Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  Instagram as a whole has been a site of reincarnation for the campy trashiness of celebrities in the early aughts through younger and younger up-and-comers—models and DJs and pop singers—who engage in nostalgia for an era that they are probably too young to fully remember. Fashion is generally understood to have a twenty-year cycle, so just as the 2010s was all things ’90s, the second Roaring ’20s will show a resurrection of Bush-era aesthetics, and maybe sooner than anticipated: fashion writers started to predict the return of low-rise pants as early as 2017. There had been a few moments on various runways that foreshadowed it, and interviews with executives at major denim brands revealed they were reinvesting in the silhouette. It seemed astounding that a style that had been largely accepted as uncomfortable and impractical could simply be brought back, just like that. But notably, we also once again had a president who didn’t respect women, in a “one step forward, five steps back” dance that makes progress feel incredibly delayed. In so many ways we circled back to before we liberated our love handles with higher rises.

  When news of the low-rise return began trending online, the internet at large seemed to react with one giant “NOOOO” in unison. No one wants this, we screamed at our screens, as though we were powerless to stop the return of this trend that looks good on approximately 0.00001 percent of the population (statistics my own).

  But here’s the thing. We weren’t powerless. Before digital media infiltrated the fashion industry, and specifically the trends to come out of Fashion Week, editors and designers could make decisions in a vacuum. What was cool or not cool had an air of mystery to it; what’s more, it was presented as a truth. A trend was agreed upon and then it was in stores and then everyone wanted it. But we know better now. No matter what your day job is, you can watch Fashion Week unfold pretty much in real time on your iPhone. There’s almost complete transparency into the moments that dictate trends. So this time around, armed with insight and not-too-distant memories, the generation that’s been shamed so much for our reliance on our technology—my generation—has more power than ever before. The same way social media has given us insight into politics and helped fuel the #resistance, we can use it to fight back. But will we?

  In many ways Instagram is an equal-opportunity social media platform, in that it positions celebrities and regular people alongside each other in the same feed. With the exception of the little blue checkmark to indicate a verified account, meaning you are who you say you are, it’s a pretty effective equalizer. We all get the same amount of space and the same tools, and we show up in the same feed, leading us to feel as though the celebrities we see are our friends, or at least like the images we see of them are authentic. Its popularity also feels like a response to frustration over seeing heavily doctored images of women in pop culture; it’s a place where we can post images of ourselves on our own terms. I think part of what was so appealing about following celebrities on Instagram was, at first, that it allowed them to get ahead of the paparazzi-driven hunger to catch them off guard and photograph them off duty by posting themselves off duty first. And for a while it was delightful to see professionally beautiful people in no makeup and sweatpants with their loved ones.

  The platform gives everyone—celebrity or otherwise—total control over the images of themselves that are published for the world to see, but in reality, once we have that control, we haven’t found ourselves implementing the lessons we’ve learned about the way Photoshop and runway models have affected Western female self-esteem; instead, we use filters, and then as other apps were developed, we got Facetune, a kind of Photoshop-for-dummies application that lets you change pretty much whatever you want on your own face and body. Once people realized that just because you’re posting it yourself doesn’t mean you can’t change it, Instagram was never going to be the authentic, intimate platform it pretends to be. I am absolutely positive that the majority of the images that celebrities and influencers post of themselves are doctored in some way, especially the very young, very popular ones, who are models and usually daughters of other celebrities, with impossibly thin waists, out-of-proportion booties, and skin as clear as glass.

  So, as the platform grew and photos became easy to manipulate, the vibe switched from “See? Nobody is perfect!” to, “Actually, look how perfect I am.”

  Depending on who you follow, you could easily curate your feed to confirm a universal sneaking suspicion: that everybody is perfect but you. The result is the result that’s always been. We know the end of this story, although the characters have changed. When you’re barraged with images of women who have hyperidealized bodies, you start to forget that it’s not the same as being healthy, and you start to aspire to look like that. Instagram for me has become as toxic as, if not more so than, the runway—runway casting at least doesn’t pretend to represent real life.

  But it’s not just that people are pretending to reflect their real lives on Instagram—it’s that they’re showing their best lives, curating a highlight reel. There’s pressure to do it, too, as though the value of your success, whether professional or personal, can be measured in how well your iPhone captures it. It’s competitive, exhausting, addicting, all encompassing. It hinges on virtue signaling. It sets us all up to fail.

  And ultimately as a result it’s become harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s enhanced. I’m constantly alarmed when I meet influencers in real life because of how different they look, even though they post close-up images of their faces. But truthfully, it’s hard not to change your own self, even just a little bit—I do use Facetune, albeit lightly, but still; it’s difficult for me to post a photo of myself with a shiny forehead or a zit if I could just blur it out. A friend recently said to me that she loves the app because she can reshape part of her nose that she’s always hated. For her, it’s an alternative to plastic surgery, because her nose only bothers her when she sees it in photos, so why have to see it at all?

