Agnes Lidbeck: Kroppsaktivismens dull back

”Would you buy a used car from this man?” is a worn out question.

”Would you buy a toothbrush, a pair of jeans, a närodlad panty of this..?” If we surveyed each and every day.

The first question is if the seller looks reliable.

Reliability is, however, difficult to expression with your breasts. Anyway join right now some verbal advocate for equality to a movement which puts further emphasis on the female coded body, that the degree be. Kroppspositivismen.

briefly can be boiled down to that all bodies have the right to exist, the right to be valued equally, have the right to appear and right to be perceived as beautiful. The focus is less on factors such as height, hair color or skin pigmentation, and to a greater degree on the weight.

Or, perhaps hardly even on the weight. It focuses on the distribution of subcutaneous fat. Regardless of how your fat is positioned, you deserve to get the dress of you in order to get the estimate. (Though it is not really true. For example, if you are very slender with big, implanted weights in the breasts, you can in this context be considered to be less appropriate to show up in the picture).

Kroppspositivismen has been met with criticism. Sometimes the criticism of its short-sightedness: that criteria such as skin color, funktionsvariation, könsidentifikation and class are forgotten. Other critics are concerned that encourage obesity, which according to some sources is considered to be a greater health hazard than starvation, as seen to the number of deaths.

But there is a third angle, which gets surprisingly little space in the Swedish debate. Namely, it is problematic to put the body in the centre. In putting, so to speak, the butt especially.

the problem, in this context, today? Contains the public domain for getting unnamed, unclothed typically feminine bodies? Use get brands smiles, vadkurvor and bystlinjer to increase their sales? It is too clear for the young people of today if their value sits in the to be found attractive?

Whatever their original intention, kroppspositivismen far from being an underground resistance movement. Already from the beginning it was heavily influenced by the usual reklamtänk; the motto ”visible-valuable”. But now, it's also anammad of both small and large companies, which use it consistently in order to legitimate the body as the commodity. Every image on a more or less fully clothed individual who sells something in the capacity of the body, reinforces the message that this is the easiest, most effective way to sell. And thus, our most important asset.

Against this may be set to similar advertising images will be regardless, so why wouldn't they be more fairly distributed between the different types? It can both counteract the unhealthy ideals and reflect the actual population and thus may also widen the norm?

But ”the more overweight in the picture” is a cure that counteracts the error condition. The real negative is not that too few of us have the right to be seen as attractive. It is to this attractiveness for large groups as seen by all the superior importance.

not necessarily be positive. One can break the norms in all eternity. But self-worth will can't lie in the broken, but what they are breaking. It's the same sort of problems as when the representation in the advertisement is the parent of the perchance klyschiga yet true phrase that ”advertising is lethal”. Or, if you have a leftist: still working actively for quotas of women to management positions, as if it is better to be a quota bully and the problem is not under the same ideology, working conditions, capitalism, etc

as long As our value is in the body, the body will be something to fight against.

I know from my own experience that I can always find something to disgust in my reflection. It is not always a disgust that sits in all day, but it is a disgust that bites, hold in the hand, with regularity. I have learned that my overriding mission is to be... liggbar. And I see, in the pictures, how liggbara looks. It's not just about waist size. It can just as easily be about the pores, or hair follicles. It can always be about anything, anything anything, anything except what you yourself are.

the Idea that the current trend for bigger butts and some discrete callouses around the waist would break the boundaries for how ”it should look like” is quite naive. Puffandet with the hair, vaxandet of the upper lip, the finding of the right, natural, lip gloss to give the right, naturally elevated color of the naturally rounded amorbågarna is the same no matter what the model weighs.

To have the right to appear is one thing. Want to be seen is another. To feel the compulsion to appear to be, is a third, and quite the opposite.

to put it vulgar: it is rarely the runde, male 57-year-old professor will be asked to pose nude for his body is missing in the public domain.

Even more rarely, he creates a hashtag to draw attention to this problem.

Read more texts by Agnes Lindbeck