Every now and then it’s important, isn’t it, to take the temperature of where we are with the whole “feminism” project. Specifically in relation to women’s bodies – these soft maps where international politics plays out daily, from the way they’re criminalised by the men controlling anti-abortion laws to our evolving body-image crisis, now entering its late stages.
At the beginning of the new Boots advert, we watch two women watch an advert, a Protein World-style video of a hot bikini girl asking: “Are you summer ready?” But these are modern women, able to dissect and name the clichés that have rained and then hailed down on them since puberty. So instead of doubling over with shame and regret, they laugh. After a slick of lip balm and spritz of hair stuff, they saunter across a beach, past a disapproving model-type, before, with brave Thelma and Louise-esque grimaces, throwing off their sarongs to dance gleefully in the sea. The slogan appears: “Let’s feel good about summer.”
It’s an odd experience, watching one of these new, “woke” adverts, similar to the feeling of seeing your maths teacher at a nightclub, or a grandma typing “lol”. Odder still when you realise it’s an ad aimed squarely at… women like us, big-thighed feminists with opinions on our T-shirts, with Instagrams dripping with empowering quotes by artists long dead; women on a neverending quest for a) equality and b) a retinol routine that doesn’t bloody dry your skin to the texture of hessian.
And while this ad is wildly preferable to that original 2015 Protein World ad for slimming products, the one that inspired a protest in London’s Hyde Park, the two are clearly related. This is its embarrassed daughter, chatting in a “Basic Bitches” WhatsApp group, ankle-deep in positivity and petitions. It’s a well-meaning advert, so it seems silly, perhaps, to pick it apart, but I’m hungry, and there’s still meat on the bone.
The amorphous, millimetre-deep “everybody’s beautiful” pap of today’s messaging on body positivity has been spread so thin, and wheeled out so often, that its repetition has created a sort of semantic satiation, like when one says the word “pagoda” too many times and begins to suspect it doesn’t exist.
We have named the problem, but the mistake comes when we assume this has solved it. It’s a problem that’s layered, as if folded in on itself many times, with all the creased shadows that implies. First there’s the reluctance to understand or explore quite why certain bodies have been marginalised and seen as offensive, un-beautiful, instead of simply refusing this history, plastering over difficult conversations with paper and spit.
And then, of course, there’s the weary insistence that beauty is important, valuable and true. Rather than, instead, a lucky dip of cash, fashion and genes. Perhaps it’s because of this denial that we remain faithful to the idea of authenticity, and the fact that “real women”, like those laughing in the advert, are by definition “beautiful”, simply by dint of that realness.
It could be argued, of course, that it is not the job of an advert to fix our broken body image. And yes, it’s often forgotten that these institutions of body sprays and lipsticks’ only job is to make money, which they do by trying to reflect a generation’s anxieties and aspirations back at us – in this case, the panic to feel OK, and to be seen to feel OK, about our bodies.
But unfortunately, because institutions have capitalised on our confusion, our body politics have become institutionalised. It’s in the ad breaks that we see mainstream shifts in feminism play out, these almost imperceptible moves from coveting beach bodies to coveting self-esteem, the messaging changing seasonally, while the products stay the same.
I was struck last week by 28-year-old activist and Instagram influencer Harnaam Kaur (whose polycystic ovary syndrome means she has facial hair) explaining at a conference on body positivity in Bristol that she has recently rejected the label of “body positivity advocate” because she felt “loving your body” is too much to ask for those battling mental health problems. “Stop telling people to love themselves, and start telling them to be kind to themselves instead,” she said to students.
Which seems, on the surface, a brief and sentimental idea. But shouted down today’s well of eternal self-empowerment, it’s shockingly radical. An acknowledgement that these anxieties are complicated and itchy, and can’t be erased by adjusting the angle of an ad, by telling us to love our bodies, or be ourselves, or simply “feel good”.
Because for all our new culture’s allusions to body positivity, it’s the same song in a different key. The message to concentrate on “inner beauty” ignores a further possibility – that we could forget it all together.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