  But, okay: not everyone does this. The true body-positive community on Instagram—the one that puts fat acceptance front and center—continues to champion women’s bodies in a way that is definitely pushing us in the right direction. And I’m sure a lot of my analysis of the phenomenon comes from my own competitiveness and my own struggle to redefine perfection for myself. Or maybe my struggle is to step outside of the confines of perfection altogether and generate self-esteem that isn’t rooted in comparison. That’s something I am very much still working on.

  I don’t hashtag my body parts, because I understand objectively that I am thin and therefore probably no one cares how I feel about my body, and rightfully so; it wouldn’t be empowering to the women who follow me to read me ramble about how much I #love my body. It would just be annoying. The fact that I’ve been to hell and back to feel something adjacent to comfortable with myself is mostly irrelevant; thin privilege is attached to your exterior, not your interior, no matter how difficult that interior is to live within.

  As women’s media grapples with how to be more positive and inclusive while covering topics like fashion and beauty, I frequently find myself caught between two worlds—the world of empowerment culture and the world of perfectionism. At the intersection of these two things is the idea that everybody is already perfect and that there is power in owning your self-worth as is, which is, I think, the ideal at the heart of contemporary pop culture feminism. The further away from empowerment the idea of perfection gets, the more you enter spaces where women still talk about their weight-loss goals and fat-shame other people. The further away from perfection culture you get, the closer you are to a value system that takes women’s aesthetics out of the equation entirely. Neither extreme works for me.

  The common denominator, though, is that both ways of viewing the world are grounded in a digital performance of feminism. I’m suspicious of any political view where the focus is on the public branding and not the real-life experience. But the flip side is that in curating our feminist brands, regardless
of how you define that, we are allowed to create our own narratives, with ourselves at the center—rather than ourselves as inevitable by-products of a world we can’t control. We’re no longer passive consumers of culture; we don’t have to engage with trends if they don’t serve us. Nor should we. Especially not those of us who remember going hungry to squeeze into a denim shape designed for emaciated figures.

  I don’t love the “women have more important things to worry about” argument against fashion; I believe there is value in what we wear and how it makes us feel. Generations before us, women fought for the right to wear pants. Now we need to make sure those pants don’t make us want to starve, don’t punish us for eating a nice big lunch, and can be worn by all of us. The argument, really, is that we need clothes more befitting of women who are trying their damnedest to live their best lives while changing the world in the process—regardless of how they choose to hashtag it, if at all. And if low-rise jeans really do become cool again, I’ll have no problem sitting it out. After all, if trends are cyclical, it won’t last forever. Maybe it’s my thirties talking, but I’d rather be off trend than uncomfortable. And anyway, who I am has nothing to do with how my jeans fit.

  5 Everybody Else Is Perfect

  It was June 2017, a precious time of year in New York City when the heat has yet to vaporize the garbage juice, so the air still smells like pollen and possibility. Hyperphotogenic pink-gold clouds appeared every evening just in time for me to emerge at the top of the subway stairs after work, sweaty and exhausted, phone in my hand.

  In Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where I lived, the ice-cream truck song was always blaring in the background, no matter what time of day it was, harmonizing hauntingly with the urgent giggles and shouts of children—which sounded charming but, if you listened closely, were full of insults and curses, hurled joyfully at one another. It was perfect weather for a soft, loose T-shirt tucked into even softer jeans, for men to linger outside of bodegas watching you walk by, and for the collective seasonal depression to be instantly replaced with boundless passion for a city that everyone probably just swore they hated.

  I was on a third date with Wallace, a friend who had recently admitted to sharing the crush I’d had on her since we met a few years earlier. We’d been to this candlelit, overpriced neighborhood bar countless times separately, and a couple of times together as part of a group. The most recent time had been on our first date, when we were both so nervous we stared past each other at the rows of liquor bottles, the occasional nanosecond of eye contact so overwhelming that we both tried to avoid it. But by date three, maybe because we’d been casual friends for so many years before, we’d quickly fallen into tell-each-other-everything territory, and I was going full speed ahead, divulging all the gory details of a breakup with a woman I’d been with for a year. The split had culminated in a daylong feelings marathon during which she insisted, repeatedly, that I was not in the right frame of mind to decide to end our relationship because—as she so bluntly put it—“You have a mental illness.” It was cruel but not necessarily untrue, which a friend later joked meant she’d gone “full Scorpio” on me.

  Maybe it’s because I’d had two negronis, but I then found myself admitting a detail to Wallace that I had only recently begun to say out loud: “It got complicated because I had taken a little break from food.” I said it casually, like I was kind of joking, not wanting to sound dramatic.

  Everyone else so far had regarded this admission with alarm, which was annoying, or skepticism, which was more annoying. Wallace, though, matched my tone. “Oh yeah?” she said. “That’s no good. You kind of need food.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed, relieved. “As it turns out, you really do need to eat things.”

  Her knee was touching mine under the bar, sending an electrical current through my leg and up my spine. We ordered six oysters and two double cheeseburgers with fries. It was the biggest meal I’d had in months, but I didn’t tell her that.

  No one really knew: When you work in fashion (and, probably, anywhere), weight loss is rewarded with compliments and attention. No matter how thin I got, my friends, coworkers, and even acquaintances “couldn’t believe” how “good” I looked. Meanwhile, I had a doctor, a nutritionist, and a therapist working together to help me start eating regularly. I was about three months into recovery from what I was told was anorexia.

