Back off body shamers, including you Khloe Kardashian
Women are increasingly seeking the help of doctors to surgically fix “flaws” that don’t exist.
Kylie Lang
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If we all ate the same things and did the same amount of exercise, we would still have completely different bodies. That’s what makes us wonderfully unique.
Yet the billion-dollar body shaming industry, and those who get fat off it, would have us all be clones, at any cost.
This week I discovered I had flawed hips. Not that I’d ever realised I had an unsightly problem that needed immediate correcting, if not with targeted exercise and carefully curated poses on Instagram to minimise the hideousness, then with medical intervention.
This column was originally published in April 2021 and has been resurfaced as part of The Courier-Mail summer columnists series.
But it’s been brought to my attention that I have what’s called “hip dips” or “violin hips”, a slightly inward curve on both sides of my body between my hips and thighs.
These dips are completely natural, and part of a woman’s normal bone and genetic structure, but these days they have been added to the list of undesirables designed to make us hate our bodies.
Marilyn Monroe had hip dips, just sayin’.
But women are increasingly seeking help for this affliction, with doctors reporting a rise in requests for injectable fillers, fat transfers and implants.
This is happening mostly in the United States, which gave us Instagram and the Kardashians so no big surprise there, but like many American trends, it’s bound to catch on.
Already, a staggering 80 per cent of Australian women are dissatisfied with their body image, and 90 per cent told University of Queensland researchers they knew other women who were unhappy.
You have to wonder where the quest to be “perfect” – however perfection is defined in any generation – will end.
Self-combustion, perhaps?
There is only so much “intervention” and foreign matter that a body can take.
But fuelled by the distorted images presented on relentless and aggressive social media, no step seems too far to fit a mould prescribed by external arbiters of beauty.
The really sad thing is those most easily influenced are those who use Instagram and other platforms the most – young people, many of them teenage girls who are yet to find their place in the world and whose self-confidence is already precarious because of their age-related brain development and deference to peer pressure.
They “follow” and fawn over so-called celebrities who meticulously and narcissistically curate the unreal images they post.
The trout pouts, thigh gaps, perky ta-tas and bubble booties. (And if any of these terms are unfamiliar to you, count yourself lucky.)
If ever we needed proof social media is used as a platform for hiding the truth we got it in spades last week.
Khloe Kardashian and her army of lawyers and spin doctors went into overdrive to remove from the internet a photo of her allegedly taken by her grandmother and posted to Instagram by accident.
I didn’t see the alarming photo because I don’t follow her or any of her family including billionaire sister Kim Kardashian, but I’m told Khloe looked relaxed, happy and largely unposed.
As many who do follow her noted, she resembled her former self – before filters, staging and editing controlled her image.
But the 36 year old, said to be worth $65 million, wasn’t having a bar of that.
She told her 137 million followers “when someone takes a photo of you that isn’t flattering in bad lighting or doesn’t capture your body the way it is after working so hard to get it to this point – and then shares it to the world – you should have every right to ask for it not to be shared – no matter who you are.”
She went on to say “the pressure, constant ridicule and judgment my entire life to be perfect and to meet other’s standards of how I should look has been too much to bear”, and she’d “unapologetically” use filters and edit photos to “present myself to the world the way I want to be seen”.
The Kardashians have made a living – nay, an eye-watering fortune – out of manufacturing a physical “perfection” that, as Khloe herself has now all but admitted, is a lie.
If such “perfection” is unattainable, even with all that money, surely that’s a sage reminder to accept ourselves for who we are, hips dips and all.
LOVE
Bernard Fanning and ex-Powderfinger band mate John Collins calling out the Queensland Government’s double standards on restrictions in live music venues and sporting stadiums.
Radio presenter Mark Hine on 4KQ’s Laurel, Gary and Mark winning the breakfast slot in the latest Brisbane ratings: “Like most things, it’s been 15 years of hard work and great friendship to become an overnight success.”
LOATHE
The very same Twitter trolls who’ve been attacking the Morrison Government over its supposedly poor treatment of women ridiculing the Prime Minister’s wife Jenny over her appearance.
Bank branches closing down, with almost 300 going or gone. Not everybody has the ability or confidence to. As the Finance Sector Union’s Julia Angrisano says: “It’s a real blow to the forgotten Australians”.
Kylie Lang is associate editor of The Courier-Mail
kylie.lang@news.com.au
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