Diet Season, or a feminist take on “Spring Renewal”

It is spring, and I want to say something about narratives.

Spring has always brought with it numerous narratives about rebirth, new beginnings, fresh starts, relief, hope, beauty. This is because the season is really, truly a time of rebirth, for nature. Scientifically speaking, spring is a time in which the climate permits growth, flourishing, and birth in the natural world. This truth stands on its own, free of human judgment. But the narrative takes on a moral meaning when humans adopt it for their purposes. For example, Christians adapted this narrative for their Easter story, in which their prophet is resurrected after being persecuted and killed. The prophet brings a message about forgiveness: that after evil, you can still be loved by something good. You can start over. Death and rebirth are no longer scientific truths here, but instead have become the backdrop of a moral human story. Now, I will not make any kind of assessment of one of the most powerful human narratives in the history of human narratives. I simply want to point out how a “neutral” narrative can take on a moral, i.e. good vs. evil, weight, when used for a certain human end.

In the past few weeks since spring sprang in my French city, I have noticed lots of changes, and not just in climate. Sure, the trees are blooming in pinks and whites and yellows. There are certainly many more birds and bees. Luckily, the farmer’s market has real vegetables to sell me. But most importantly, and disturbingly, I’ve been noticing one a particular nasty strain of the “spring narrative.”

Yes, I am talking about Diet Season. And the ways in which businesses co-opt the spring narrative in order to sell women things, most importantly an intangible ideal of beauty. The story sounds innocent at first: “The sun is shining. Children are frolicking in the green parks. The smell of flowers wafts past your nose as you notice a nest full of baby birds… and YOU NEED TO BE THINNER.”

How do they do it? Well, it is quite simple. Soon, the warm climate will require us to wear lighter, less clothing. We may even need to expose some skin. And this necessarily means that we will be attractive to the opposite sex, specifically the Masculine Male Man, who cannot control his sexual urges because of his DNA (another flawed narrative… but that one’s for another time). When MMM looks at us in the lovely spring sunlight, he wants to see someone in Good Physical Form. And so. Get to it.

In the window of every pharmacy in Besançon, a display about “minceur”; on the cover of every magazine, elaborate nutrition and exercise regimes. And speaking of the word regime, which is the word meaning diet in French, and not coincidentally can be found as a synonym to “dictatorship,” this is another way that the spring narrative gets butchered. Time to start anew, like the little birdie families! Change of leadership–your winter inner-dictator was lazy, weak, flabby; let’s hire a real disciplinarian this time, who knows how to say no, who visualizes bikinis and pushes harder.

And oh, how thankful to this narrative is the clothing industry, which reminds us that it is a matter of weeks before we will need to wear this, this, that, and that. Notice, all ye women, that on our huge posters and advertisements, people wearing our clothes are THIN. If you are worthy of spring clothing, you will do best to get to work.

Now, wasn’t I talking about good vs. evil before? This deformed narrative passes for Good because it resembles that neutral and natural story of rebirth and renewal. But it is not good. Au contraire, it is evil, evil, evil.

Refuting a bad counter-argument #1: Some people are unhealthily overweight and so if this narrative encourages and motivates them to get healthy, it is not evil. Indeed, narratives like this possess immense psychological power (kind of like Stalin), but they derive their power not from innocent, honest ends like “health” and “well-being,” but rather from destructive complexes of harmful emotions like guilt, insecurity, over-competition, and unrealistic expectation. Anyone who wants to pretend that those pharmacies and clothing boutiques are looking out for an overweight person’s cardiac health is just living in Delusion-ville.

Refuting a bad counter-argument #2: Women do this to each other; a feminist point-of-view is moot since women will always compete with each other and hold each other to unrealistic beauty standards. This is an old and weak argument, stemming from some kind of myth that the women who write for, edit, and publish women’s magazines create the standards from which they sell their products. Let’s go back to thinking about the “end” or goal of the narrative here. Women’s magazines’ end is to sell women’s magazines. Let’s look at some historical examples, taken from Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, of how beauty propaganda had to accommodate women’s liberation after world wars:

“A Pond’s cold cream ad of the time read: ‘We like to feel we look feminine even though we are doing a man-sized job…so we tuck flowers and ribbons in our hair and try to keep our faces looking pretty as you please.’ A cosmetics ad admitted that while the war could not be won by lipstick, ‘it symbolized one of the reasons why we are fighting…the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely.’ The propaganda in women’s magazines of that day emphasized that it was okay to work in the factory, live on your own and earn your own salary, so long as you stayed feminine. And, of course, the goal of all women’s magazines was to be the sole source on how to be feminine. Women’s magazines needed to ensure that their readers would not liberate themselves out of their interest in women’s magazines.”

If women are holding each other to unhealthy and unrealistic standards of beauty, it is because the propaganda pandered to them by their culture uses destructive and manipulative narratives that insist they do as such. At the same time, women are not innocent actors in this equation, which brings me to my next point: that a feminist understanding of these narratives is invaluable because it promotes solidarity. We can only counter-act a narrative as powerful as this spring-means-get-skinny bullshit if we help each other recognize its fallacy and misogyny.

But I argue that before we can help our female loved ones to love their bodies, we have to learn to love our own. The way we do this is to TELL A NEW STORY. Compose a new narrative for spring. Notice evil narratives when we see/hear them, and say something about them. When we say to ourselves, “Hm, that ad just made me feel extremely ugly, bad, and un-womanly,” we must train ourselves to react with productive anger instead of unproductive self-hate. That ad made me feel that way, and therefore, that ad is NOT MY FRIEND. And by the way, if a person makes you feel ugly and bad, do you call her/him your friend? Of course not. So why adopt these terrible ads and shops as friends, inviting them into the shower and the bedroom with you? Avoid them, like you’d avoid that nasty, mean bully on the playground.

Or, if you really feel empowered, talk to that bully. Ask it to stop. Remind it that it is actually quite hurtful. And who knows… maybe it will take a bit of that to heart.

A “culture” is really just a big mesh of narratives. When these narratives make sense and allow groups of people to function effectively together, they start to be enacted. Soon, for those enacting them, as well as for those watching them be enacted, the narratives feel true. They feel true because they are ubiquitous and visible.

But there is an important difference between REAL, i.e. actually happening, tangible, visible–and TRUE, i.e. factual, legitimate, trustworthy, fair. Let’s let spring tell a different story this year, one of complex self-love, and not of beauty myths. Let’s tell a new story, in which we and our girlfriends, sisters, mothers are beautiful because they are themselves. And then let’s go outside and enjoy the spring.