Author: Laura Mesa

I started looking at and reading the book Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln, Phd after a talk with one of my experts, who is one of the founders of a therapy-led approach group in Colombia called El Cuerpo Que Somos. They started this initiative around ten years ago, and they have therapy groups for extended periods of time as their treatment. I started doing this this week, which I am really excited about, because they talk about and analyze everything around body image and the obsession with looking a certain way. They recommended I read this book for my thesis as well as for my journey in their therapy group. 

The book starts with a critical introduction to beauty and the industry, and how we are never satisfied with what we see in the mirror because we are obsessed with the media and trying to emulate what we see in our actual lives. There is always this idea in our lives that there is something that needs to change and that we look great, but I should fix this one small thing or another. She started her career and began learning more about women’s psychology. She saw that women sometimes stopped living or constantly criticized themselves because of how they looked and how other people perceived them. (I believe this is definitely a reality from all the sources I have interacted with, but as the book says later on, there isn’t enough research on people who actually feel good in their bodies; it is mostly about women who suffer from beauty sickness.) 

Thought the book there is a lot of talk surrounding the mirror and it is seen even in the cover of the book having there be a broken mirror this is a book that is really interesting and entertaining to read which makes me think of the fact that most women should give it a read since it takes on a very particular style where there is a lot of research and numbers, “34% of five-year-old girls do dietary restriction, and 28% of this group of girls want their body to look like the people who are on TV.”(pg.3) and there are many phrases and numbers such as this throughout the book but it does bring sort of a novel aspect to it as well as the author chose to describe conversations with women who had suffered from beauty sickness and how this was something that looked different for all women and everyone had their own experience which made it easier to read than most academic books in my opinion and easier to understand since it was as if they were telling a story I think this makes it easier for the average audience to engage with because it is not just information getting thrown at you but you have something that you are able to follow and characters you are able to relate to. 

One of the main discussions in the book is that we have created an environment where being beautiful, and being perceived as beautiful, means you have power. If I seem smaller than the rest and have a more beautiful face, then that means I am superior to others, and based on what we see in the media and the outside world, we have also made it impossible for people who live in bigger cities to be seen as beautiful. The first example of someone with body image issues in the book is a young girl named Leigh. Clearly, the researcher also had the parents’ consent for their child to participate in this research. When she was asked what she thought was beautiful, she said that it was having thin body parts: “beauty could be captured via a series of measurements”(pg.4). There is a lot of talk in the book throughout about the fact that women live in the forms of others and start to internalize that people are looking at them. This is what gives them value, and it is something we don’t come out of the womb with; we learn it as we grow up, shaped by the society we are in. 

There were a lot of examples all through the book about how some women started to get beauty sick based on how they saw their elders and especially their mothers have a relationship with their bodies for example if a girls mother was always critiquing her body and being her clothing that does not fit her but would fit her at her ideal weight it would make their daughter think about how their body is not correct and something that they have to keep on changing, this is something that we see all of the time and it is something that we see of a lot on tv as well as in the media as a whole for example women showing their bodies in instagram with their size xxc skirt when it did not kit them. Then, a couple of months later, it fit her, which only proves the point that smaller is seen as better and something women are always striving for. 

One thing in the book that really emphasized my gap of there not being enough research or enough talk about women in Latin America and body image is the fact that the researcher and author talks about the fact that there are a lot of students that reach out to her about getting information for projects they are doing, but this is mostly in the USA; she does not speak about people from other countries doing so, which is important to note. 

One of the main issues the author notes is that this cultural obsession is not just about one person or one family. Still, it is the fact that as a society we have placed such an emphasis on looks and the media: “signs…thoughts…behaviors… illness also lives in our culture…A beauty-sick culture cares more about an actress’s nude selfie than important world events”(pg. 8). This is something that we have seen recently in different moments; for example, there is the fact that even today there are moments when there are real-world issues happening, but people’s reactions and the importance they put on what models and celebrities are doing is more important. 

One of the main ways in which the author talks about young girls getting into this world is in mother own relationship with their bodies and this is a fear I have heard and seen on social media about people who have suffering through eating disorders and starting a family because they never want to set that example for their children and this is very important because you might think that it is very important to never say anything negative to your child about your body but if you have very strong negative feelings towards your body and this is something your child sees this is something that at some point they are going to start internalizing and start to consider normal for example in this book the author was describing a exercise they did with young girls and their mother looking at themselves in the mirror and then doing it next to their daughters and even though the daughters individually did not have an insecurity about a certain part of their body when they saw their mothers talking negatively about that part of their body they started to think it was normal and since they admire their mother they said the same thing about being uncomfortable with that part of their body. 

