Maybe we need to stop trying to find our body doubles online
"Omg, I've never seen my body type on someone else!!"
“Wow! We have the same B stomach”
“I’ve never seen my body on someone else”
“You look just like me”
“Why can I love someone else’s body that looks like mine, but not mine”
These were all comments I saw on one woman’s TikTok. The woman in question is cisgender, white, size 12, able-bodied and - apart from a curve around her lower stomach (where, I assume, her uterus is) - ticks almost all of the Eurocentric beauty standards continually shoved down our throats. That’s no shade to her, just an important caveat. I, also, sit within many of these privileges.
Reading these comments, I didn’t feel good. And, for a while, I wasn’t sure why. On the surface, these comments are wholesome and show how important body representation is. Most of the comments were from teen girls, and I’m happy they found comfort in this woman’s video.
However, it shows how severely lacking media and social media are in putting forward different types of beauty. We know this. You know this. I’m not saying anything new. What is new, I think, is an obsessive culture of body checking.
Human nature is to compare, but when the amount we have to compare to becomes infinite, there’s nowhere left to go but in. In and down.
Body checking is a compulsive behaviour related (but not exclusive) to various forms of body dysmorphic disorders; it can be introspective or more focused on the bodies of others - and how they relate to you. It’s an anxious response to body image fears and narratives, which we’ve seen get more and more prevalent with the rise of TikTok and new, insidious beauty standards. Said beauty standards are the products of patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism.
Two years ago, The Face magazine published a piece called ‘We weren’t meant to see this many beautiful faces’. This headline has stuck with me. But I think it goes further than this. I don’t think we were meant to see this many faces or bodies, period. Beautiful or not. Human nature is to compare, but when the amount we have to compare to becomes infinite, there’s nowhere left to go but in. In and down.
We need to be able to love our bodies even if they don’t look like someone else’s.
We are so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of bodies we see daily that to try and make sense of it all, we look for similarities. We look for our body doubles. In my opinion, this pursuit is a hapless one that can only lead to insecurities and toxicities. You will never find a body double unless you have an identical twin. Just as you will never find someone with the exact same face as you.
Representation is vital, I’m not denying that. Of course, we need more representation. But we need less body checking. We need less searching outwards and more discovery inwards. We need to be able to love our bodies even if they don’t look like someone else’s.