Who owns the body?
How do beauty standards, consumerism, and loneliness, shape the way women see themselves and their own body? In this essay, the author walks through the streets of Paris and reflects on whether the choices women make about their physical appearance are truly their own. Perhaps society has taught them what to want.
I walk the streets of Paris and watch the people around me. Tourists look at the buildings, ignoring the locals. The locals, annoyed, jab the tourists’ shoulders. I too want to feel someone’s touch. But I’m neither a local nor a tourist.
My body exists in space with other bodies. I feel the coolness of the November wind, the warmth of the sweater on my skin. The scarf is tight around my neck. This cold space is shared. But I feel like one of the stone buildings lined up along the street. Nobody cares about me – except for the dogs who, trotting past, glance at my legs with curiosity.
I stop, nailed down by a gaze: an ad for a women’s swimsuit towers in front of me, reminding me that both I and my body exist in the context of late-stage capitalism. In today’s world, nearly every ad dictates expectations for my body. Youth and beauty are promoted to me as the most desirable qualities in women. I feel significant pressure to submit – so that I’ll be liked. Capitalism, luckily, doesn’t just highlight problems; it also offers solutions. It feeds on the feelings of lonely people. To quit means to vanish. Shopping “for oneself” delivers a quick hit of dopamine, which washes pleasantly over consciousness and pulls attention away from reality. I can buy a young and attractive look for a mere four hundred euros – the cost of a red-light LED face mask that promises a reduction in visible wrinkles after just a few uses.
The American feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky considered the body as an object of politics that carries certain ideas. Another author, Barbara Grabowska, wrote: “The politicization of bodies leads to their peculiar alienation. One’s own body turns out to be alien and hostile. (...) it can hardly be called one’s own anymore since it is the product of disciplinary procedures and the result of patriarchal relations of domination.” In other words, over time, we build an avatar of our own body, imposed on us by society – only to end up hating this body because it isn’t perfect.
For a while, one’s body can be ideal in the eyes of society, making the person unique and desired. But over time, the attractive avatar will inevitably age and lose its shape and, thus, its value; others will distance themselves from this once-desired body. We see this in the case of actresses who cling to Botox and plastic surgery as their only way to stay afloat in Hollywood. They often say that, by reclaiming their beauty, they remain feminists, because they themselves choose how they want to look.
Here I see the fear of being abandoned, forgotten. Research shows that dislike of one’s own body significantly affects feelings of loneliness. This is a subjective state in which we feel insufficiently connected to other people, no matter how many are around. As Pierre Bourdieu wrote, aesthetic preferences form the basis of social judgment and determine whether a person belongs or not to a certain group. The shape of the body, the haircut, the clothing – they, too, all function as ways of satisfying others’ preferences. We all long to be liked by others.
Capitalism, meanwhile, offers ever more possibilities for “improving” oneself” by eliminating “unsightly flaws.” Body hair, lips that are too pale, “wrong” skin tone, or sagging skin – there’s a product for everything. We are sold trends toward a particular body shape and youth, making it look as if this were our own choice rather than a propaganda campaign benefiting corporations. For example, ever more is being said, since the second wave of feminism, about how shaving one’s legs is also a feminist choice, even though everyone knows that razor ads for women were originally built on the conviction that body hair – specifically women’s – is unappealing.
This kind of approach serves to promote all sorts of products for women. Becoming a better version of oneself, they claim, is not submitting to demands but expanding one’s own capacities. As the author Jemima Repo writes, the Western take on feminism as something that can be sold is nothing new: abstract feminist slogans about “girl power” and women’s rights have been used to sell soap, razors, makeup, clothes, and other products at least since the 1990s. Motivational appeals in ads often hint that women’s emancipation is in their own hands.
The propaganda of attractiveness and youth as pledges of a woman’s social success directly shapes the perception of her own body as one that is constantly in need of intervention. At the same time, pressing issues – such as blaming rape victims for being “too attractive” – are left ignored. According to Jemima Repo, “companies engaging with commodity feminism refrain from addressing the social, cultural, material, and economic pressures that have historically shaped women’s relationships to their bodies. By offering feminist ideas back to women in a commodified form, power structures are discounted as the cause of women’s oppression. The feminist movement is consequently also disregarded as a solution to it.”
This is how post-feminist ideas emerge, treating freedom and equality as already achieved, and feminism as a no-longer-needed relic of the past. Women are promised confidence, happiness, and self-fulfillment through consumption (marketed as self-care), rather than through broader social and political mobilization. A belief feeds into this, described by culturologist Martin Roberts: sexual appeal gives women power over patriarchy – rather than subjugating them to it. A woman may no longer be an object, but as a subject she is still viewed through the lens of appearance.
There is a direct connection here with the neoliberal focus on self-improvement. Neoliberal capitalism is built on the lives of people like me – those seeking a sense of belonging and trying to fill their inner void. This is a space of educated greed that motivates the improvement of one’s own “self.” Philosopher Michel Foucault was among the first to point out that neoliberalism, extending beyond economics and state policy, also rethinks individual behavior. Individuals are viewed as constantly investing in their physical and psychological qualities to accumulate human capital that maximizes their usefulness.
In the café I’ve walked into, lunch is wrapping up. A piece of roast fish on my plate symbolizes my mortality, because to keep my body functioning, I have to eat. But then, I choose delicious food that supposedly feeds a “hedonistic spirit.” I pick up my fork and, embarrassed, avoid eye contact with a woman who looks like a model: she gives me a guilty smile as she opens the restroom door, which bumps into my table. “Parisian cafés…” She shrugs, looking self-assured. This woman is different, attractive, nothing like me at all. I try not to compare myself to her, even though at this moment she and I share the same reality, that of “growing older together,” as Alfred Schutz wrote. The awareness that even a conventionally attractive woman is growing older, too, warms my heart.
Finally she returns to her table. Her tiny, expensive handbag, slung over the back of her chair, could hold at most a lip gloss. Smooth legs, delicate tattoos, glossy lips, boldly made-up eyes – everything about her screams that this woman is not burdened by the question of whether her body belongs to the system or to herself.
Isn’t this the perfect embodiment of the neoliberal subject as described by Foucault? Such a person, rational and selfish, follows the demands of consumer society and keeps track of trends, being, as they say, “an individual who invests in themselves” (that is, doesn’t mind splurging on a red-light mask). According to anthropologist John Gledhill, neoliberalism seeks to attach value to human relationships, while simultaneously measuring one’s social worth merely in terms of consumption that markets a certain lifestyle to ease the suffering. The tiny handbag belonging to that woman from the café illustrates this best. Perhaps I’m simply envious, because it seems this woman has managed to strike a balance between her own body and the system we both inhabit. She looks happy. I look tired. I pay my bill and walk outside. The swimsuit ad shines like the last ray of hope.
But if you think about it, I’m just as much a representative of neoliberal capitalism: I’m an active feminist, yet I’m obsessed with myself; I don’t shave my legs, but I do get Botox injections; I’m lost within my own body, perpetually lonely, and thus in search of a quick dopamine hit. No matter how much tasty food I (don’t) eat, how many gorgeous mass-market clothes I order, how many steps my skincare routine includes – I will always be missing something.
For now, I enjoy the privilege of consumption-slash-dopamine oblivion, because I have the money for it. This kind of existence is, for me, like a codependent relationship. I’m a tiny particle that feeds the mechanism of capitalism, and that mechanism, in turn, helps me avoid collision with harsh reality. It doesn’t get any easier, though, so I keep searching for salvation on advertising banners. And I keep feeling like a stranger in the city crowd.
Translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv
Illustration: Viktoria Malik
