Consumer Culture Won’t Lead to Body Positivity

While I wholeheartedly support the push for more inclusivity in fashion, I worry that focusing so much attention on the lack of diverse size representation in the fashion industry distracts from the deeper issues at hand. The real problem facing my daughter and other young people is twofold: teaching kids that bodies are objects to be scrutinized, and then telling them that buying stuff is the way to deal with insecurities generated by narrow appearance standards.

Public representations of more diverse body shapes and sizes may help combat body insecurities—but not when they’re created and disseminated only in service of consumption. Body positivity in this form perpetuates a vicious cycle: People learn to see capitalist consumption as the solution to the problems caused by capitalist consumption. This approach will not lead to a greater sense of self-worth or to more inclusive, fair communities.

The stakes are high. Consumer capitalist demands within the global fashion industry have generated unspeakable human and environmental rights violations. Supply chains “follow poverty”—exploiting laborers in poorer countries to bring cheap clothing to shoppers in wealthier countries. Manufacturing and transporting clothing taxes an already fragile planet, contributing a whopping 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of continuing these harmful cycles, we need to give children critical thinking skills so they can push back against a clothing industry that wraps up their self-worth in buying jeans of any size.

As an anthropologist who has spent a long time studying gender norms and social change, I believe that we have a lot to learn from how other societies think about bodies. Among Indigenous Kichwa communities where I’ve done fieldwork, for instance, people tend to think about their bodies in terms of what they can do—or how strong they are—rather than how they look.

That’s the model I’m trying to teach my daughter—so far, with limited success.

The truth is, I have struggled with my body my entire life. When I was a teen, I realized that I could be as skinny as I wanted (correction: as skinny as U.S. society wanted me to be) if I only tried hard enough.

So, I ate the same meals over and over again. Dinner was a portion of chicken breast no bigger than the palm of my hand, two containers of “no sugar added” applesauce, and 18 peanuts. Eighteen peanuts: no more, no fewer. Folks in my life would laugh as I counted them out.

Thinking back, I am troubled that no one asked me what I was doing or suggested that I stop. Indeed, the skinnier I became, the more positive reinforcement I received.

It wasn’t until I was immersed in graduate school in anthropology that I was able to teach myself that what I was doing was part of a larger societal problem, one that amounts an individual’s self-worth to their appearance and propagates feelings of guilt and shame around eating. The work of culture critic and gender studies scholar Susan Bordo, in particular, may have saved my life.

In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a classic feminist text, Bordo argues that U.S. culture is dominated by competing tensions: Women are expected to achieve a “perfectly managed and regulated self” while living in a consumer culture that makes this impossible. Overwhelmed by the drive to consume, women’s self-worth becomes about how well they are able to “control themselves.” Thus, women are set up for failure, and failure manifests in struggles with eating and body image.

My research explored questions of the body, gender, and social change. How did Kichwa women think about their bodies? Were there generational differences between school-bound girls and their farmer mothers and grandmothers? What impact, if any, was outside media like internet and satellite TV having on their beauty ideals and body image?

While Western beauty ideals that valued thinness were not totally absent in the community, I found that, like their mothers and grandmothers, young women still maintained a reverence for women strong enough to care for kin. Theirs were bodies that tended to farms and families.

Ironically, one way Kichwa women talked about their bodily strength was by referencing chicken—though not the flavorless, palm-sized portion of white meat I used to call dinner. One Kichwa woman likened herself to the tough, lean, free-range chickens that wander around their community: “pollos criollos.” This distinguished her, she said, from the “store-bought chickens”—fattened on industrial farms, then plastic-wrapped and piled high on the refrigerated shelves of the Super Tía, a gleaming, new supermarket located in a nearby city. This woman proudly saw her sturdy body, shaped in and by the land, as superior to the bodies of those accustomed to city living.

Another woman remarked that Kichwa folks are “people of manioc and plantains”—in other words, people built out of the demanding work of farming and of the staple foods this work produces for kin.

Community members were troubled by the emergence of damaging new appearance standards. However, they were buoyed by a powerful cultural admiration, even among girls and teens, for what strong women could do. This focus on strength and care for others mitigated the problems associated with objectifying bodies to increase consumption. For the Kichwa I knew, one’s self-worth was ultimately tied to having a body that produces and acts on behalf of others’ needs.

This, of course, is what’s often missing from the messaging girls see and hear in the U.S. context. In the U.S. ideal, self-worth hinges on consuming in order to have a body that conforms to others’ perceptions. Worth depends on what women and girls can buy. And that’s the problem we in the U.S. need to face if we want to truly embrace body positivity.

I can’t shake the feeling that I am failing my daughter. Despite my best efforts to teach her that self-worth does not hinge on appearance, she still knows that, in a pinch, the TV screen makes a good mirror. Our household mantra about self-love rings hollow without public reinforcement.

So, should fashion retailers continue to cater to and highlight more diverse bodies? Sure. But representation alone doesn’t fix the problem of objectification or provide an alternative to consumption.

Instead, we in the U.S. need to teach children that self-worth cannot be found in a new pair of jeans, even ones that come in a variety of sizes. It comes from nourishing their strength, bravery, and critical thinking skills so they believe they are enough and love their selves and bodies unconditionally—even in the face of a fashion industry whose bottom line depends on giving them every reason to believe otherwise.