Goes Without Saying - body-positivity is pointless: the tea is hot but so are you

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

it's time to throw your fitbit in the bin and delete 'myfitnesspal' because we're going IN on diet culture. in this episode of Goes Without Saying, we (sephy & wing) are exploring fatphobia, body positivity, body neutrality, and ~of course~ women's endless objectification under patriarchy. join the conversation every monday. speak your mind on instagram! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A-Cast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. stories about Dave and his family. We're excited to welcome you back to the warm and welcoming world of the Vinyl Cafe with our new podcast, Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Each week, we'll share two hilarious stories by Stuart, and for the first time ever, I'll tell you what it was like behind the scenes. Subscribe for free wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Hi guys, welcome back to High Priestess. I'm Erin.

And I'm Persephone. And... Oh, I thought we were getting a hate comment, but we're not. Okay. Oh, thank God. Forget it, I just got a notification. I'm kind of living in fear. Same, the incel army are... Of the the men that are gonna come and attack me it's real though it's like a bit too real i'm happy we're

growing but with every comment i mean i get shivers down my spine my butt cheeks are clenching yeah i didn't expect to start the podcast like this but maybe we will it's fucking real like it's actually not a joke like i completely get i mean i've always got it but now i really see why influencers are like you need to put more um restrictions on comments and holding people accountable for what they say because it's insane so i've got a man coming to rape me tonight i've got a man coming to shoot me in the head tomorrow yeah i'm an'm an absolute fucking joke. My parents hate me. We're fucking ugly.

I need to go and die. Also, it's like, oh my God, people actually do hate women. I thought they didn't anymore. I didn't get the memo. People actually physically hate women. Yeah. If a woman says anything, there's 10 men. You're a fucking liar.

Women don't get raped. They lie about it. It's like, oh my goodness. Well, it's bizarre to be attacked for saying that rape is bad that's the bottom line isn't it if you read the post the post that is doing ever so well it's running a marathon as we speak for each amazing reshare that that post gets that's reaching kind of their 300 followers three of which are their weird people in their class at school who are fucking incels racist incels i think the main problem that i'm

having with it is that i'm constantly i try and get rid of it within kind of 10 seconds and most of the time i do unless they come in kind of overnight and then i wake up to them and i'm like right straight on my phone like jack this morning was like i literally opened my eyes went straight to my phone to check and they were all there immediately screenshotted them me straight to animal crossing yeah literally and he was like you need to you need to have like five minutes yeah and i was like okay fine fine whatever put it down like blocked one but i knew there were more so i blocked one put my phone down i was like yep fine okay two minutes later i was like i actually can't i don't know what you want me to do just sit here and stare in space while the time is ticking until i

can get back and block them all because what bothers me is that i know our page isn't a safe space we're not advocates for any instagram page being a safe space for who like who was that for but i don't love that there are literally women who have been raped now having to see men be like yeah fuck you in the comments it's so gross i also feel bad that because you wake up earlier than me so then you get by the time i wake up i'm like oh what a lovely morning everything's spick and span little do i know erin has spent the entire morning i've been up cleaning all night yeah i'm like wow god we just got so much love overnight like so stunning what a stunning space we've created little do i know erin's been like cleaning it up like tidy it before she wakes up like tidy it before she sees it and you've gone through a big nightmare there's a lot i my my camera roll

is full i know there was one morning where i saw it and i thought these people need to get away from my fucking page you know what's a shame actually last night was the first time i had to do this someone had liked this girl had liked one of their comments one of the men's comments like attacking women and i clicked on her because i was looking i blocked him and then i was looking to see who because when you block them it deletes the comment too so it's all nice for you guys when you see it two in one yeah exactly kill two birds with one stone exactly and so i clicked to see who would like it so i'm gonna get rid of him as well fuck that and then i clicked and it was a woman and she follows us and i was like well you're blocked as well lady you don't you're not you don't get to be here why i don't want you here well completely harassing my girls

absolutely not get out of town i think that's the thing it's like actually you don't get this access to this incredible platform for free and you're gonna come in and say sorry but we don't believe any women that have been sexually assaulted. Then you can fucking leave. I just don't love that you lot are participating so sweetly in something that I think is so pure. And then lo and behold, the men are out to get you.

Yeah. So anyway, good morning, everyone. Rise and shine. It's a lovely day on over at Ecomorama in Laputa. We're having great days. Exactly, yeah. But also,

maybe you should announce on the podcast your gifts because we got in big trouble oh yeah we got in trouble because we didn't announce what the big present was that i that i got over straight from ariana on she came over to lapita gave me a present um and it was we put it on the story so you may have already seen it it was an incredible sort of fortune telling tarot set and it was so stunning it's in my house it's right next to my incense oh your incense also gifted by me with a kind of fridge and a mixer also erin yeah she says oh i've got one special gift for you turns out like 10 it was honestly she came with a rucksack full of gifts just dumped out my pockets and your entrance honestly my house is just filled with

gifts that erin me. It looks good. The island's coming along. Well, thanks for being here anyway, guys. Thanks. We're going to talk about body image today. Something I wanted to start off by talking about. Oh my God, this morning I was listening to, I mean, it's definitely something that everyone else has already heard of and I'd never found it before. It's a podcast called, let me just check just start my podcast by recommending somebody else's podcast um it's called black gals live in so good like i actually fell in love oh wow okay i have to listen it was just i love their dynamic and one of them i literally don't even know their names i literally just found them this morning so i'm so sorry let me find their names jazz and vic and one of them i don't know which one because i don't know them yet but i'm already in love one of them said blah blah something is nang and i was like oh my god you

didn't just say nang like i'm obsessed i haven't heard that word in like a decade love it you should go and listen they're really funny great recommendation love a recommendation love to divert our traffic somewhere yeah exactly within the first five minutes it's like oh you were here no you should probably go somewhere else um but i was listening to an episode where they were talking about blackfishing and something really interesting that they were kind of touching on was kylie jenner just kind of like the standards of body image etc etc along with blackfishing they were saying how interesting that when kylie jenner did you remember this when When she like got her lip fillers dissolved or whatever. And they were saying like, you can see it moving away from the current

