money. Capital is money that is used to buy things in order to sell them again. Capital creates wealth, which is intertwined with social relationship. Appearance privilege and the hierarchy it creates can be understood in similar terms.
Bourdieu refers to the “symbolic” collection of skills, mannerisms, credentials, accent, posture, et cetera that comprise the tool kit of privilege, of which we are often unconscious. Those tools are rarely used in a quid pro quo arrangement—to purchase a specific commodity. Like Marx’s idea of capital, they are used to barter toward greater gain across time and within relationships. We create additional social capital based on where we work, with whom we associate, and how we seem to significant audiences. That is, our agreement on what constitutes beauty matters. Our perpetuation of the means to create and achieve hegemonic beauty matters a great deal.
In many ways, the modeling school era of my youth and of my mother’s generation were more honest in their pursuit of that privilege. They knew that privilege was the aim—to be seen as someone with a model’s beauty would yield complex personal and professional rewards. The coursework did not just include how to shape the body through hunger, color, shading, and clothing; it included how to enunciate clearly, use refined diction, choose wine at dinner, and steward a scintillating conversation during the meal.
As if our participation in upholding these standards for the sake of corporate profit weren’t nefarious enough, we tend to accept that some people just have a certain “way about them,” a feel for being slender, youthful, and attractive, while others don’t. Our belief in beauty, charm, and charisma adds to its capital. Some women just don’t feel good enough about themselves. That’s a shame, we might say, but it’s up to them to remedy the situation. We don’t even see that it is within our collective ability to amend that circumstance for all women. Now that body positivity is the new marketing edict, if a woman doesn’t present flawless love and acceptance of herself, she’s also to blame for the shame and awkwardness that others witness.
Of course, feeling positive about one’s appearance is not just a personal problem, though painful self-image can assail anyone. Bourdieu explained how this reinforces the idea that some people are worthy of receiving social rewards while others are not. Capitalism and all forms of class society shore up and reproduce themselves by dividing people. The obvious divisions have to do with social class, but the history of racism in the United States is another fine example. Our forebears simply invented another appearance-based distinction on which to base distribution of resources. We are still living with the vibrant consequences of deciding that when we look at some people, we are witnessing less humanity, even though the period of their servitude has formally ended. (Note that when I say “we” I am not speaking on behalf of whiteness. I am speaking on behalf of United States culture. Even those who are oppressed internalize a diminished humanity, until we are able to believe and behave otherwise.)
Very few people consciously want this to be so. People want to feel comfortable. The startling paradox here is that love and connection are the most comforting things humans know. Yet most people are daily reinforcing capitalist divisions that keep us alienated from the love we might otherwise feel for one another’s bodies and for the beauty of human diversity. This, at its most fundamental—the inability to love and value our own and other people’s bodies—is what keeps human culture disdainful, violent, and purchasing in order to alleviate our suffering. Consumerism—some might say capitalism itself—feeds itself when it feeds on our desire for connection and personal respect.
We have to cultivate the ability to look at other people’s bodies and love them with an expansive agape. We have to care for our own and other people’s bodies with compassion and tenderness. The mechanisms that reproduce inequality have become invisible. I believe that through storytelling we can reveal them again.
Body positivity will never be enough. As it’s presented in advertising and media, body positivity is not about doing away with beauty conformity. It is merely calling attention to the fact that beauty conformity is important enough that you should be allowed into the club. By saying that a slightly wider variety of bodies should be seen as acceptable—maybe not optimal, but acceptable—the importance of beauty conformity is solidified. There is nothing radical about this. As Amanda Mull offered in “Body Positivity Is a Scam,”
Like most ideas that become anodyne and useless enough for corporate marketing plans, “body positivity” didn’t begin that way—it started out radical and fringe, as a tenet of the fat acceptance movement of the 1960s. Back then, body positivity was just one element of an ideology that included public anti-discrimination protests and anti-capitalist advocacy against the diet industry, and it made a specific political point: To have a body that’s widely reviled and discriminated against and love it anyway, in the face of constant cultural messaging about your flaws, is subversive.
Now body positivity has shed its radical, practical goals in favor of an advocacy that’s entirely aesthetic and a problem that can be wholly solved by those looking to sell you something. The brands previously thought you should feel one way about yourself, and now they have decided that’s no longer appropriate for their goals. How you talk about yourself should change, even if nothing has changed that would materially affect how you feel.
The way these companies see it, our self-perception is unrelated to the external forces that determine the circumstances of our existence, which is why they think telling us to do better is enough to absolve them of responsibility.
So when do we get to not only see the bigger picture but hold it long enough to modify it? As the title of this book says, I’m soon to be old. I’m not kidding about that shit. As a woman who is fat, pretty, queer, and aging, among other things, I have a perspective that might help us reach critical mass as we discuss social change. Sure, wear the “body shaper” if you think it’s going to help you not be ridiculed on the bus. Put on some makeup if it’s going to help you be heard in the job interview. I’m not against the savvy application of social knowledge. But let the application of social knowledge be this: artful manipulation of privilege, not a daily quest for privilege that leaves existing power structures unchecked.
When it comes to those power structures, it matters how we talk and behave, what we wear, and which norms we challenge in small ways, day after day after day. We are creating culture even as it creates us. It matters that we check our own stories, discuss common words and phrases with our friends, and prepare for the moments that will happen again and again throughout our days, months, years, and lives. Before this day is through, someone will discuss dieting again in your presence. Unless you’re reading this in bed at 11:00 p.m., I can almost guarantee it.
We have to get ready, think clearly, behave differently, speak openly, and show who we are and what we want the world to be. No more just talking in private or just thinking about how we’re not comfortable when someone says, “Fat big-lip bitch” to the black female fast-food worker who’s slowly helping the person ahead of you in line. What’s happening in that comment? We have to own what we know, prepare to interrupt the culture as it is and become cultural creators.
Before someone can see you, you have to be you. I’m going to show you who I am in these pages with the hope of prompting urgency with this practice. I’m going to show you because I respect you. I believe in our ability to make the world a better place before we die. That’s what I care about. Not staying pretty. Not losing weight. I care about justice. See how you feel as you read; I hope your own creativity is sparked in the process too.
1. Maintaining Appearances
My small suburban private school was structured to provide two years of preschool and then kindergarten at age five. I was a big child and smart, so partway through my first year of preschool, I was moved into the kindergarten class with Mrs. Shalala and the older kids. I didn’t yet know how to write my name, but luckily there was another girl named Kimberly in the class. On the first day we