One example that the author describes is about the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate, and the way that, because she is in the public eye, her life is always on display for others to see. For example, “One day after Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to her first child, she was greeted with a story in the UK tabloid press about how she could lose the baby weight and “shape up.” After delivering her second child, she was widely criticized for looking too good after the birth.”(pg.12) This just shows us that people are always going to look for something to criticize and look at, so even if you do exactly what someone else wants, other people are going to disagree, which makes me think about the fact that you really have to be at peace with yourself and what you are doing because if you decide your life based on what the people around you are thinking, you are never going to get anywhere; you are always going to be trying to please other people and not succeeding at it. 

There is also the fact that she talks about certain eating disorders or forms of disordered eating, including body dysmorphia, “…Body surveillance or body monitoring.”(pg.66) This is something that we see and from speaking to several man I have seen the fact that they say that it is good because it keeps women together and accountable on the way they look however if you are always looking at yourself and criticizing every small flaw that is when there starts to be issues with your time management as well as how you view the world because if your only focus is your body and what your appearance looks to the outer world this takes away from other work and activities you could be taking part in, “The problem with having body on your mind is that it takes your mind away from other things”(pg.69). This is an issue that is similar to a very used term which is food noise which is just the idea that you are always thinking about food and what you are going to eat next and your whole life revolves around it when there are so many other things one could live for. 

There is this wrong image at times, not just of the males around us and the people around us but of ourselves, of thinking there are certain areas that we don’t like about our body that we can change without affecting our health or how anything else in our bodies looks: “‘They had gone through and created a perfect female by taking segments of each girl that they thought won a category. So this person’s face, this person’s chest. And then he told me I had won the torso, which was the abdomen and butt’”(pg.71). How was it okay for people to be taking women’s parts of their bodies an acting as if they could build the perfect woman as if it were that way it could be done the other way around of just saying that men could change this or that about themselves but in reality it is important to look at people as a whole and not just at the specific part about them that you like. 

““She said my face was so fat, who would ever be attracted to me? They were always commenting on what I was eating. I would counter with ‘People should like me for what I am. People should like me for what’s on the inside.’ But it was just this constant barrage of shit about my appearance.””(pg.93) If not even your parents love you just the way you are and are always commenting on your body and your appearance, you are going to believe you are not truly worthy of love. Why was it important to look attractive for a man, as if they needed to make sure they looked pretty for a man and future people who might be attracted to them, as if that was where their worth went??

I think that this book is a hard read because it really makes you think about your own relationship with your body and how body-sick you might be. Still, it is important because it is showing us the reality and the critique of something we have normalized so much that we don’t even question it anymore, one of the main steps that the book talks about is about how we need to critique better what is going on around us so that we know how to avoid it, the book really looks at the reality of not asking women to not participate in their beauty rituals if you feel happy to be doing your make up then that great but don’t critique other when they are not constantly fixing their make up and don’t make it an expectation for example give young girls different gifts instead of just asking them to play with make up and nail products give them other things they can play with and develop their personality around. 