Instagram body that we have at the moment, which obviously is massively commodifying black bodies, black women, which is then validated by the eyes and desire of black men amplified by the pockets and the financial security of the white men and then further confirmed by the participation and like never-ending doom of all women who comply with it and they made a really interesting point about well one of them had a theory that we're going to move away from the Instagram body and move into a more natural looking body as in we're going to move away from I think they said man-made um and that that is going to die out over the next two years was their theory I thought that would be quite interesting wow yeah by 2022 your bbl is going to be extracted I don't know how you can get rid of it I'm assuming it

gets extracted I don't know do they cut it out I don't know i have no idea i'll phone my plastic surgeon i'll tell you yeah exactly but i just i remember thinking back when kylie jenner got her lip fillers dissolved like oh this could be quite a moment because if she would have done that for like six months 100 we move on to something else do you get what i mean like people would have dissolved their lip fillers for sure yeah and i think it's interesting that even kylie jenner i actually really genuinely believe doesn't understand the um the weight that she has in that she sets it's not just about she's such a trendsetter it's like no she really largely informs what the rest of the world does or what they see as attractive see it as the idea well in the way that she said

who would even use snapchat anymore and their stocks like collapsed yeah that's crazy you have the power to not only dissolve your lip fillers but literally dissolve tech like a huge tech company economy how insane i thought that was a really interesting combo they were having and it was kind of something that i was definitely thinking we were going to bring up in this episode anyway absolutely love it I guess I mean influencers are a hundred percent coming up Instagram fucking social media classic classic classic it's just classic chat guys it's all going to come up can I bring up a point that one of you had and actually quite a few of you were kind of echoing it but I thought I mean there was like of the ones

that I saw there were so many people saying this same thing which I thought was I would have thought was quite niche quite a niche experience but it's I thought it was really interesting how many people could relate my dad calling me fat and ugly growing up shaped me into having low body image parents came up a lot i thought it was specifically interesting someone else said my dad once said to me there's no middle with you you're always too fat or too thin and it's stuck loads of people say my dad always used to comment on my weight my dad used to say this about me my dad said that it's like what the fuck so interesting from the dad yeah so interesting from the dad because often a common thing that we received was um

kind of mothers passing that on to the daughter and i think that makes sense which i definitely think we should talk about as well absolutely because that that makes sense because women have internalized a load of shit about their own bodies and of course they see a younger version of themselves and they're kind of almost trying to protect them from growing up with a non-ideal body but also they're pushing on essentially eating disorders and like diet culture onto their child so it's so interesting from the dad well why are people's dads commenting on their body because female bodies are sexualized and i wonder if there's almost a part of it of like your family being respectable so in the same way they want

their son to be like a doctor yeah they want their daughter to be beautiful yeah they want their daughter to be beautiful quote unquote beautiful i also think there's something specific about often a daughter's desire to please her dad oh my god totally yeah and impress their dad and like and make their dad proud and like do enough for their dad because i think women grow up to put a man's opinion on a pedestal yeah and maybe the purest form of that is your dad's opinion yeah because just male approval is seen as the highest approval if we could get a big ceo man to put a stamp on higher processes this is worthy then amazing it definitely is then but when it's just two girls thinking this is cool or a girl about her own

body thinking okay i'm happy with this until the the big man of the family comes and says yeah you look good it's not confirmed yet it's not canon yeah completely completely that um it's the same thing as one direction not being no one's taken seriously if it's a big group of girls who are backing them but in the same way i mean i have my own family dynamics but i would 100% want my dad's verdict over my mum's i mean that is it's a long story but i definitely have had from a i definitely have had since i was a child a way stronger desire to please my dad it's definitely more specific isn't it because your mum's approval is almost just my mum's approval is almost just an extension of myself like she kind of would approve she would approve

of the things i would approve of usually but my dad is kind of like it comes from a different angle it comes from almost like it does almost seem more authoritative it comes from the man it comes from a male's angle yeah i think it really is that simple obviously everyone has their own relationship with their parents i mean i think my dad oh i'm not getting into it but my mom i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily trust her judgment as much on things anyway i'll leave it there but i definitely have always craved my dad's approval about everything uh maybe actually not so much about my looks but definitely about like my intelligence and my work and the things that i produce your worth essentially how much

you are worth i mean maybe i was just lucky to never have my dad fucking comment on my body yeah it's a really specific thing that it's kind of breeding within you like your opinion of your body after that is going to be seen as a performance for the male gaze it can't not be if your dad feels that he can comment and in a kind of not in a we're worried about you sort of way which it's masked as that yeah often i've seen that kind of we're worried about you yeah it's that kind of discourse about we're concerned we're just raising this almost like an intervention um that's just masked as we want you smaller smaller less less like just be more makeup just hide yourself more be less speak less be thinner don't embarrass me yeah don't

don't mortify me please you fucking idiot but if it's coming from your dad in that way there is a really specific thing of like then i know that my body is a performance for the male gaze it cannot exist for me if this man who i'm supposed to respect is commenting on it in that entitlement to female bodies there's just a male entitlement to women's bodies and i'm sure he's no george clooney george clooney's funny i'm i mean dad bod where does that come from like i'm sure he's i mean no i'm sure your dads are all lovely young men well but i'm sure they're not the fucking hot stuff george clooney is a funny one like i haven't thought about um george clooney in quite a while i don't

