The renowned Nannen Prize is awarded once a year for special journalistic achievements. Among the winners in 2020 was the photographer Marteline Nystad, who was honored for her pictures in the BRIGITTE dossier “The Body Revolution”. In this dossier excerpt, BRIGITTE editor Alexandra Zykunov asks herself: Does body positivity really change the way we treat ourselves?
I have a problem. I am 1.72 meters tall and weigh 74 kilograms. I don’t have a problem with that, but with the fact that I always think I’m slimmer than I am. When I reach for a pair of trousers in the store, I think: I can easily fit in them. Not even getting them over my clenched thighs in the locker room. My friends say: “Be happy, you just have a positive image of yourself.” Yes, you could also call it unrealistic. At least I know exactly where this foreign perception comes from. From everywhere I see slim people. They stagger through my shows and the commercial breaks in between, they fight zombies in my husband’s paddle games, they wear hipster clothes in my favorite shops, and they smile happily at me from my Instagram feed. They are in my reality 24/7, so they are my reality – and the reality of all of us. That’s a problem.
Curvy, dimpled and sagging female body parts
But now something is changing. Because in this very reality, a counter-movement is spreading, which only a few years ago found its followers in relevant blogs in the furthest corners of the Internet. A movement that is striking, repulsive and, quite frankly, almost unbearable for the eye. Because it forces us to see curvy, dimpled, sagging — yes, fat women’s body parts. Bodies that are not considered beautiful, have therefore been made invisible for generations and declared abnormal – although, and this is the perfidious thing about it, they are the normal average of our society.
“It has long been proven that the body image portrayed in the media has a major influence on how we perceive our bodies,” says Ada Borkenhagen from the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, who researches the connection between eating disorders and media consumption. So far, the studies could be summarized as follows: Young, thin, white women in social media and pop culture drive their fans by the hundreds to feel dimpled, fat and ugly. But the new development is: in 2019, the fat people suddenly have a following of hundreds of thousands. Which suggests the thesis that plump women could have the same influence on our body image, but in reverse, says Borkenhagen. It just hasn’t been researched yet – because the trend is so young. However, in a current survey by BRIGITTE and YouGov, every second woman says that the more curvy women she sees in the media, she feels more comfortable in her body.
107,000, 411,000, 1.8 million – the followers of fat activists like the German make-up artist Charlotte Kuhrt, the US yoga teacher Jessamyn Stanley or the British plus-size model Tess Holliday also speak volumes. They call themselves “fat,” of course, and are fighting to return the term to what it used to be: just a word to describe one of many body shapes. Value-free and without holding up a hand.
Armpit-Vaginas – A normal woman’s body
“Two girls wrote to me last summer that they wore a bikini for the first time in their lives. Because of me,” says Melanie Jeske, better known as Melodie Michelberger. The German “body image activist” naturally posts photos of herself in her underwear, cross-legged, on a stool, size 44 on Instagram emerge. Armpit vaginas – that unspeakable name for the fat gap between the bra strap and the upper arm.
Just a normal woman’s body. It’s just that it’s not at all normal to our eyes. “We all have exactly the same viewing habits,” says Michelberger, “which means that billions of women around the world worship this one minority of white, thin, young women. That’s not normal!” Her photos are radical, they’re disturbing and, let’s face it, they’re not what you would call beautiful. First.
‘Cause they’re doing something to me. Because I now see Melodie’s pictures on my smartphone every day, two things happen. Suddenly, the otherwise “normal” thin influencers look frighteningly unhealthy – that surprises and irritates at the same time. And secondly: Your own physique in the bathroom mirror at home seems somehow more normal for the first time.
Naturalness instead of self-optimization
Corinna Mühlhausen, guest professor for trend and future research at the Technical University of Lübeck, also observes this phenomenon and speaks of a turn that has never been seen before in the modern age: away from self-optimization towards naturalness. The year 2019 as a turning point? Why now?
