James Campbell: Brumfitt’s ideal just as unobtainable as the perfect body

This year’s choice of Australian of the Year is final proof for James Campbell that he has parted company with the spirit of the age.

Your parents warn you it will happen one day but it still comes as a shock when you have to admit that you have parted company with the zeitgeist, culture and spirit of the age.

For me, the final proof that I just don’t understand the world anymore arrived last week with the announcement that Body Image Movement founder, Taryn Brumfitt is to be this year’s Australian of the Year.

Let me be clear, I’m not complaining that Brumfitt’s work doesn’t seek to address a real problem in the world.

I’m most definitely not with Mike Carlton who complained it should have gone to a frontline health worker and “NOT someone who makes a buck out of saying it’s OK to be a bit fat”. If Brumfitt’s message were as simple as “it’s OK to be a bit fat” that would be fine. But actually that’s not her message at all.

Her message, and the movement she leads, while they purport to stand against our age’s obsession with appearance, are a dead end which is selling an ideal as unobtainable for most of us as the perfect youthful bodies we are confronted with everywhere we look in advertising.

Brumfitt’s life story, as her film Embrace tells it, is a tale of redemption.

After giving birth to her three children she ended up “hating her body”. “As a quick fix” she decided to book herself in for surgery to restore herself to as close to the pre-child-bearing Brumfitt as medical science could achieve.

But after wondering what message this would send her daughter, who she wanted “to embrace and love her body just as it was”, she abandoned the move.

“I looked at her and I thought you’re perfect, no matter what you look like,” Brumfitt recalls.

Having given up on surgery, Brumfitt was left “at rock bottom” as she was “stuck in this hideous body for the rest of my life”.

Her solution was to take up bodybuilding. As you do.

Fifteen weeks later she was ready to compete in a bikini competition which suggests that despite her worries, she was in pretty good shape to start with.

Anthony Albanese presents the award for 2023 Australian of the Year to body-image activist Taryn Brumfitt. Picture: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

Was she happy? No. She and the other bodybuilders were still dissatisfied with bits of themselves.

Brumfitt realised it wasn’t worth it and went back to eating normally, though she continued to exercise.

Then in 2015 she posted a couple of photos on Facebook of her bodybuilding body and the current state of affairs, sans kit.

The internet exploded and before long she was world famous with thousands of women – and some men – writing to her with their stories of self-loathing.

Now, as I said, I am not downplaying this problem – it’s real.

But to go back to where Brumfitt’s journey began – with the example she wanted to set for her daughter – I just worry the message she was sending was not just wrong, but actually dangerous.

Because however endearing the Brumfitt infant was a decade ago, she was not “perfect” as her mother seemed to think.

Nobody’s perfect – either physically, morally or intellectually – something that is so obvious as not to need saying.

And what is more, most people – that is to say everyone except narcissists – knows they have room for improvement.

What most of us need in life is best summed up in the old prayer which asks God to grant the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

On the face of it, you might think this is what the Body Image Movement is offering – a modern-day version of that wisdom which since time immemorial, mothers have been delivering to children unhappy with the way they look: “Never mind, dear, there’s nothing to be done about it.”

But that’s not the message Brumfitt is offering.

Brumfitt’s message is that we need to learn to embrace and love our bodies just as they are.

I don’t know about you but I reckon that’s a much harder ask than telling us just to get over it and concentrate on other things in life.

If your child has no pitch, is it a kindness to encourage them to sing in the school choir?

As I have said, I have no doubt the mental distress many people feel about their appearance is real. But just how real it is you have to wonder, given from what I can see of young people’s Instagram feeds, the thing so many of them most enjoy photographing is themselves.

Perhaps it is a sign that I have moved serenely to the state of acceptance that I find the idea of middle-aged people fretting about their appearance to be bizarre, but, again, given the evidence, I accept it is real.

I just think it would have been better – and certainly more Australian – to have picked someone whose message was not embrace yourself, but instead get over yourself.