think about him often george clooney i don't think i've thought about him since like gravity with sandra bullock oh my god yeah with sandra bullock where he kind of dies at the beginning spoiler and then never to be seen again i think he's just like what oh but they i bet they sold it as a george clooney yeah they do and he just kind of floats into space but literally the opening scene is him flowing away into the distance like fucking aunt marge it's so strange he's just like going he's like talking like i'm going out to space now sandra it's like i don't get this movie she's like sorry you're gonna have to carry the film from here sandra she's like shit i needed a white male to sell this film it's like now it's a woman's movie fuck no one's gonna watch it shit take it away oh i'm taking it away yeah so take it away

only i feel like i'm fucking chit chat shit chat like i don't talk this is just a shit talking podcast now i think so body image body image body image what all the image shmody image you can tell we've just had a five minute break body image shmody image this is what happens when we take a break we're like we come back i'm like i've got something to say and i come back with body image shmody image useless um so but i want to kind of talk about body neutrality and body positivity because that's a big topic and i actually have many thoughts on this because we did have an episode on body image before the og listeners will remember will recall you may have noticed it is now nowhere to be seen nowhere to be seen i'm sorry guys the pilot season has been cut

it's been cancelled the pilot season is over party cancel culture's real and we've cancelled the first season but you've got this amazing season and we're gonna keep it going um so we did speak in depth about our own histories with body image so if you're an og listener you will remember but i was talking a bit i remember about the complications that i feel personally with like body positivity and body neutrality and how i think we should all strive for body neutrality which i completely think we should i was almost thinking about it before we started recording about what it's so fucking arbitrary that we should feel pressured to feel positive about our bodies when it's like i would never have like brain positivity like i feel so positive about my brain if you think that you do

feel positive about your brain though and so do i absolutely but i don't feel any pressure to feel to feel actively positive about my brain like i if i feel stupid that's it if i feel like i feel ugly that should just be it it shouldn't be i i feel body negative as a whole like it should just be it changes on a daily basis it's like a fluid relationship i was just going say the stat for how many of them said that their body image changed so 77 of you said that your body image is changing only 23 said that their body image was stable yeah i think if it is stable i mean i hate that for you oh i don't why do you hate it imagine if it's stably bad oh yeah that wasn't what i imagined yeah okay well that's not good is it i'm like well

that's rock bottom yeah that's not good stably bad obviously if you want it to be stable good but also i think everything is changing and it's really unrealistic to be like my relationship with anything is just purely unchanging can you name anything in your in your life experience that your your relationship with is stable. Can I name one element that's stable? Is there anything in our lives that's stable? I wouldn't want anything to be stable. And by stable, I mean unchanging.

My relationship with my dog is like very stable. Like I know he's there every day. But then also it's like he's going to die one day. Touch all the wood in the world. I was going to say, I didn't want to say it but when otto dies well maybe then it's more about is your relationship with your body more stable or more unstable healthy or unhealthy almost yeah with a healthy amount of change wait can you name anything in your life that you think is stable no not really i guess are we mad are we depressed we got nuts i'm literally looking around my room

like is my plant stable this is that's why i came out then i came out with my hair i was like what do i have literally well some things are stable though some things are more stable than changing yeah like for example my experience of my brain is stable rather than changing i constantly um it's always one of my favorite things about me absolutely but i think it's her mind yeah honestly her mind but this is the thing it's one of my things that i have always felt positive brain brain positivity let's get it trending that's really strange brain who are we i know what the hell but there's nothing about me that's changed more than the development within my thought i can't do this today so sorry should we cancel the podcast wait so nothing hang on let me get this straight

nothing has changed more yeah than the development within my brain yet it is one of the most stable relationships and that is right i've always felt positive hashtag brain positivity within my brain yet it is one of the most stable relationships and that is right i've always felt positive hashtag brain positivity about my brain but that's because the trajectory is quite linear but also the ridiculousness of i've thought about my brain my brain is the thinking thing we are bizarre it's literally just like what but then i think that's because um are we've been lucky enough to have a good starting point at kind of three like brain development i get as a babies and then uh you can't see me but i'm doing almost quite a nazi salute with my arm to show the trajectory an upwards motion exactly almost

on a graph an upwards graph yeah of our of our minds but that's still stable even though it's it's changing because it's developing it's still it's still stable do you get what i mean it's not irrational yeah true it's stable growth it's compound interest you get more every time yeah yeah so maybe it's not so much about changing well initially i wanted to put unstable i guess then stable can be moving but then it's not like volatile as in it so do you have a volatile relationship with your body oh what was i talking about body neutrality yeah god tangent city yeah so i feel like with body positivity it's almost easier to get to with an objectified body under the male gaze it's almost easier to get

to body positivity and flip your mindset and still see yourself as like an objectified being under patriarchy and be like okay now i don't hate my body but i love my body rather than remove all sense of objective objectification and suddenly be neutral as if it's your brain as if it's nothing physical it's just like it's i'm just neutral with it i thought that is such a difficult place to get to oh so you think it's easier to get to like kind of a mindless positivity because i think there are symbols of positivity i.e lizzo i would see as a symbol of body positivity of flipping the ideal of what's of um of what's desirable and showing like positivity about her body whereas body neutrality there can be no symbol of it because

it's just viewing it as if it is not objective wendy's small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy.

It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. It's kind of Lady Gaga in a meat dress.

