Underwear, Public Fitness, and the (Dubious) Progress of #aerieREAL

Aubri Plourde — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 22:06:46 +0000

I’m going to take it as an assumption that in any thorough discussion of fitness, we’re also inevitably going to talk about body image. Lately, when I’m thinking about fitness and body image, I am unsurprisingly (and, perhaps unoriginally) drawn to underwear. I am not the first to write about a connection between underwear advertisement and fitness complexes. There’s even a meme that highlights the absurdity of underwear advertising:

Image Credit: WeKnowMemes

Here, the meme functions as something of a visual critic. Recognizing the gendered disparity in dressing women up as overwrought, overmakeupped angels and men as large grapes allows us to laugh at the ridiculousness of both. Of course, I feel we have to acknowledge the class disparity here, too: there isn’t just a distinction between women’s underwear advertisements and men’s, but between undergarments marketed as luxury items and those sold as a necessary purchase. A men’s Calvin Klein ad, for example, is also a long way from the Fruit of the Loom dudes:

Image Credit: Calvin Klein

This gentleman is still a long way from being trussed up in an angel costume, but there’s certainly more of an association of the CK brand with physical fitness and with luxury—fancy lighting, airbrushed abs, unexplained pose… And, despite the overwhelming majority of body image issues filtered through women’s media, it might be silly to assume that men go unscathed. The Photoshop work done on the Justin Beiber's body suggests as much.

Image Credit: PetaPixel

To be clear, I don’t want to go anywhere near an argument that men’s body images are equally as damaged by underwear advertising as women's are. The Biebs claims that this “before” image isn’t real, negating any argument we might make about the photoshop industry’s effect on his phallus. I don’t care so much whether or not the image is genuine so much as to what degree we invest in the authenticity of underwear images as markers of fitness. Underwear has become somehow integral to body image, despite the fact that it’s hidden. Strangely, there’s this rhetorical move we’re being asked to make in looking at these images, where we imagine the private (underwear) dictating the public perception of our bodies. This is not to suggest that ads for, say, blue jeans, don’t also contribute to body image. Still, it strikes me as strange that photos of other people in their underwear have come to dominate how I see myself in my clothes. Further, they have collapsed the line between lingerie and fitness, as Victoria’s Secret’s obsessive attempts to get me to buy a sports bra attest.

Image Credit: Victoria's Secret

Thinking about Victoria’s Secret lately has led me to consider American Eagle’s campaign @aeriereal. The lingerie and loungewear division of the company, Aerie has recently made a commitment to never photoshop their models.

Image Credit: Buzzfeed

I like that this girl's belly looks like a belly. A healthy one, with clear abdominal shape, and fit. But not plastic. When Aerie first announced this commitment, the company was met with praise and a few tongue-in-cheek sniffs. “They still use models.” And they do still use conventionally beautiful young women. Still, in the spirit of celebrating small successes, they have made a tiny, half, stumbling baby step toward body diversity.

Image Credit: Aerie

In the months since Aerie began this campaign--which, I should acknowledge, is absolutely an advertising campaign and not an altruistic effort to end body negativity--the company has even shifted their rhetoric away from "sexiness" and toward the "real." The girl in this photo may or may not exercise. She appears healthy, happy. Her smile suggests an openness to the “real her.” It seems that investing in authenticity creates beauty. Leaving aside for the moment that in fact, this (beautiful, white, able-bodied) girl is meant to stand in for body diversity and leave us feminists satisfied, I’m interested in Aerie’s divergence from fitness rhetoric. In fact, instead of presenting us with a stunningly photoshopped model and lauding her as “healthy” or “fit,” Aerie goes for the rhetoric of “naturalness.” In fact, this naturalness is figured as under threat by the ad industry. For example, #aeriereal, the brand’s Twitter feed, features actual Aerie employees featuring t-shirts that read, “Love me. Don’t retouch me."