• This is a TEDx talk by one of Colombia’s fat activists, Adriana, but on social media she’s known as Fat Pandora. She has a very interesting story and take on fat phobia in Colombia, and I thought this was a great talk to watch and include in my blog. 
• The talk began with the interviewee talking about how she came to know Fat Pandora from an article she read in a newspaper, and it started with a quote that she gave, which roughly translated, since it was done in Spanish, was, “I am Fat, I dress incredibly, and I will not hide”
• They describe how it seems as if we live in a world that accepts body diversity, with concepts such as body positivity and size models. Adriana normally speaks about these subjects, as well as aesthetic violence and body violence. 
• She was asked how her experience has been, especially now that there is the idea of miracles for losing weight. By listening to this, I am assuming she is asking about using GLP1s as weight loss medication. 
• She speaks about aesthetic violence because she believes there is a misconception that this only involves or affects fat people, but this is something that all women are exposed to. (I can relate this to the book I read about Beauty Sick and how it is something we are just born to face in one way or another) There is constant pressure and watching the body to get close to the body standard society has; in that moment, the more you fall out of this and don’t follow or try to achieve this ideal, you are more exposed to violence. You lose privilege, and this is a type of prejudice. You lose privileges and are discriminated against because of how you look. 
• Fatphobia and aesthetic discrimination almost always go hand in hand, and they are almost sisters. She comes from Bucaramanga, and her mother was a designer, so from a young age she went to buy textiles. Still, she remembers every time they would leave the house, someone would comment on Adriana’s body to her mom; a very common one in Colombia is, “you can tell that she eats her soup,” which means that she is eating more than she should because she is on the fatter side of the spectrum. Since she was young, she did not think this was bad, and her mother told her that they were telling her she was fat. That phrase marked her life, and it shows how children can internalize what they think is helpful. 
• She found her place in the fashion space, having seen her mother as a designer and her father as someone who always wanted to look amazing in his clothing. As a fat woman, or just a woman in general, she learned to figure it out; however, when she went to study marketing and fashion communication in Bogotá, she studied with other girls who looked like what the industry had told us was acceptable, sort of like the actresses in The Devil Wears Prada. She started to think about how she wanted to look this way. She started saying she couldn’t be the only fat Colombian to want to buy fashionable clothing, and she looked at the bigger-size industry in the USA, China, and Germany, where there was an offer for this. Hence, she started saying she bought these clothes from these brands, but she understood this was her position of privilege because she had the means to buy them. 
• She started a blog and took pictures in the clothes she bought. There are fat women in Colombia, and she wanted to prove that they existed. 
• She called her blog Fat Pandora because she has always liked being disobedient; she found ways to compensate for being fat and admired the myth of Pandora. 
• The fashion industry is a Machiavellian plan because they put the seed for insecurities; for example, the thigh gap, and a lot of girls fall into eating disorders, and then creams and then machines started to come out to make it better. They invented the idea that it is bad to have your hip bones stick out, and at one point they started saying freckles weren’t good, and everyone was crazy about covering them up; but now that they are in fashion, they sell you a pen that draws them in for you. 
• Medicine that we don’t know about to lose weight; everyone is very thin right now and following this trend, but in reality it goes much deeper when you get a doctor, and you tell them that you don’t feel well, but they tell you that you are thin, so that must mean there is nothing wrong. (I actually have a friend who has PCOS and was told that since she was not fat, then it was not a problem, but in reality there are so many underlying issues that come with this that we don’t even realize). There is hypervigilance about women’s bodies. 
• One of Adriana’s friends, who is super thin, told her that she was a victim of medical fat phobia and said that she has biomass. She is going to have to get surgery, but they had never examined her for complete tests, and now that she is getting surgery, they will. They saw that she has cholesterol problems, but if it had not been for her surgery, no doctor would have ever found it necessary to do this test because of how she looks. There, she saw the idea that there is this stereotype that if you are fat, it means unhealthy, and thin means healthy; it affects both sides of the spectrum. 
• Pathologizing a body by just seeing it brings a lot of problems to fat people. She has her story with Ozempic, but a different one, and a doctor sent it to her. She started using it, and a few weeks later, the voice of reason, and she heard a third voice of What if we die, and she asked the doctor. She said that there is a percentage of people who can develop suicidal thoughts because of this medication, and she stopped taking this medication. A couple of years later, it came out that this is a problem and a consequence and causes depression and has effects on mental health. This fears the idea that society would rather see us dead than fat.
• The idea of wanting to lose weight has a lot of effects, and there is research that says that women who are overweight earn less money than those who are not overweight. 
• It looks like the world has changed somewhat because there are more plus-size models, and yes, and no, it is the message of society that you can only look fat if you look a specific kind of fat; there is still diversity with fat bodies, and the model of being more fat as a model does not represent all fat people. She does not think this is a victory to see them on a catwalk because these women are not representing all women, and it is not a victory that they choose fat women as a life-saving measure when they see that they are losing their market. 
• What can we say to people who are still fighting these impossible stereotypes? She says to think about what we would have done with the time that we invest in being self-deprecating and use that time on something different, like working, a hobby, and knowing oneself better instead of trying to fit into less space. Secondly, she wanted to say that fat people are not promoting anything or romanticizing anything; they are just saying they want the same treatment and clothing they can wear they want to be treated with dignity.

While I was walking around Frieze and Frieze Masters today, I ran into a couple of stands with magazines from Harper’s Bazaar Art. I grabbed a couple, and later, when I got home, I started looking for articles that could give me information for my research. I found one called “Bodies of Work,” a curation piece by Jo Baring. The idea of this curation was to look at how women are portrayed, but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy and, at the same time, a lot of empowerment. They start talking about Venus, and when people think about Venus, they probably think about the painting The Birth of Venus or the sculpture that is in the Louver,. Still, people do not realize this was done long before that, and that the way she was imagined was influenced by earlier sculptures such as the Venus of Hohle Fels, discovered in a cave in Germany and believed to be 35,000 years old. In these sculptures, many of them depicted the women’s body in a very realistic way, including the vulva as well as large breasts. When people started to discover some of these pieces in the late 1800s, they began to compare them and say she was an immodest Venus, while European representations were modest. (This makes me think about the fact that they were grabbing something that already existed and someone had created and was the actual women form and something they gathered inspiration from and calling it immodest and as if it had less value. This reminds me of some of my readings about how some bodies are considered immodest, and it is similar to what they were doing around this piece.) The reason why they were considered immodest was that she covered her genitals in the Roman version, but in this one it was all exposed for the world to see. It is suggested that these were pieces done by the women themselves as a form ofself-portraiture (This is something that I find incredible: they were able to depict themselves in the nude and the way they saw themselves then, or even at the time when the Birth of Venus was painted, there was so much taboo over the female body, and even though this is something that is being fought against in society, there are different ways in which we can still see them today.)