  It’s estimated that upwards of thirty million people in the United States have an eating disorder. Meanwhile, it’s also estimated that more than 70 percent of them won’t seek treatment because of stigma. This statistic feels especially prescient: In this golden age of female empowerment, we aren’t supposed to have eating disorders anymore. It’s not cool to hate your body. Women, and especially women within the public eye, are obligated to promote a message of self-love, to put all our cellulite and wrinkles and rolls out there proudly. Culturally, we’re all about “wellness” and redefining it on our own terms. And yet, studies show that eating disorder rates continue to rise.

  I’ve moved in and out of periods of disordered eating for as long as I can remember, though I can never tell it’s happening until I’m on the other side. When you admit to having an eating disorder, you’re also admitting that you’re body negative in an aggressively body-positive world. You’ve prioritized impossible beauty standards over your own health. And ultimately—despite your feminist politics—you’ve internalized the patriarchy. The misogyny that says women need to be skinny has infiltrated your brain until you believe it, until it feels like it’s a belief system you organically hold. It’s oppression at its most sinister: so pervasive that it becomes part of you. By starving yourself, or making yourself throw up, or otherwise doing whatever you can to keep your body small, you are in effect working to uphold the values of a system built on keeping you down.

  That is, at least, what I told myself, what I punished myself with, and what many others do, too; I think it’s probably why many people don’t want to talk about their eating disorders in today’s world, which can feel built on surface-level feminism depending on what bubble you live in. For me, saying it out loud was nothing short of devastating, especially because a huge part of my mission as an editor had been to help young women expunge patriarchy both from their own minds and their communities. I had built a career around pushing the boundaries of beauty standards. I would fight to the death for every woman’s right to representation in media—regardless of her size, race, sexual identity, where she comes from. And I knew firsthand what it felt like to not see yourself represented and how lonely it could be—like it is for many people, my first memory of magazines is of flipping through them and not seeing anyone I identified with. I could talk forever about the importance of diversity in fashion. But at a certain point, it became myself that I was fighting against, too: for whatever reason, no matter how strongly I advocated for other women, I left myself out of it.

  It felt like admitting weakness: I was trying so hard to be the picture-perfect empowered millennial woman, but I had gotten stuck on the “picture perfect” part. In my darkest days, I tried to find balance: every time I did something particularly crazy, like only drinking liquids for a day’s nutrition, I yelled at my social media team about not having enough body diversity on Instagram.

  In a fabulous essay for Racked titled “Body Positivity Is a Scam,” Amanda Mull writes that the original definition of the phrase, as a tenet of the fat acceptance movement, is this: “To have a body that’s widely reviled and discriminated against and love it anyway, in the face of constant cultural messaging about your flaws, is subversive.” Her argument is that this concept has been co-opted by corporations that have discovered women are more likely to share their content, thus creating free advertising, if it’s based on empowerment, not shame. And when it’s used as a marketing tactic by these corporations, especially within social media, Mull writes, “an alarming percentage of the public conversation about which bodies our culture values or rejects pivots around models, actresses, an
d other professionally beautiful people reassuring what they seem to believe is a dubious public that they are, in fact, super hot.”

  In the end, the loudest, most body-positive voices end up belonging to those whose bodies aren’t actually all that marginalized—mainly, thin white women, whose voices drown out the women of color who were doing the work long before them. It’s a confusing fusion of empowerment culture and white privilege, and it becomes a much less powerful conversation than originally intended. The ultimate message is that women have to be all things at once—publicly supportive of all bodies, yet representative of the impossible ideal.

  In our newly woke world of marketing based on “positivity,” the blame is once again placed on women—but this time, it’s not our bodies that are wrong; it’s our feelings about our bodies.

  And my feelings about my body were definitely wrong, creating a vortex of shame. By the time I finally started to realize I had a problem, I was twenty-seven and thinner than I’d ever been. I hadn’t weighed myself but knew from the way my clothes were fitting (or rather, not fitting) that something was wrong. I’d later find out that I was around one hundred pounds (twenty-five to thirty less than my regular weight). I had gained and lost a ton of weight in rapid succession over a two-year period, as I reorganized my personal life through breakups and moving and job changes. It wasn’t super intentional—I don’t remember actively trying to be skinny so much as focusing on my diet and exercise as things I could control when the rest of my life felt so uncertain and scary. What started as a coping strategy turned obsessive, and I completely lost touch with my own ability to feel hunger.

  It was having a real impact on my day-to-day. I felt tired all the time. I cried often for no apparent reason, especially on the subway or after working out. Dark circles settled under my eyes, and my hair got so thin that I got extensions glued in to fake the appearance of thickness. I lied a lot, usually about having plans when really I was going to work out. The one thrill became shopping, because suddenly clothes designed for models hung on my body the way they were designed to; things like loose sack dresses and high-high-waisted trousers maintained their own shape. Once I realized that if I skipped a meal the hunger would go away after a few hours, I didn’t see why I’d ever need to really eat again.