Watch out, this is a long one...!
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I've read a few articles lately on the current trend of 'shaming' women. Skinny-shaming, slut-shaming, sport-shaming, shoe-shaming, shirt-shaming, shpoon-shaming...sorry I couldn't resist the alliteration. It's something I've noticed more and more since beginning at university, along with an increasing competitiveness between my friends, subconscious or not, over every aspect of how we live our lives. By this I mean what we eat and how often we exercise, which boys we get involved with or boys we fleetingly kiss (or more), in some cases whether to drink or take drugs, even how much money we choose to spend. I don't know, but I'd like to argue, that it stems from a mixture of things: living in an all-girls house, the explosion of social media, and the lack of control and routine at university, but I'd say the international trend is really all down to that devil social media. For now though, I'll stick to food/health shaming.
Thanks to Instagram, photos of food are now extremely cool (#foodporn) but, weirdly, it's not just photos of delicious cakes and burgers that rake in the likes. It's all that healthy, gluten-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, everything-that-tastes-good-free stuff that truly gets you that desired attention. It's goes something like "look at this amazingly intricate salad that took me hours to make, but will only take up 1cm of my stomach," as if we need everyone to know we are on a dedicated health drive. I mean, it's really great that healthy living is being promoted, it's not as if I want obesity to be marketed more heavily, but there's something a little snarky about it. Hell, I'm as guilty as the next person. I posted a picture of a kick-ass salad on my Instagram, hashtagged it '#healthy', but also '#theniateatleast5cookies' which was deadly true. God I'm a pretentious t*** sometimes. Alongside that beautific vision of a salad also sit filtered photos of caramel shortbread, Yves Saint Laurent pouched chips (don't ask just go and look), a yule log....the list goes on. But I ate every single one of those items of food (other than the YSL chips which I spotted looking funky in my feed so I regrammed). I'm not just going to stare at a piece of food or take a photo of it, if it's there I am going to chow down with gusto. My profile is really quite an accurate reflection of my diet in general, aka I don't diet, and I generally don't fuss about what I eat.
That salad picture though....it's niggling at me. Yes it made for a pretty picture, but I obviously felt some pleasure or satisfaction in being able to publicly show it off. Three years ago, I wouldn't think twice about what I consumed, let alone photographing it - although my Blackberry wouldn't have been up to the job anyway. Even though my parents paid thousands in fees for the boarding school I attended, the food was pretty god-awful and anything extra induced a violent scramble in the boarding house; you were done for if you didn't race up to the study for toast after evening prayers, the nutella would all be gone in a flash. I have also never been sporty, in fact on the whole I loathe exercise. Recreational Squad was the extent of my fitness and included being walked round the school grounds (literally), dodgeball, and pilates. None of these activities even required me to tie my hair up which for me was total, luxurious rebellion.
When I went to university, all of this seemed to change, and suddenly I felt like my pigging-out days had to be counteracted or justified by a hangover. Everyone joined the gym, I resisted until my final year and even then used it a maximum of twice a week. My reasoning was that I ought to get used to exercise or I might, at 25, find my metabolism suddenly drops one night while I'm asleep and helpless and I will have no means of fighting it. But I was also worrying because everyone around me seemed to be doing it. I'm only human and not immune to trends or jumping on the odd bandwagon, so though I'm ashamed to admit it I did let it get under my skin a bit.
I LOVE food. I mean, really really love it. I am a creature of phases, and will often go for weeks eating the same sandwich, but then I discover another and cheat on the first. I'm a serial monogamist of food. And I'm also very lucky that I've never really had to worry about what I eat and how it might affect my weight. I was known for having a packet of Minstrels in every single afternoon lecture I attended in my first year; it probably doesn't hurt that I take a bit more care of myself nowadays. In January of second year, I got glandular fever; weight fell off me and I had absolutely no control over it. It was actually quite worrying. I didn't change my diet or start exercising, it just seemed to happen while I suffered extreme exhaustion and terrible depression courtesy of the virus's symptoms. Some of my friends were worryingly envious. One friend, who was so drunk she won't remember this, asked me to kiss her in the night club toilets to pass on the virus so that she could lose weight too.
This strange turn continued into my time at uni. People started to point out to each other when you hadn't eaten enough, in a way that was patronising, or in a way that was sort of jealous. I can't think of anyone doing it in particular, but it just seemed to become a peer-wide thing. In her article for the Sunday Times Magazine, Katie Glass says we are "pretending people are shaming us when actually what they are doing is pointing things out" but I hate to say I know otherwise, for I would "point out" to friends what they were eating, or how much exercise they were doing with a subtext of concern or jealousy. It's that classic fridge magnet case of 'if you can't be thin make your friends fat', or if you haven't the will power to eat better make your friends feel bad for doing it.
More than one of my closest friends have suffered from eating disorders, and it is the most painful and heartbreaking thing to watch, let alone deal with. I think, for me, pointing things out to a friend over what they're eating is a kind of simultaneous defence and care mechanism, as I can't bear to see another person suffer. But I also had things pointed out to me during my glandular fever, and even when I wasn't ill anymore, and it really pissed me off. So what if one day I felt the need to eat a little less? I'm a woman who just like every other woman occasionally feels her jeans pinch and needs to do something about it. But it's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation: eat less/go on a diet/be healthy/Instagram your salad and you're accused of veering towards an eating disorder, or eat as you please/Instagram that cake and you suddenly feel you're doing something wrong because of the glaring celebrity glamour and promotion surrounding fitness. Everything to do with food and the body now has to be an extreme or an obsession. Whatever happened to balance? As Pandora Sykes so accurately remarks, "It is none of our business what someone we follow on Instagram does or doesn't eat. We have become, as a culture, extraordinarily obsessed with whether or not a woman has an eating disorder - as if we somehow have the right to be privy to that knowledge."
Sadly I think at university, and in general, eating disorders are far more rife than we think, and they come in varying degrees. It can stem from something as small as students feeling they don't have enough money to afford big portions. I want to know what happened to the gals just drinking wine together, gorging on pizza, or dipping Haribo in melted chocolate like we used to do at sleepovers. Now they go to Zumba together, which I am currently skiving to sit on my bed and type this. Luckily, I've come through to retain and gain a pretty stable bunch of friends with whom I can eat to my heart's content, but also have the odd moan to about my tummy. Even so, I'd really like to go back to that time when I wasn't bombarded with every aspect of my friends' and celebrities' faddy lifestyle choices. Pictures of sweet treats and indulgence are always welcome BUT, girlfriend, that cake is for real life, not just for Instagram.
*** The above image was sourced from the 'Models Do Eat' tumblr, with the tags: natasha poly, thin, thinspo, model, model eating, model chewing, supermodel,runway, vogue, cupcake, devour.
Yeh, exactly.
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