Go on. It's kind of Lady Gaga in a meat dress. I want nothing else to lady gaga in a meat dress i want nothing else to say meat dress lady gaga 2009 meat dress meat dress um lady do you think do you get what i mean i don't know what you mean go on expand okay let me get to it as well we can do this together let's let's see what i mean kind of i start a sentence and I don't know where it's going to go. If body positivity is Lizzo in her little body suit performing and being a body that doesn't fit into what largely capitalism deems as conventionally attractive,

quote unquote. But still objectified as well, like still under. Still sexualized. Yeah. It's different because it's still objectified, but objectified almost in the art world when lady agar turns up with a meat dress it's still an expression of something it's not necessarily an expression of sexuality but it's still using her body um to fit into

some sphere in the world to gain recognition from something yeah i like it so it's in between so it's not body neutrality but does body neutrality have to be there's something yeah i like it so it's in between so it's not body neutrality but does body neutrality have to be there's something about body neutrality that i don't love because it's almost like yeah i am here in this vessel and i don't really want to ignore that well i i'm not um a practicer i guess of body neutrality i almost see that that would be incredibly hard to reach i do know some people that i would say are like very neutral with their bodies i think it was in the other episode that we did on body image which is now gone you said that there was someone in your life that you think is really um neutral about their bodies and and

they came back to you and said i think you just think that because i'm not conventionally attractive and i don't put a push on being conventionally attractive or whatever it's still even body neutrality me saying Lady Gaga's meat dress is because I don't think it's a sexy thing to do to turn up in a dress made of meat yeah hashtag vegan life yeah and it's the same thing of being like oh my god you're so confident about your body like you're so brave wearing those shorts absolutely to a fat girl or being like oh my god you're you just like don't care about your body you're so like body neutrality when it's just like the fuck i didn't ask me to say that totally yeah i completely agree so i would view this person as very body neutral because almost there has been an emphasis on i don't give a fuck i don't give a fucking fuck what i do still um that

person in a way fits into the lady gaga thing of trying to avert the mainstream because they're very artsy it's the artsy yeah it's like an art let so in a way it's the lady gaga thing of trying to avert the mainstream because they're very artsy it's the artsy yeah it's like an art let so in a way it's still objectified and still in a way performative it's not sexualizing yourself for conventional the conventional like gaze of mainstream media but it's kind of sexualizing yourself for the art world which is a different form of gaze it's just like you are now yeah and it's like oh it's not the male gaze for all the boys that follow you on Instagram. It's the male gaze for the men in suits who are going to be ticking off your artwork.

Absolutely. So are you, would you work on more body neutrality? I think in a utopian society, there would be body neutrality. As in that means there is no emphasis politically and like socially on how your body looks. It is just purely your vessel to move

through the world in the same way that your eyes are just vessels to see through but this is the thing i think you can have your own relation but i think the relationship in society in society is quite toxic of it's all based on performance and being smaller smaller all of that stuff but personally but personally i would be more inclined to label myself towards body positivity because i think that's kind of an easier switch for if you've grown up feeling kind of shame and guilt around your body to flip towards a different form of object objectification which allows some empowerment one way you benefit yeah rather than flip towards a neutral stage which almost seems like how can you remove yourself from the male gaze when we are

we only exist as that yeah it's almost kind of um don't hate the player hate the game exactly yeah just flip the game yeah yeah so it's kind, well, this is the situation you've been dealt. You can either capitalise on it too and try and exploit the oppressors and kind of benefit from your own objectification or reject it. And what do you get then? Well, I think body neutrality would allow, if you can get there,

God, surely that's the happiest place you can be with your body. Something about it i'm not sold on it as in you wouldn't want to feel it's very unthinking though very unselfconscious i wouldn't want to feel neutral about my about about anything but i think i'm kind of a i think i'm kind of i think i have a problem with neutrality i was gonna say we're not very neutral people yeah especially something like my body which is literally how i experience the world is the only tangible thing i have about me ever literally the

only thing that i own jack jack sorry he's singing that's that's getting cut that's gonna absolutely rip your ear holes out sorry that's going at the front that's going at the top of the box at the very beginning it goes jack jack shut the fuck up he just texts me sorry trying to think of an idea does that mean you have to sing it just happens okay yeah i think i this is the only this is the only thing i will ever have my physical body my skin if i can't like i'm gonna try and do you really want to be neutral about your only thing yeah do i want to be neutral about that i'm not trying to be a neutral i'm trying to be like fucking in sixth gear my whole life like it's not really the only thing that i have physically

i'm gonna try and rinse it for what it's worth yeah i think the thing with new body neutrality though is the argument is that by being neutral and unselfconscious about your body it allows you to be in sixth gear is in it allows you to be focusing on the real things rather than focusing on how you look and how you perform in the world as a woman it allows you to be being the fucking ceo okay so something i think this largely fits into then something that i asked on the podcast was about how often you think about your body and how often body image is on your mind so i think maybe that's what this is as well with body neutrality is kind of the absence of consciousness of your body yeah i think it is that it's just not not always having a microscope like having a feeling

as if there's like a fucking magnifying glass to your body the whole time of like okay i need to change this you change this or even like being unaware of how you show up in space i feel like with any kind of eating disorder or body dysmorphia you're constantly aware of how you are showing up like how you appear and when you get rid of that it's just like okay now you're free yeah or you can flip it to body positivity where you think that you look amazing in the space so you can there are the kind of which one is more empowering one you're working with in patriarchy i think the two are not mutually exclusive then i think you can be body positive and that can fit into your body neutrality as in you are neutral about your body because I mean, someone said they think about their body 80% of their day.