“If you hear everywhere that this is the millennium of women, women can do everything, take to the streets, uncover grievances, bring down powerful, male decision-makers – then it will do something to you,” says Mühlhausen. “You free yourself from a dictate, the dictate of the unconditional fitness lifestyle.” That doesn’t mean that people live unhealthier lives, “but they go away from the outside towards a feeling: What’s good for me? That can be jogging. Or just lying down and sleeping.”
No wonder, then, that critical voices are also being voiced at this point, accusing the movement of encouraging fat people to adopt their unhealthy lifestyle. But this thought is based on an argument that has also been passed down for decades: Being fat means living unhealthily.
Body positivity photos win the Nannen Prize
stereotyped thinking in society
“The health risks of obesity are overestimated,” wrote the magazine “Psychologie Heute” recently, citing the “Düsseldorf Obesity Mortality Study” from the University of Düsseldorf, which observed more than 6,000 obese people for over three decades. The astonishing result: People who are officially obese do not get sick any more often than leaner people. Naturally, there are also counter-studies here, but the internist Dr. Anne Fleck says, for example: If an 80-kilo woman does sport and a 60-kilo woman doesn’t, the fatter woman often lives healthier. It is not the kilos that are decisive, but how healthy the metabolism is and how much inflammatory fat is stored in the abdomen around the organs. And you just can’t see it from the outside! Point.
But before some people start yelling: “That’s a free pass here to only eat caramelized burgers!” Of course not. And of course exercise is important too. Only: The fact that this idea has to be put down on paper at all shows the pigeonholes in which we still think. For a society trimmed for thinness for a century, a fit fat is still a mindfuck.
At least until now. Because when social networks suddenly influence hundreds of thousands of women in a positive way about their body image and medicine also differentiates its propagated understanding of being fat = unhealthy more and more, the fashion industry, which degrades everything over size 42 as plus size, should have no other choice have than go along. The most amazing thing is that it actually does.
In the summer of 2018, the fashion giant H&M photographed underwear models with visible stretch marks on their thighs and bottom. Yeah okay, they were still thin, but still. The well-known hip underwear label “Aerie” in the USA now shows its models completely without Photoshop, but with fat folds, hair and – watch out – armpit vulvas. Result? 40 percent more sales. And the global online shop Asos tried out a tool last year that showed one and the same clothes next to the slim model a click away on a fat woman. Almost as a matter of course. Here, too, the response was gigantic, the shop is now working under high pressure to get the tool ready.
Can women be fat again? – No!
This is certainly not done out of pure charity. The brands are afraid. Don’t worry about missing the boat, like “Victoria’s Secret” just did. The underwear label, which once celebrated bombastic success because it let half-naked super-beauties glitter down the catwalk, lost more than half of the share value in two years with its parent company. The company stands there like a fossil that didn’t hear the shot. And the woman? Penalize it. Thanks, no thanks So have we overcome this overbred ideal of over-beauty?
Can women be fat again, openly, publicly and obviously? Unfortunately no, say critics. There is still a lot of injustice at work. And feminist voices in particular are asking why everything in this movement has to revolve around female appearance. The fact that at some point people are no longer interested in their appearance is utopian, says trend researcher Mühlhausen. Because we are programmed that way. Because we have an anthropological need to belong and to be recognized.
So the fact that we compare our bodies will not change. But what can change, and does, are the standards by which we judge. Ignoring this would undo the achievements of this movement. Even if slim overbeauties still stagger through my series. But the new pictures teach me something.
You are teaching me to finally find peace from the self-shaming in the dressing room. Of course I’m not going to greet my armpit vulvas with a morning high five. Instead, though, I can wonder if their namesakes didn’t actually have other problems. And observe what it does to me when I see the fat pads on more and more foreign women’s arms. And eventually I won’t care about mine. Instead of hating her and, to a certain extent, hating myself. Therein lies the power of this revolution.
Marteline Nystad actually photographs models. With her naked self-portraits, she wants to disrupt – and change – our viewing habits.
Alexandra Zykunov no longer wants to squeeze herself and her “armpit vulvas” into a beauty ideal that some Horst came up with 100 years ago.
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This article appeared in an issue of BRIGITTE in 2020 and is still shockingly up-to-date in November 2022.