The summer trend we need to leave behind forever

WANTING to be healthy is one thing, but pushing your body to its absolute limits just to fit an Instagram ideal for three months of the year? Now that’s just ridiculous, writes Bianca O’Neill.

Kayla Itsines runs an online bikini body program that has thousands of devotees, but also many critics. Picture: Matt Turner.

IT’S as certain as the weather getting warmer and as summer approaches that we’re going to be inundated by tired and psychologically damaging articles about one thing.

How women can get ‘bikini body ready’!

I add an exclamation mark because they’re almost always presented this way — with a sense of schoolgirl excitement, a faux too-friendly tone that invites you to think that you should be popping champagne about the idea of slamming your body with various diets or exercise fads so that it’s finally fit for human-at-the-beach consumption.

But don’t kid yourselves — this isn’t a focus on women’s health and wellbeing, or even fitness. In fact, most of the models in these magazines, who are supposedly upholding the women-only social contract of being ‘bikini body ready’, are actually bordering on unhealthy, and more often than not, have benefited from retouching.

This annual trend is about isolating women’s self-doubt about their physical bodies, and encouraging them to consume products that will apparently magic-away your genetically-coded body shape. And these days, it’s a big business.

Gold Coast fitness instructor Ashy Bines offers a divisive online bikini body challenge. Picture: Instagram

Many social media famous fitness bloggers make thousands from seasonal programs that promise to whisk away your FUPA (fatty upper pubic area) in mere weeks. Biology? Bah! Fitness instructor Kayla Itsines promises that for $69.95 and her program will ‘completely reinvent your shape’ and get you ‘bikini body ready’ in just three months.

Who knew she moonlighted as a genetic biologist?

Meanwhile, the Kardashian sisters, supposed queens of the ‘curvy’ body movement, spend a lot of time — and I do mean a lot of time — promoting waist trainers. These distant cousins of corsets are meant to flatten your stomach and cinch in your waist. What they are actually doing, however, is pushing your internal organs into other areas of your body cavity to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. Unsurprisingly, doctors warn that wearing said trainers can ultimately do permanent damage.

And that’s just it — all of this is an illusion. This obsession with a ‘flat’ stomach or a ‘thigh gap’ or the ‘ab crack’ is not only damaging, but it’s just not realistic for the majority of women.

Khloe Kardashian has promoted waist trainers via her social media account for years. Picture: Twitter

Our bodies change as we get older — our curves may become accentuated, or our bodies may redistribute fat in a different way. And, as someone who hasn’t had a baby, I’m not just talking about post-pregnancy changes. My body has changed regardless of the lack of baby-making. And that’s normal.

What isn’t normal is the pursuit of a figure that demands significant fat deposits in your breasts and butt, but absolutely zero on your stomach.

It’s incongruent that in the context of today’s feminism-charged environment that we still tell women the most important thing they should be thinking about is how they look in a bikini. I suppose it does keep our mind off other things, like the fact one woman a week is murdered by a current or former partner. Or that a person accused of sexual assault has just been appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

But the tired magazine covers and Instagram shout outs that declare you can get ‘bikini body ready in two weeks!’ are not about what women want. It’s an old-fashioned plot device that’s used to encourage women to see themselves as decorative items.

You’ve read about the damaging implications of the male gaze? Well this is it, tenfold.

Thankfully, there has been increased discussion around body positivity of late, including the now-old joke about how to get bikini body ready (take whatever body you have, and put it in a bikini) — but it seems nothing will quell the seasonal outpouring of these articles.

Australian fitness instructor Kayla Itsines’s bikini body program promises to “completely reinvent your shape”. Picture: Tim Hunter.

That’s despite the fact that it has been proven that women don’t want to read them.

For example, a 2015 survey showed that the majority of Women’s Health readers wanted an end to the use of the words like “drop two sizes” and “bikini body” — and yet, splashed across this month’s issue three years later is the headline, “Kick start your summer body”.

The reality is — and one we still seem to struggle to come to terms with — there is no ‘correct’ body type. There is no single way every person’s body should look in order for them to wear a bikini. The damaging side effects of portraying such a position are incredibly damaging to women’s collective mental health.

I say collective because we’ve all been party to some weird masochistic competitive discussion, in order to win the “I have the worst body flaws” trophy. Let’s stop doing that, OK?

Why should I feel ashamed about my body at the beach if I don’t have toned abs? Why should I be urged to cover up my natural, curved stomach in a one-piece because a magazine tells me to?

The answer is, I shouldn’t. And the only way we can fix it is by taking our power back, one non-sponsored link click at a time.

Bianca O’Neill is a Melbourne-based freelance writer.

@biancaoneill_