Body Image Issues Are Only a Small Part of a Much Bigger Problem.
Hi friend,
If you’re a regular reader of my work, then you’ve probably noticed a pivot in the topics I’ve been writing about lately, and today I want to share why that is!
I’ve been focusing less on body neutrality recently, and focusing a lot more on internalized patriarchy, gender performance and expression, relationships between men and women, and the increasingly popular practice of “decentering men,” all of which reflect the direction I’m feeling called to take my work!
To be clear, I am by no means abandoning my work as a body image coach, or the business that I’ve built around body neutrality for the last decade.
But I am finally ready for my business to mature, evolve, and catch up to where I’m at now, both in terms of my own personal life and experience, and in terms of the work that I’ve been finding myself doing with clients the most!
So in the name of #transaparency—a value that has guided my content for over 15 years and has always served me well—I want to invite you into this decision, and explain why it’s the most natural evolution of the work I’ve already been doing!
***Quick Note: I’ll be referencing both sex (which is biological) and gender (which is socially constructed) in this article, and using a lot of binary language about gender that don’t reflect my personal views. But for the sake of highlighting our social conditioning, it’s sometimes easier to reference what most of us learned—and what many people still believe—about sex and gender being interchangeable, fixed, binary, and prescriptive.
My mission has always been to help women* liberate themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy, and reclaim their agency, power, and feeling of worthiness… so that they could live their most authentic, expansive, and fulfilling lives.*And also AFABs, although that language didn’t exist when I started my business!
In fairness, this mission has been pretty much the same for me since at least the second grade, when I went around telling my female classmates to just say “thank you” when someone gave them a compliment, instead of disagreeing or deflecting, because I noticed that boys never did that.
So at the time I was starting this business, I looked around to see what was preventing women from being free and thriving, and determined that the number one most destructive and unyielding problem facing women was a lack of confidence and not feeling good enough.
In particular, food and body image issues stemming from these feelings seemed to be hurting, restricting, and disempowering women the most. So that’s what I dedicated myself and my business to, and my book Body Neutral was the culmination of my work in this field, teaching people the exact process that I developed to help my private clients decrease or even eliminate body image distress.
But it was clear to me from the beginning that body image issues are both extremely gendered, and extremely linked to our gender performance.
Everyone knows that men and women have completely different “beauty and body ideals,” but we don’t talk enough about how those ideals are shaped by our cultural fetishization of exaggerated sexual dimorphism.
Put another way, those ideals are based on how well an individual embodies the “appropriate” representation of either masculinity or femininity, as understood in our culture.
I used the term “sexual dimorphism” just now because it’s the scientific term used in the field of zoology to describe the condition where the males and females of a specific species exhibit distinct physical and behavioral characteristics from each other, beyond their genitals.
Some animal species do have extremely pronounced sexual dimorphism, like the northern elephant seal, where the adult males can weigh three to five times as much as the adult females, and have enormous necks and distinctive inflatable noses that the females lack.
Humans, on the other hand, are only moderately sexually dimorphic compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, and we’re actually the least dimorphic when compared to the other great apes in terms of overall body size!
To give you a visual, the Venn diagram of biologically determined traits and characteristics belonging to males and females for some species would look exactly like the classic Venn diagram we tend to think of, with two distinct and separate circles having just a wedge of overlap in the middle.
But for humans, the Venn diagram of biological traits between males and females would be mostly all overlapping, with only a small sliver on either side for distinct and exceptional traits.
I’m telling you all this because I think it’s important to understand that there simply aren’t many notable biological differences between men and women outside of our reproductive organs, and that even the differences that we understand to be “statistically more likely” for one or the other sex are incredibly variable, and have a lot of overlap. (Men are taller than women on average, for example, but there are lots of women out there who are taller than lots of men.)
While men and women may not be particularly distinct in terms of biology, however, we have nonetheless worked extremely hard to separate and distinguish men and women from each other socially, culturally, and historically, and the lie that men and women are biologically and significantly distinct from each other is actually a cornerstone of both patriarchy, and of beauty/body ideals.
What humans lack in biological dimorphism we have more than made up for in what I’ll call “social dimorphism” here, in that the ideal gender performance for both men and women is based around exaggerating and emphasizing the traits and characteristics that make them seem different from the other, while simultaneously minimizing or concealing the traits and characteristics that are associated with the opposite sex.
Let’s consider the “ideal man” for a moment, according to our culture.
This man is a fantasy; a performance of hyperbolic masculinity that is nothing but smoke and mirrors, in which he is seen to be both completely distinct from and indeed the exact opposite of a woman.