Wow, okay, yeah. And so I think, yeah. And so I think body positivity for some people can be actually your body neutral. You have a lot of neutrality about your body. You're not forced to think about it all the time. And then you can be body positive. But actually maybe that only works for people like us

who largely fit into society largely fit into society's ideal of what our body should look like small white young girls then i think that's the issue too because body positivity really isn't for you and i exactly it's somebody else's movement and what i want to run around saying oh my god the only thing i have that's tangible is my body and i love it's somebody else's movement and what i want to run around saying oh my god the only thing i have that's tangible is my body and i love it just shut the fuck up yeah exactly it's like of course we do yeah like no one told you not to love it oh but they did though they did oh yeah the every waking moment of every day but they told us the least of it kind of thing the body positivity that's available to white women and the body positivity that's available to black women or trans women and fat women versus skinny women it's huge like it's complete a

completely different form of language that's used because whilst there's the encouraging women to be smaller smaller smaller there is the language of just like complete shame it is a shame that i mean it's more than a shame every movement started by a black woman is completely um eclipsed by a single white woman who wanted to like show off for a bit even if she had good intentions so how do you think then people like us can interact with a movement like the body positivity movement I think it's about accepting the fact that if you think that oppression exists on levels it's about accepting that you are not the most oppressed here because you're a size 12 and you want to be a size 10 that is not um cannot even compare to the oppression faced by a black woman

that operates in the world and her body is seen as othered and dangerous and not allowed in certain spaces and the world still largely is built for you. Like chairs are built for you. Machines are built for you. Instruments are built for you. Yeah. A book that I recommended in the other body image episode is Hunger by Roxane Gay that you need to read if you haven't. I mean, we talk about Roxane Gay so much. read if you haven't if you i mean we talk about roxane gay so much she's so so great beyond beyond words but um hunger is about her she's a black woman and it's about her relationship with obesity it's so complex and so beautifully written and just explains i read a quote in the other one about oprah i remember um about weight um oprah talking about weight watchers or ww as she's renamed it yeah

yeah it's just like isn't that it's bad it's bad news should we explain that quickly so weight watchers everybody knows weight watchers i assume it's kind of a like slimming world kind of essentially cult diet program diet program where women are and women and men but predominantly marketed at women are encouraged to like go on extreme diet like eating plans um to lose weight essentially and oprah bought weight watchers and rebranded it as ww to kind of it's not about weight anymore it's about health and it's about living your best life it's the push towards wellness yeah it's kind of a wellness oprah kind of fit it's oprah's brand it's kind of

i'm growing my vegetables in my garden and i am glowing and i'm oprah and i'm amazing beautiful but it's still um pushing this horrific message of women be smaller take up less space um starve yourselves so i've just found this quote from roxane gay because i realize it's quite ridiculous for me to be saying in the other episode i talk about this quote but it's like actually that episode's gone and we've got many more listeners now doesn't exist so this is the quote that i read in the last episode um about oprah and ww um so roxane gay writes in yet another commercial oprah somberly says inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be. This is a popular notion.

The idea that the fat among us are carrying a thin woman inside. Each time I see this particular commercial, I think I ate that thin woman and she was delicious but unsatisfying. And then I think about how fucked up it is to promote the idea that our truest selves are thin women hiding in our fat bodies like imposters usurpers illegitimates stunning chef's kiss like beyond amazing chef's fucking kiss honestly i just think that idea that women you do know if you just did all of these ridiculous steps you could be like this woman and it's like what is this idea that we're not whole also the peakest part i think

is that you're the fat girl all your friends love you you lose that weight and you get to your real skinny self all your friends are gonna fucking hate you now genuinely yeah exactly we liked you better when you were insecure you little motherfucker and you're still you you still have all the same problems you can't place happiness and success on some otherworldly goal and achievement that you think, once I'm a size 10, I'll be happy. Once I'm a size 8, I'll be happy. Once I have this, I'll be happy.

You will never be happy until you're happy with yourself, who you are. Getting quite preachy now. Do you know what this is? Just to make it even fucking more cheesy and worse. It's literally Dumbledore saying, it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live and forget to live it literally fucking doesn't and i know i just fucking quoted harry potter harry harry harry it literally is fucking true you cannot have this figment fucking phantom of an idea that you're chasing um and forget that you're still going to be you inside that body you can't

run away you can't lose weight your way out of your problems you're still gonna hate yourself everybody's done that as well put your happiness in well once i've got this i'll be happy and then you get it and you're happy for kind of six hours and then you're like right on to the next thing what next i actually just gonna get super personal um but i remember speaking to my therapist about this and i remember saying but yeah i'm coming from a privileged thin position here um but i'm just gonna say something that i said to my therapist i remember saying when i'm thin ridiculous when i'm thin i will be so happy i just need to be thin then then i'm done and my therapist was like will you though what will you be when you are quote unquote thin what will you be and i was

like i'll be i'll be thin and she said yeah but what does that mean i was like oh but then i'll be happy and blah blah blah and she's like no you won't you'll be thin like that when you lose weight you will be thin that's it you got that what do you want now oh well now i want this now i want that as well now it's true it's just like you then you just want everything else there's no the target is just ever moving so it's bullshit guys constant search for gratification from some thing that is never really about who you are yeah it's nothing to do with you and the dream of being thin is not your dream it's a dream that just someone else gave to you someone else wrote that fucking script before you were born it was already written in you that you're gonna want to be look

like a little child you're gonna hate yourself so what we're just gonna sit around and hate ourselves or we're actually gonna try and figure it out oh okay so one thing i found really interesting which i cunningly asked you so i said your friend's bodies are better than yours yes or no 60 similar 66 of you said yes my friend's bodies are better than my own i thought this was so interesting that you asked this and then and then i asked if i woke up and i had my best friend's body instead of my own i would be and only 46 percent of you said happier it was pretty neck and neck for a bit so 54 percent of you said that you'd be unhappy still 46 percent of you said you'd be happier if you woke up with your best friend's body.