Image Credit: #aeriereal Twitter

These images, more than even the ads themselves, emphasize bodies in various states of physical fitness without completing a link between lingerie, designed for sex appeal, and exercise. Sure, this link isn’t all that hard to make; the diet industry runs on mass obsessions with looking good naked. Still, considering that almost all the people who will ever see me (including almost everyone who will ever gauge my fitness levels) will see me fully clothed, I’m finding myself more drawn to the slogan “Love me. Don’t retouch me” than to the actual images of “normal” girls. Framing retouching as an aggressor to healthy bodies and healthy body images makes this photo do some heavy lifting. A visual image itself, it critiques the ad industry’s violence on young female bodies within its own medium. That is, it turns the gaze of the viewer back onto the myriad of tools and labor that goes into the advertisements.

What does this have to do with fitness? Of course, the assumption that body image issues so latent in any female underwear advertising are tied to the fitness complex is a simplistic one. Still, I think it’s worth dwelling on how the fitness industry runs on this strange metric of private/public concern, wherein the intimacy of the naked or barely-clothed body is made public and publicized.

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body positivity

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Training the Viewer's Sense of Beauty through Body Positive Imagery

Deb Streusand — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:17:19 +0000

Image Credit: Abbey Gallagher

The weight loss advertisements I wrote about last week share a premise: changing the shape of your body is a positive end in itself. Rather than focusing on the health benefits of losing weight, they sell the viewer a slim body as her ultimate goal. In direct contrast to such messaging is the imagery employed by the body positivity movement.

One trend in body positive imagery is to show a group of women of various shapes and sizes, wearing underwear or swimsuits, lined up next to one another, with text affirming the beauty of their bodies. The cartoon image above, with its friendly handwritten text, shows a wide range of body types. The soft watercolor rainbow activates associations of beauty in diversity. The text, with its insistent anaphora, defines beauty before it asserts it: a beautiful body is “good,” “worthy of love,” and “demand[s] respect.” According to the image, all bodies have all of these characteristics, so beauty is simultaneously good and meaningless. Since all bodies equally deserve love and respect, one’s body is irrelevant to one’s deserts – a laudable perspective. Yet the image does display the bodies to the viewer’s gaze, in a way that implies we should find them all aesthetically pleasing, although American culture has not predisposed us to do so. The image and accompanying text propose to train our aesthetic sense, to instruct us to find physical beauty in all bodies, while arguing at the same time, through the text, that physical appearance is irrelevant. The goal of body positive imagery is to persuade the viewer to love her own body. So the idea of training the aesthetic sense, while still affirming that looks are ultimately unimportant, is rather practical. We are not likely to stop caring what we look like entirely, but perhaps we can adapt our idea of what physical beauty is to include the dimensions and other characteristics of our own bodies.

The small details of this image are also interesting. The third figure from the right is flexing her muscles, a movement whose argument is rather ambiguous: it could be “I love my strong body,” or it could be “I am empowered by my love of my body.” The figure to her right gives a thumbs up sign. It’s odd that both bodies displaying these signs of confidence are on the slim side, while the curvier women in the picture appear in more neutral poses. However, women are sometimes also critiqued for having defined muscles or for being “too thin,” so perhaps these women are showing appreciation for their bodies in the face of such messages. I like that the artist has included the second figure from the left, who appears to have a prosthetic leg. The image delivers on the text’s promise to include all bodies by going beyond differences in shape.

The body positivity movement uses such images to persuade women to love their bodies. This argument is less immediately tied to a commercial motive than the weight loss advertisements from last week. People do sell “I love my body” t-shirts and the like, but it is not a multi-billion dollar industry. (Marketresearch.com reports that the U.S. weight loss industry was worth $60.5 billion in 2013.) For the moment, people make far more money telling women that they have to change their bodies than telling them to love them the way they are. As long as there is a benefit to making such arguments, they will remain in the public discourse. However, the body positivity movement can also create effective visual persuasion through images like the one I’ve written about this week.

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Internet Feminism

body positivity

health

viz. - body positivity

Underwear, Public Fitness, and the (Dubious) Progress of #aerieREAL

Training the Viewer's Sense of Beauty through Body Positive Imagery