I found this article from a company, but I couldn’t find their name on the website; however, I thought it had some really good points and could be beneficial to review as part of my research. I found it on a website called Parametex, which sells different types of fabrics, and I thought the name was super interesting. It is recent, since it was published in April of this year, so it offers a different perspective than older research I have looked at. One of the first things I noticed and found relevant is that “fashionable” is in quotation marks, which makes me think about rules that must be broken and the paradigms and belief systems we live in, so I found it interesting to explore. The first part of the article looks at the beginnings of why the thin body started to be so representative in the fashion industry. This article is different from others I have analyzed because it points to a direct shift in the 1960s, when Twiggy entered the modeling industry. Some claim it started in the 1920s, but researchers have different views on this subject.

The article argues that one of the main things we see in fashion is thin bodies, no matter the context; this is seen across runways, magazines, and campaigns. They say this has been the standard from the start and that it shows how fashion is presented and positioned as a whole. In this article, Twiggy is considered one of the pivotal changes: she came in with her silhouette, made it a standard, and shifted the industry away from emphasizing and celebrating curves toward how clothing and fashion presented themselves. This makes me think that it stopped being so much about the body, which was the focus before, and made it more about the clothing, sort of like saying that the curves were a distraction from the clothing and the clothing needed to be the most interesting and important part of the industry; I think it made women invisible, as if they were the accessory and not the clothing. This is what is described next by saying, “the clothing is always the main focus.” It also suggests that, to do this, some people think the best way is through thin bodies; however, this is because it is “original to the design intention.” However, this makes me think about the fact that the intention is made from the beginning of the design, which is the silhouette they design, which means that if we change the process from the rule, or this is my hypothesis, then there could be more change in the fashion industry and the way that the clothing is specifically designed. This isn’t just something that happens; normally, specific fashion lines are produced in very specific sample sizes, which is considered good for speed and organization. Still, for example, if a model does not fit a dress specifically as it is imagined, then they are not right for the dress; there is never consideration that maybe the dress can change, and this is to make the process more efficient, which makes it necessary for models to be in such a small size and always be thin, or they will be taken out of the fashion industry, which tells us that this is the standard. However, this makes me ask the same question: how ethical is this industry, and do they care about the individuals they represent? Because, looking at the media and with my untrained eye, there are women in this industry that look sick from how thin they are, and I understand that there are some people that genetically look like this; however, there are some that need to think about their health and go to extreme measures to be a part of this industry. 

This was made even stronger in the 1990s when models became even smaller, and this is sometimes referred to as heroin chic, and this was made to be a part of fashion identities. Even though it was an issue before, it became much more extreme in this instance. In this era, it became less about the clothing and more about the aesthetic, with models becoming part of it. They wanted models and the fashion industry to be something people aspired to, which raised their standard and led to a hierarchy where thinner was better. This is something that I can connect to the research about fearing the black body, since making women slimmer and making this the standard was a rationalization from racism; they are not on the same level playing field, to say the least, and it is very important to name, but it is a similarity that I find interesting and something to look at further. Since this body type has been so prevalent in the media, it’s important to look at how it shaped people’s perceptions of models and the fashion industry. “What we see repeatedly begins to feel normal…” This makes me think about how many people see models as just beautiful and slim, and it is because the media bombards us with that, which makes us believe it’s normal and something we should aspire to. 

In this article, they discuss how, in recent years, the industry has started to include different body sizes. There is more representation across different forms of media, which is a real change; however, they argue that the default is still very thin, even in high fashion, ps and that these changes take time. However, I disagree with this take because, in the past couple of years, specifically following the Ozempic epidemic and seeing how much worse everything has gotten, we can see that they are going back to that default, and some models look even thinner than they ever had because of this new shift and the fact that this is something you can now buy; it is not accessible, but it is buyable. 

In this article, they argue that the industry’s expansion is not necessarily a replacement for what already existed. Still, it is growing, and more brands offer more inclusive sizing. I believe there is still a lot of work to do in this area; however, this is this writer’s opinion. The way that they are talking about this is to get more consumers: “At this point, material becomes increasingly important. Fabric is no longer just about color or texture, but about how it adapts to different bodies. The way it drapes, moves, and shapes a silhouette becomes part of the fashion experience itself.” After this point, they say they are a company that does this and is part of this shift so that they can have more materials for everyone around them. They claim and believe the industry no longer looks at only one standard; however, I strongly disagree. More people are talking about it, which is good; however, there is still work to be done, especially now that more and more people are taking weight-loss medication. I want to make clear I am not against it when someone needs it; however, there are now people who take advantage of this and make things each time more difficult because it is even an ethical problem: should you take a medication you don’t even really need to fit a standard which has been constructed by society?