Shall we discuss? I would love to discuss that. It's a fascinating like way of asking that really, because my friend's bodies are better than mine. You go, no, they're not, blah, blah, blah, click. But also when you say, I would be happy, or you can go, yeah, yeah, they are. Everyone's bodies are better than mine. But when you made it so personal of your best friend it's like everyone's picturing a person right now it kind of flips the whole concept on its head it's like oh my god what we're switching three two one body switch it's like what's happening meanwhile you also told me that 79 of you notice and analyze other parts of other people's bodies you're all aware yeah of your best friend's body you're all

aware of a stranger's body even and her body is available for your analysis would i rather have that no i wouldn't rather have that bit of her but maybe i'd have her boobs it's like what is that like why are we so fragmented in our own understanding of like ourselves and our genuine best friends like our loved ones we're like her body no next her body yeah i'll take it it's like what world is this kind of oh what was that fucking film disney channel original movie robot girl pixel perfect pixel perfect pixel perfect yeah yeah yeah i remember it and he who was that guy i have no idea kind of chad michael murray kind of a classic guy he's kind of malcolm in the middle guy let me just google it it's definitely like a makeup brand now it's like the new tamagotchi oh my god he's a

stud oh he was phil of the future oh when i said he was a stud i i wasn't concentrating anyway look we were 15 we were younger than 15 in pixel perfect not even we were like 10 right yeah literally way younger um in pixel perfect this i think it's the guy uh creates the girl of his dreams by taking like angelina jolie's fucking eyebrow bone and fucking christina aguilera's shoulders and all of this and and create and kind of the girl from school's little ears ultimate male gaze i can't believe this existed how crazy is that for a disney channel movie but it's like the it just shows that we just don't you know what it is early 2000s yeah literally and it just shows that we don't view women as whole beings

we're not like whole we're not complete i can chop you up so easily in my mind yeah it's like oh i want her eyes and her i'll take her bum it's like no no but that's like me like it's so fragmented it's so weird so bizarre it's also just like and who do you think you are to analyze the fact that i have ears eyes and mouth and nose and that you get to decide which ones you like and which ones you don't and you're gonna cut me apart and create a fucking frankenstein's monster no fucking way and for who you'll still be miserable yeah no fuck that no way that's so bizarre it's crazy this is just something that just came to me um me and my friend were having a conversation this was like years ago but she was saying that she used to do this thing

where she used to think if I could, this is probably where she was thinking this. And I think we've, some of us probably had similar thoughts. I think it was probably quite a bizarre thing that a lot of us have thought that if you had a button when you were like sort of 10 years old

and you could switch to any body, suddenly you're gonna press the button and you get a new body, but you don't know who it's gonna be. Like's just you get a new body and i remember my friend saying that she would press the button she would switch her body because she would think that's like next level self-hatred but she would do it because she would think well i might get vanessa hudgens well it's kind of anything else is better than me so yeah but it's kind of that in the come on well you may as well just die now then but how sad we've done that to 10 year olds we've done that to 10 year

old girls just anyone but me press that button well so i always think now and this is i think largely the problem is that i think now the disc there's a disconnect because so me with my consciousness i'll literally say to jack i know i look good and i know if i looked any other way i'd be unhappy about it because i know i've really, really lucky with the hand that I've been dealt in the way that that hand so proportionally fits with what society would want me to be. And yet, when I look around the room, i.e. when I look at you listening, and I know that you wouldn't say the same about yourself, even though chances are it's true, because I know that you wouldn't say the same about yourself even though chances are it's true because I've seen you in your fucking profile pictures and all your little posts with your

little cheersing and you just got your degree and all of it I know who you are really stalking them what are you doing I look at them and I know that you same as me fit into what society wants you to look like I think it's just so important that somebody like me acknowledges the reality and the privilege of that reality because the longer I ignore what everyone's been saying my whole life in order to be like quote-unquote humble or self-deprecating, the longer I do a disservice to other women by not acknowledging the privilege that I have. You literally can't scream oppression and suffering when really you are the oppressor the people like me who will hijack the body

positivity movement and be like no like i'm just like perfect i'm just like not perfect too like like we're all the same blah blah the glossier girl yeah glossier girl yeah when the actual roxane gays of the world then don't have the space to run their own movement and have it be taken seriously because all of those jobs and those campaigns that were running under the pseudonym of body positivity now get kind of the white girl who took a picture of them slouching with two rolls on their stomach and then them posed with a perfect quote-unquote perfect bod when it should have been the fat black women that we don't see anywhere near beauty campaigns fashion campaigns etc i think the sooner we can get a grip on what we look like which is

why i think everyone is dysmorphic to be honest i think the sooner we can get a grip on the realities of what we look like and how much and how far we can or cannot fit into what society wanted then we can understand where the body positivity movement and what that needs to actually um alleviate these women of their oppression because how really how useful is it for me to be like when i was younger i didn't like my uh fucking elbows meanwhile roxane gay can't fit on a fucking plane has to get a seat belt extender like it's like the world is not made the world is still set up for you but then it's made for us and we're saying thing is though like i just really don't like my um like my eyebrows aren't a good shape it's like i just really don't like my um like my eyebrows aren't a good shape it's like oh look well it's all right we'll give it 10 years and they will be

genuinely yeah because the phases are constantly changing oh my god there's an amazing book called beyond beautiful by anushka reese and i i'm obsessed with it and i love her and also the beauty myth yes naomi klein yeah which open up so kind of so clearly, so glaringly obvious how beauty standards change so much. And if you don't fit into them now, you kind of would in like 1895 and you would do in kind of 50 years time and all of it is vapid. I 100% think the beauty myth, if you haven't read that, it does does the whole thing about it changing is so interesting because it's like this ideal it was made and marketed by white men directly for you knowing that you would pay to look like it but it's changed throughout history so many times if you think um fucking there are places it feels unbelievable that there are places in the world where saggy boobs are seen as the ideal you want

big flopping saggy boobs that is what you want it feels almost laughable but that's because we have been so marked we've just literally been indoctrinated with marketing towards prepubescent children that's like small perky boobs maybe big perky boobs but they must be high youthful that is will keep our women essentially young and dumb because women can't get over the age of 31 let's just keep them basically as stupid as possible because they're as young as possible and uneducated let's just keep them children keep them children wax every hair off them keep them tiny yeah there are places that exist now and there have been periods in time where things that we would consider ugly were seen as the ideal.

