We've all seen them all over social media - the body-centered pics of women. It's hard to get away from them. A whole lot of female bloggers and Instagrammers have learned that body-baring posts are likely to get them a lot of likes and comments. Many of these photos are posted in the name of body-positivity, body-acceptance, or empowerment.
Here's another perspective to consider, though. It's from a post from Beauty Redefined entitled, "Searching for Scraps of Power, One Swimsuit Pic at a Time."
"If you strip away the inspirational caption and good intentions from so many of those #bopo or #fitspo photos, are they just another pic of a woman’s body for viewers to compare, ogle, and double-tap?
"In a culture that values women for our bodies more than anything else, it is no surprise that women learn to survive within that system, reaping its meager rewards. We learn to search for scraps of what sometimes feels like “power” in the form of validation, acceptance, and financial reward for granting visual and physical access to our bodies. ...
"When your empowerment is based on others’ physical appraisal of you, it can be taken away as freely as it was given. It is fleeting and fickle. Our profit-driven culture thrives off the objectification of female bodies, and while companies and industries thrive, women are losing. Objectification harms all women, since we all fall short of manufactured beauty ideals simply by being humans and not images. We all fail in a system that values only our bodies at the expense of our humanity.
This is not to cry foul on any and all pics of bodies; let's not be ridiculous. This is just to say, be careful.
So, when we're viewing or posting those swimsuit, those workout, those body-positive, those before and after pics (see this post), let's pause to make sure we're not reinforcing ideas in our own minds and hearts that put an unhealthy focus on our bodies. We're so much more than that.
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