Any subtle statistical differences or culturally masculine traits or “signals” get exaggerated, with their most extreme forms getting exalted and fetishized, while any traits associated with women or femininity must be carefully concealed or downplayed. This is why the ideal man in various cultures and eras has so often been exceptionally tall, muscular, and powerful, with broad shoulders or an inverted triangle shape.
Earlier, I said that as a culture we fetishize sexual dimorphism, because we are conditioned to believe that this performance of impossibly exaggerated masculinity or femininity would be (or should be) considered the “most attractive” to the opposite sex, and have learned to eroticize and celebrate those supposed gender differences.
It’s only natural, then, that we’ve also learned to feel ashamed and afraid of any traits we may possess which associate us with the opposite sex, or disrupt the eroticized ideal of dimorphism.
A woman could be tall, broad, muscular, strong, and with an inverted triangle shape, for example, but due to their association with masculinity, those traits would be considered undesirable on her, and she would very likely be made to feel embarrassed and insecure about them throughout her life.
We see the eroticization of this falsely inflated dimorphism in the “ideal woman” too, though with some more exceptions and nuance.
The ideal woman is also defined primarily by a hyperbolic presentation of exaggerated femininity, accomplished by both amplifying and calling attention to her statistically “female” traits and characteristics, and by hiding, distracting from, or apologizing for any parts of her which might read to others as “masculine.”
Our definition of the “ideal woman” is much more subject to trends and microcultures than men though, which is why we saw the heroine chic body of the 90s and early 2000s give way to the bootylicious era of exaggerated curves, and then back again. It’s also why the “ideal body” for white women has so often looked completely different from the “ideal body” for Black or Latina women of the same era, and why a “10” in Miami will look completely different from a “10” in NYC, Seattle, or the rural Midwest.
But while the details may be constantly in flux, the ideal woman is nonetheless always rooted in social dimorphism, and a desire to emphasize the ways in which she is completely distinct from men.
Kate Moss’s body exaggerated the average strength and size difference between men and women, for example, by being both extremely frail and extremely small. And both Beyonce and Kim Kardashian’s bodies exaggerated the statistical differences between men and women in terms of where fat gets stored to create lines or curves, making them instantly recognizable as women.
This combination of emphasizing and de-emphasizing, of presenting and hiding traits according to their gender association in order to present ourselves as more distinct from the opposite sex (and therefore closer to the social ideal) is called a “gender performance.”
And while we are all performing our gender all the time and in a wide variety of ways, this “performance” is usually happening so subconsciously and automatically that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!
From the time we’re born, we learn that following the rules for properly signaling and performing our gender to others is extremely important—so important, in fact, that our very ability to be loved, valued, connected, and safe seems to depend heavily on whether or not we are immediately legible to others as either a boy/man or a girl/woman.
We start learning these rules from the time we’re born, and sometimes even earlier.
It begins the moment someone looks at our genitals and declares our sex, immediately filling our parents’ heads with fantasies and assumptions about the kind of person we’ll be, based on false or exaggerated beliefs about sex and gender being more binary, more fixed, more prescriptive, and more distinct from each other than they really are.
And the messages we get about the importance of properly exaggerating and performing our gender keep on coming from there.
Parents pierce their baby girl’s ears and pop a scratchy bow on her head to avoid the humiliation of people thinking she’s a boy. Little girls are encouraged to wear twirly dresses and play house, while boys are given practical clothes and encouraged to play sports. Teen boys are ridiculed for being soft and emotional. Teen girls are sexually objectified and harassed.
All these messages and experiences provide us with a very long list of “rules” and “ideals” to help us manage, signal, alter, change, and present ourselves in a way that makes our gender easily decipherable to others… but that conditioning does still have to come up against our own unique brains, bodies, and personalities!
Most people end up rejecting some gender performance rules that really don’t fit them, while faithfully adhering to other rules—either because the rule itself feels like a genuine authentic fit, or because it feels too important and dangerous to break.
As a body image coach, I work with people all the time who are carefully, constantly, and precariously trying to straddle the line between a desire to be authentic and free with a desire to maintain the legible gender performance required to fit into society and remain safe.
Unfortunately, it’s not really possible to pursue these two goals simultaneously.
Our society romanticizes and idealizes a version of sexual dimorphism that simply does not exist. Nonetheless, our conditioning under patriarchy teaches us that men and women are supposed to be conspicuously distinct, and that being super different from each other is actually the natural, normal, morally superior, and “ideal” way to be.
Not only that, but we learn that adequately performing our gender according to these dimorphic exaggerations is extremely important when it comes to our ability to get our core emotional needs met.
Through both cultural messaging and lived experience, we often come to believe that how well we represent and conform to the expectations and ideals for our sex/gender is largely responsible for our value and worth, our happiness, our social status, our ability to attract a mate, the kind of treatment we “deserve” from others.