And if you were born then, you'd be fucking fighting for that. You'd be like, let me let me fucking put on as much weight as possible so I look wealthy and I look like I can afford to eat. It's the same thing. The goalpost of success and happiness is constantly changing. It's literally not a tangent. It's not a real thing. It just so happens that you've been born in a time when looking like you don't eat is the fashion and also even within the ideal it's a massive contradiction because there really is no one perfect body and that not all men don't tell me those words scarring what fits the male gaze oh my god yeah not all men um but yeah not all men are unanimous in their vote for what fits with the male gaze? Oh my God, yeah, not all men. But yeah, not all men are unanimous in their vote for what fits with the male gaze.

Even if you are, quote unquote, the perfect body, well, someone else has the quote unquote perfect body and they look completely opposite and they're functioning right now at the same time. There are a million ideals of beauty running right now and you probably fit into some of them and you probably don't fit into loads of them, whatever. You're never going to be what you want because you've you've already

been born sorry sorry yeah we already picked they've already sat in the fucking creator sim and made you and they didn't put the sliders where you wanted them sorry about it like you can do what you want with custom content you can do what you want with your fucking clothes and your look but you are who you are this is why i think body neutrality is so kind of um revolutionary as an idea at this time though because it's with body positivity it's this kind of um be happy with who you are be happy with this stuff and there just is no pressure with that if you think of your body as something so neutral there's no pressure and i think this pressure to be like be happy with your

body be happy with your body is like why like why is there this pressure to be happy actively happy and amazed with your body almost like how i would think about kind of my fingernails i have very little feelings about them in any way like they're just a part of my body that i just i have no i have no feelings about them my nostrils do you know what i mean this whole idea that you must be like elated with your body and like so um so proud of it almost it's like can we not just be neutral can we not just be like i don't think about it i'm busy something that it makes me think of i love that so much i completely agree with you something that it makes me think of is intuitive eating yeah intuitive eating in the thing in the sense that that is essentially a quote-unquote normal and healthy way of eating intuitive eating basically

is you just you eat when you're hungry yeah and you don't worry too much about what it is and you're eating relatively like different things every day and you're getting the nutrients and you just call it a day waves you don't feel guilt and shame there's like there's no there's not much feeling attached to food rather than hunger it's not self-conscious it's not going oh my god the thing that i struggle with with intuitive eating to grasp is it is essentially as i've what i've just described and should just be everybody's normal eating pattern so i could put my hand up and say yeah i'm an intuitive eater when really i just have what i've just described which is really what should be the ideal for everybody. the way that my body is the default and so maybe there is a need for body positivity because we need Lizzo whose body is not neutral and whose body is not the default obviously that's a construct

her body isn't is neutral it's what she was born with whatevs but society told us that Lizzo's body is not the neutral and so when somebody like Lizzo can be bodied positive, it makes room for all of those people who have that body, and even just a body that is subverting the default, to then make way for a kind of free reign over, okay, well, you can be body neutral then no matter what, no matter if your body is inherently neutral. You can't have body neutrality until everybody's bodies are neutral and inherently now in this world black bodies are not neutral we've set up a society where um fatness is not neutral so i think we need the the liberation like the actual act of like the empowerment of body positivity to move through um and level a playing field i think a big part of it is I've never ever had a

moment where I've thought oh I've gained weight or all my stomach isn't I don't have a 24 inch waist anymore I've I've really had a I think I physically had a stable body and so that leaves room for a stable body image I think yeah I'm like it it is what it is like this is this is why i say i've been dealt a strong hand if i wanted to i could go and be a fucking bikini model but i don't want to but if i wanted to i could and i think there's so many girls out there who don't acknowledge that they could because you've been told that it's and it's cool to be self-deprecating. You're only likable if you hate yourself. So why is it only okay for me to be told that I look a certain way? I can just tell you.

Let's just cut the shit. Enough people have told me. The mirror tells me. The scales tell me. The fucking measuring tape would tell me too. And it all means nothing because so what? So coincidentally society will praise me for my waist. Okay well I'm also lucky now that big brows are in but if I was 10 years older I would have been plucking my brows into oblivion and I wouldn't have fit in in that way. It's just

coincidence. But I think women need to get to a place where they can be really just get a grip on what they actually look like because I think there's so much power in it it's not so much to weaponize your body but it's almost in the way that your body has been weaponized by white men you need to go kind of sort of gryffindor you need to take it back appropriate take your body back it is appropriation i think that's why i love kind of the body positivity movement even though i don't really slot myself into it i love what that's doing for the world because it is essentially appropriating horrific messaging that we've received our entire lives and flipping it completely on its head and watching the fucking um insecure white boys of the world squirm and go she's fucking gross lizzo's i don't fucking like to look at cellulite all of

the stuff is like yeah because you're fucking quaking in your fucking boots i don't care about it happening i just don't want to see it in my face yeah you're shaking because you find her hot and you're confused or you're upset to see something that you didn't approve yeah taking a spot that you could never have owning power that you will never understand she didn't need your stamp of approval to start twerking on a stage. And she's doing it. And oh my God, how the crowd is cheering. I wonder if in a way she did.

Yeah, interesting. I wonder what Lizzo physically, or I wonder what Lizzo has had to sacrifice. There's an amazing interview with Lizzo. There are actually two amazing interviews with Lizzo. First of all, I waited an IGTV with her, which is really great. But also the one that I highly recommend is Style Like You. If you know Style Like You,

God, I fucking love them so much. Go on their YouTube channel, Style Like You, like a little U. The letter U. Back in the day. And they interviewed Lizzo before she was Lizzo. She's wearing like this bright red wig. It's for their What's Underneath project.

