It’s no secret that a woman’s percieved ‘value’ is now based solely on what she looks like. No matter what a woman’s achievements are they pale into insignificance against what she was wearing when she received her award for creating a new sustainable energy source, whether she showed cellulite on her thighs when she pulled three children from a burning car or what brand of moisturiser she was using while she was working out a cure for cancer. It has got to the point where young, fit and healthy women are having invasive surgical procedures to look ‘better’; misogynistic abuse meted out to women via the safety curtain of the internet is stomach churning; champion tennis players are advised by male BBC presenters that they’re ‘never going to be lookers’ so they’ll have to fight.
Yes, I know all that. And yet, it was still a shock to me that there were control pants for pregnant women.This was one time when I assumed we would be safe from that judgement; a time when a woman is blossoming with the new life inside of her, her fecundity a shining beacon of the miracle that is nature. I assumed she would be cut some slack and not be expected to look like a catwalk model while she gingerly applies ointment to her vulval varicose veins. Some women face grueling exhaustion and other physical and emotional symptoms during pregnancy but hey, her thighs will look FABULOUS while she’s bent over the toilet pan for the 15th time that morning. The sickening thing about the company selling these things is that they use insidious language to get inside the heads of their target audience.The word power is used a lot and while it may be like trying to peel a sausage trying to get these repulsive garments off for the thousandth time that day to pee like a racehorse I’m sure the only thought in the mind of the pregnant woman will be, ‘Goddammit, I feel SO POWERFUL!’. But where is the power in restraint? Where is the power in fretting over whether you’re exactly the same size and shape as everyone else despite the fact that you are holding new life in your belly? Where is the power in strapping up your blossoming, fecund body? And where’s the power in wearing something that fucking UGLY!
The question that kept popping into my head was, ‘What is it about the female body that frightens us so?’ Why do we feel the need to restrain it, to squeeze, squash and mould it into an entirely un-natural shape with hideous industrial strength elastic? To mask it with layers of make up and fix it with serums and chemical lotions and surgical procedures? It’s as if a woman’s body unfettered is some kind of threat to national security; that if we allow women to feel confident and happy in the bodies they have they will rampage through our ‘civilised’ society, voraciously consuming everything before them and stomping on all our carefully constructed moral codes. Can you imagine the sheer anarchy if we allowed women to feel that they are valued members of society, valued members of the human race, just because they exist and that it doesn’t cancel out the achievement of winning a Nobel Peace Prize if you have a bit of chin hair and your knickers aren’t made of steel.
So, yes, I was cross. I still am. I was cross enough to make a video about it. I dithered about the ending and whether it was a bit trite that she finds happiness with another person and not alone but the ‘Restrainopants’ catchphrase, ‘We love you because no-one else will’ clinched it for me. I felt it was important to counter the suggestion by these sinister companies that you won’t be attractive if you don’t wear their restraint garments. It’s nonsense.
The video is called ‘Wabby’s Flabby’ as a nod to the Japanese aesthetic concept of Wabi Sabi and the acceptance and embracing of impermanence and transience. We grow old, we change and so do our bodies. That’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to embrace and revere. We are beautiful whatever age we are, whatever size we are and we should celebrate that.
As Geneen Roth says:
“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)”
― Geneen Roth, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
To fully embrace that we need to stop listening to the multi-billion dollar companies who bombard us with the notion that our bodies are a problem to be fixed by caging and fearing ourselves and that they can sell us just the cage we need.