But because this all happens completely unconsciously for most people, identifying the real problem in a moment of shame, anxiety, insecurity, or self-disgust is extremely difficult.
Imagining you’re being super mean to yourself about getting “too angry,” being “too harsh,” or not communicating your needs to your partner with the right level of patience, calm, and warmth that would have prevented him from getting defensive, for example.
In my view, this is a clear moment of self-policing and self-flagellation around your gender performance, because your behavior in that moment failed to uphold social expectations and ideals around femininity, which would be extremely distressing if any part of you believes that your worth/value, identity, emotional safety, or desirability to your partner is based on how well you adhere to your gender ideal.
But that’s not how you’d probably think about it in the moment, right?
Probably not. In the moment, your distress probably wouldn’t feel related to your gender in any way at all, and the suggestion that they were related would probably seem bizarre, incoherent, ridiculous, or even offensive to you.
If asked, most women in that situation would probably say that they were just feeling “bad” about how they behaved, or maybe guilty about “losing her cool.” There would likely be no awareness whatsoever of the ways in which her behavior feels “bad” because it violated the rules for which behaviors and traits her gender is supposed to exaggerate and avoid in order to be considered worthy and “good.”
This is why I want to start focusing on this issue. Because until we can identify a problem, we can’t start solving it. And these invisible and unconscious feelings of inadequacy and hypervigilence about what’s good and appropriate and desirable for us according to our gender are so normalized and encouraged by society that they tend to just feel like the truth.
It’s all a lie, but this lie is robbing way too many women and AFABs of their agency and power, keeping their lives small and unhappy, ruining their confidence, prohibiting their ability to be authentic and thrive, and overall preventing their liberation.
Is this ringing a bell, or reminding you of body image? It should.
When I first started working as a body image coach and talking about my job, I had to contend with a very similar problem.
First, I had to contend with the fact that most people didn’t even think they had food or body image issues. They mistakenly believed their thoughts, and just thought it was a fact that they were fat, disgusting, ugly, out of control, bad, or broken.
To those people, their body or appearance really was, quite literally and unambiguously, the source of their suffering, and the only way to stop their suffering would be to change something about how they looked.
But even among people who were able to accurately identify that their distress was the result of body image issues rather than something about their actual body, I still had to contend with the fact that they generally thought of body image issues as being a matter of faulty logic, irrationality, superficiality, or “caring too much about what people think.”
With the people in the first category, I didn’t have a job, because they wouldn’t have bothered to hire a body image coach.
But with people in the second category, my job—especially in the beginning, before I had made so much content online talking about this!—was to convince them of a few crazy-sounding ideas:
That their body image issues existed for a deeper purpose, and that they were always trying to help or protect the person in some way.
That the key to overcoming those issues was to strip away all the false or inflated meaning, significance, and moral value that society had taught them to attach to their body and appearance.
As I said before— the new direction that I’m going with my work and my business now isn’t really new. The “problem” I’m helping people identify may be different, but it’s really just another facet of the same issue.
I’m still helping women and AFABs liberate themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy, but instead of doing it exclusively through the lens of body image issues, body image issues will now become just one part of the many ways in which we’ve learned to falsely assign meaning, significance, and moral value to our gender performance.
Now, I think I need to give this problem a name, so that we can talk about it with the same ease and clarity that we talk about “body image issues,” but I’m not fully committed to a term yet.
For now, I’m thinking of calling this problem either “gender image issues,” as a play on body image issues, or “gender performance anxiety,” because it draws what I think is an appropriate parallel to sexual performance anxiety, which is entirely rooted in a person’s gendered ideals and fears. Or maybe just “gender performance issues?” (Feel free to hit reply and tell me what you think of these terms, or suggest your own!)
To me, dismantling the bigger picture of patriarchy’s prescriptive gender performance ideals is the natural evolution of the same principles and process that I’ve been using to heal body image issues since the very beginning, and I am unbelievably excited to get started!
If this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to learn more or explore this issue together, please hit reply now and let me know. I’ll keep writing about it here in my free content, but I’m also available for private coaching!
We can dive into the deep end together and start identifying and dismantling the places where your specific idea of an “obligatory gender performance” is holding you back or harming you, OR we can start with just a single session to dip a toe in and see if this feels like a fruitful direction for your personal growth and healing!
Thank you so much for being here, whether you’re a more recent reader or you’ve been here since I was making fitness content about empowering women through lifting heavy weights.
Your support and engagement mean the world to me, and I cannot express how excited and emotional I feel about updating and maturing my “brand” to really reflect and express ME again.
Big hug,
Jessi
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