And she like takes off an item of clothing every time they ask her a question and the questions are really personal. was lizzo she's wearing like this bright red wig it's for their what's underneath project and she like takes off an item of clothing every time they ask her a question and the questions are really personal at the end they always say like what's your favorite part of your body or something like that like one of the questions they ask and she starts crying because she's like my skin and she's never realized that the thing that's most weaponized about her is her favorite thing about her and then afterwards she wrote this amazing song called my skin which is stunning because she like realized in this interview about her skin blah blah and just this video is so interesting because she talks about when she kind of made the decision to um stop dieting and stop trying to lose weight because she was in bed i mean i'm

just going to recount interview she was in bed she'd slept with this guy that she really was she was seeing she really liked him and he was saying my friends he said to her my friends think you would be way fitter if you lost weight because you've got really pretty you've got a pretty face and she was like fuck like i'm the smallest i've ever been i have lost so much weight i've been dieting starving myself and i am the smallest smallest i could possibly be and it's still not good enough like it will never be good enough what they want so i'll just be me and i just think that is the most empowering fucking moment it's kind of the moment lizzo became lizzo where it's just like actually if you don't fit that fucking ideal they're never gonna accept you so you might as well fucking flip the ideal on its fucking head somersault somersault and just be then just fucking stand on a fucking stage and twerk and have make millions and millions

of dollars this is why i think it's a waste of time for people like me to go oh but my but my blah blah the sooner you can be so much more helpful if you just understand all of the ways that you have been um quote unquote lucky to just fit in so easily into the world and what everyone wanted you to be and what the men wanted you to be but also i think that's the thing of you you you do slot in but even when lizzo was slotting it exactly it's still not good enough it's still not good enough so i think even as the super privileged white women that we are that kind of oh i think i could lose weight here or i think i could get my bum more toned or whatever we need to on two on two sides acknowledge that we exist with immense

privilege and it is not our role to be boosting ourselves up in this situation but also acknowledging that we have been conditioned to hate yourself but conditioned by lots and lots of essentially a lifetime of like patriarchal messaging that has told us yeah but you're still not good enough even though you fit you're not good enough like you're still fucking ugly still men don't want to fuck you like but you should always want them to like all of this stuff happiness isn't external no the more you keep feeding yourself with external validation you'll be absolutely starving hungry starving it's not happiness and confidence doesn't come from actually physically what you look like but then still i speak to people and they're like i am counting calories and things like this and it's like god like we're miles off we're utterly miles off i'm speaking

now am i yeah god every time after we take a break we've just got to stop taking breaks i'm like what you just pointed at me like you go give me a nod um okay so i think we're gonna wrap this up i think body image is such a fucking huge subject that kind of also everyone has an opinion because everyone has a body like it's not as if unless we have some um sort of astral protecting souls involved yeah hey if you're listening from from the void welcome from the void but it's kind of like oh yeah we're talking about breakups or something it's like not everyone can relate but this is like pretty sure you have a body and pretty sure you have a complex relationship with

it so or some kind of relationship your body will fit in somewhere yeah thanks for listening as usual you said you were gonna you said you were gonna say something funny thanks for all your beautiful messages i was getting into it it was not funny but i was gonna say it's you tell your joke knock knock it's not funny but i was gonna say when we weren't recording and i thought oh quite nice for you guys to know as well i actually listened to the podcast the other day oh my god erin doesn't fucking listen i find it fucking rude i don't really listen to them because it makes me kind of ill um but then i thought you know what people seem to like this podcast so i'm gonna listen to it and i thought yeah it's actually fucking good podcast which one did you listen to the last one that we did glow ups nice glow ups yes and i was

like this is good i completely feel you though because i edit them and i honestly sit there i mean the hours it takes to edit i sit there thinking fucking hell we're morons like yeah it's bad our voices are unbearable well this is why i didn't like it when i edited them i was like this is a chore well it is yeah because you're cutting out every um, and um. Yeah. But I was really impressed. Also, we do this really annoying thing, which I edit out. You guys won't know that we do this annoying thing, or unless I've missed some.

But before we start speaking, we go, um, and it's like, oh, every cut, every time. And I'm listening to each one. It's like the worst ASMR video of all time. It's like, oh, God, like cutting us our voices it's awful so we do an annoying thing that you guys don't are not aware of fun fact hopefully don't know about thank you so so much for all of your messages as usual like all of your um interesting insight into body image um we'll definitely touch on more hopefully if we do another episode on this i would love to do an episode on i think we said this but i'd love to do an episode on like surgery

like plastic surgery and shit like that i would love to because some of you mentioned things like that i just so you all have such interesting stories it's like god we could literally spend two hours i mean not even we could spend all day literally reading out your stories they're so interesting we never really struggle for topics because it's literally like there's so much going on in the world like god the world is big like there's so much going on that it's like yeah i can't even move for topics stop talking like how do we pick one thing so but keep sending us your stuff because fucking hell i love to see your ideas thank you everyone for listening we'll leave it leave us a review we've been getting some reviews and it's really fun some oh it's so heartwarming it's honestly so heartwarming to

get those apple reviews so go over to apple even if you're on spotify i know you're fucking listening on spotify right now but go over to apple apple.com the app you know the app you know the app store you have an app store yes go there type in hybrid stress down the bottom five star review and then just write us a little thing five stars unless you i'll leave the rating up to you but i would say five star podcast um leave us a little thing just write like just write these words so amazing would highly recommend send that in if someone does that now i'll die i would actually love to know even if you don't review i would love to know what it is you like about the podcast

because you're always like oh i love the podcast i'm focused i'm like why like i would love to know why what is it well there was a funny time me and you had a conversation where i was like yeah because it's like a comedy podcast and you were like no no no no it's not a comedy i was like yeah no it's like a funny thing like they listen and laugh and you're like i don't think they do i don't think people are laughing at the time people weren't really laughing i had like a bit of a crisis where i was like oh wait i've been viewing this i was like but i'm yeah it's like hard advice oh well thank you guys yeah thank you so much off we go stick around see you next week see you next week can't wait for all your amazing reviews bye right bye