I’m tired of being told my body isn’t good enough

Waist training, skinny white-girl yoga bodies, “hot curves”, cardboard protein shakes — this girl is DONE.

According to my social media feed, going to the gym a few times a week and eating healthy is no longer enough.

We don’t just do yoga because we want to stretch and switch off, or heaven forbid develop an actual spiritual practice — we now need the “yoga shred” (advertised by hot skinny middle class white girl, obviously) complete with designer yoga pants and top that looks more like bondage gear than something you see in your average yoga studio.

My gym (who I won’t name, because to be fair to them they did take this criticism on board) recently advertised a class called “Curve Appeal” for women, which had me absolutely raging. They have taken the “appeal” out of the class name following my complaint about the rampant implied sexism in it, but they have, sadly, kept the “curve” — because women are all about the curves, obviously — we can’t be solid, we can’t have mass, muscle, or lines — we must be soft curves. Just soft enough to “grab on to” but of course, not too soft, otherwise we would be considered fat rather than curvy. Too solid, too many heavy weights and we are masculine. We are telling women they must not just exercise, but train a certain way to be socially acceptable.

And let’s not forget the bloody meal replacement shakes or whatever the fuck they dress them up as these days. I thought Slim Fast had gone out with the ’80s and thong leotards, but apparently not. It’s back, though under a more apparently “healthy” disguise, with words like “100% plant-based” (seriously, that beige cardboard shit no more resembles a plant than I resemble Megan Fox, I hate to break it to you). They still taste like arse, and they are, no matter what the Beachbody coaches say, still a slimming aid, despite all the life coach bullshit about how it’s all about balance and strength and health. They are a substitute for giving your body real fucking food. We are still telling women to deprive themselves of real food to be socially acceptable. And that is not acceptable.

Last of all, guess what’s apparently back in fashion? The Victorian practice of waist training. Yes, I shit you not, this is now becoming a thing again.

Oh, let me count the ways in which this is fifty shades of FUCKED UP. Apparently, these girls even wear their waist trainers to the gym. To the gym! Not only must we sweat off our fat and sculpt the appropriate curves, we must also lace ourselves so tightly into a corset while doing it that we can barely breathe.

Not only must women not eat real food, they must not even breathe a full lung’s worth of air, if they wish to have a socially acceptable body.

I would really like to be able to go on to my Facebook, do my posts for my clients and check in with my friends without being bombarded with a bunch of adverts designed to make me feel inadequate as a woman. To make me feel that I must alter my body in fairly drastic ways for it to be considered even vaguely socially acceptable. The implicit message is that my physical female body, without such alterations and “training” is wayward, it will do terrible things. It is dangerous, a body that must be tamed, even physically abused, whether by lack of food intake, excess physical activity, or horrendous contraptions of metal and Spandex, into submission.

Women who spend hours in the yoga studio working on their hot yoga body, (sorry, “journey to enlightenment”) or in the gym perfecting their “curve appeal” have no time to question what society throws at them. Women who are too exhausted from dieting and can barely breathe through maintaining the perfect hourglass shape all day are too busy trying to stay upright and get through the day to make any waves. With some of those devices on Waistshaperz.com I don’t even know how those girls go to the loo.

I’ve had enough of it. Can we just stop this madness please? Like, now?

I don’t blame women for buying into it, because the messages are horrifically pervasive and persuasive. Even bright, successful women can be overtaken by the need to participate in this horror show of all the things that must be done to women’s bodies in order to make them objects of desire rather than fear. I know, because I’ve done it myself. I’ve dieted, I’ve done crazy gym routines, I developed the diet/binge eat cycle, I’ve beaten myself up every time I failed to obtain the right body. I drank the Kool-Aid. But I’m not drinking it any more, because the Kool-Aid is way worse for your body than letting it do its own thing. In fact, I’m pretty convinced if women let our bodies do their own things a hell of a lot more, we’d not only feel better, but we’d be able to effect the changes that we really need in society as a whole. I wonder, what would our bodies do if we did just let them be what they wanted to be?

Skinny white girl yoga? No thanks, I’d rather be on a protest march. Hey, it’s exercise and social change at the same time. Oh and I’d definitely rather be able to use my full lung capacity while doing it too, on a full stomach of actual real food that will keep me on my feet all day and full of patriarchy-dismantling energy.

Watch out, because this girl is coming out of the gym and on to the streets.