would likely have had a critical response similar to my initial one. By writing about my critical response and how I moved to a more appreciative one, I was encouraging my readers to look past initial qualms and see the value of the movement.
In your comment you make much of how popular the movement has become and how many people have taken encouragement from it. That’s great, and I’m happy that it’s successful; as something of a CrossFit zealot myself, I’m happy about anything that gets people on a healthier track in terms of exercise (and diet).
As for my response to the interview, I stand by it. Nothing I wrote contradicts anything in “Marsha is a strong, genuine and REAL woman who lays her daily struggles out there for the world to read and many women are encouraged by her message.” But I still see the core of it as being about losing weight, and this is because of Marsha’s answer to your last question. She says “The day I stepped on the scale and saw that number…200…a switch flipped. I knew I had to do something” and this is followed by pictures of her at 200 pounds and pictures of her now. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, and her achievement is, as I acknowledged in my post, phenomenal. But it’s still weight-centric and looks-centric, and hence I reacted to it as such. One of the key concerns of my post is the tension between two things: a) the fact that it’s undoubtedly healthy for her (and others) to have been driven to seek better health by aesthetic concerns; b) that the aesthetic standards our society imposes on women are deeply unhealthy and that those standards may be reinforced by stories such as Marsha’s (again, even while her story is clearly a positive one).
“How about working WITH us to create change and make things better instead of cherry-picking the message and criticizing?” Well, as stated above, my post was actually an endorsement of “Strong is the New Skinny” to my audience. I don’t think I was cherry-picking the message, either; my criticism was based in part on the fact that SINS doesn’t offer a fundamental critique of how beauty standards are applied to women but rather focuses on expanding those standards to be more inclusive of muscularity and fitness (which expansion, I stress, is nevertheless a good thing). That still seems true to me. So what? It’s totally fine for you to say you’ll concentrate on promoting those expanded standards and will leave the larger feminist issues aside. But it’s also fine for me to point out they’re there.
In closing, it’s a shame you got the impression that my post was so negative, since I didn’t mean it that way. I like SINS despite my reservations; that I don’t endorse it unreservedly is hardly surprising given how few things I do endorse unreservedly.
21 Dec 2010 at 13:16
For those of you who want to follow along, my reply over on practicalpaleolithic.com is here: http://practicalpaleolithic.com/paleolithic-diet-blog/still-not-good-enough/comment-page-1#comment-2006