In 2004, the sex advice columnist Dan Savage was asked about another fashion in female body shape: why weren’t women in porn getting enormous, “bigger-than-your-head” breast implants anymore? And this is what he replied:
“The sudden appearance of women with ridiculously huge boob implants was arousing in part because of its shock value. There was the shock of women with such exaggerated racks, of course, but there was also the more important and, sadly, the infinitely more arousing shock of women finding a novel new way to imperil their health in order to attract the attention of men.”
The point of all these extremes is their demonstration of commitment to being beautiful — to fulfilling the assumption, as Chambers describes it, that “to be a woman is to be sexually attractive, or at least to be sexually available, or at least open to judgement for being or not being sexually attractive and available”. It’s not that these physiques are universally desired by men at the times they become popular. It’s that they become the accepted symbol of a woman’s willingness to reshape her body in order to be pleasing.
Trends are cyclical: an aesthetic gains ascendency, spreads to ubiquity, is pushed to absurdity in the competition for attention, and then collapses under the physical limitations of the body to be replaced by the next standard. When the thing after skinny-thicc begins to emerge, it might feel like an escape, but it won’t be. It will go through the same process, have the same distribution of winners and losers, exhaust itself the same way.
Women’s bodies, in other words, will always be a problem to solve. They will never be acceptable. That’s what makes Chambers’s position in Intact so appealingly radical: she argues that bodies do not need to be modified. Your body is valuable just as it is, because it is you. And I agree — while being enormously grateful that Chambers leaves enough flexibility in her thesis for me to agree without having to change any of the habits I’m attached to.
Intact is not absolutist. Sometimes, writes Chambers, modification is justified — for reasons of health or happiness. So it’s okay to spend £150 getting my hair done, because it’s a pleasure. (I’m a primate: it’s nice to be groomed. The sociological term for this is “the beauty touch”, says Chambers.) It’s okay for me to lift weights in the gym; so long as steroids aren’t involved: “bodybuilding can be good for both body and soul.” My tattoos are perhaps a more challenging case, but they too are defensible for Chambers as acts of “self-expression”.
In fact, any kind of body modification turns out to be acceptable in the end, because “the principle of the unmodified body asserts a premise, not a goal”. This saves her from doing anything as gauche as telling other people what to do with their bodies, but it does set her argument a little adrift: her book is part passionate defence of physical integrity, part “you do you” shrug.
Chambers is also careful to make a fine distinction between “unmodified” and “natural”, pointing out that the latter is an unhelpful concept because “if being natural means being without human interference, then no human and no body can ever be natural”. Everything you consume, every movement you make, can alter the appearance of your body. How can a woman decide what to do with her body when every possible choice is loaded with value?
I’m not as scared of being censorious as Chambers is. As far as I’m concerned, wanting to change your appearance is part of being human, and one of the ways we signal status and group loyalty. But not all modifications are equal, and the ones we should be wary of are, first, the ones that infringe on the body’s ability to be a body: that destroy its capacity for function or pleasure (labiaplasty), that attack its self-reliance by turning it into a permanent patient (fillers that must be endlessly refilled so the stretched-out cavity won’t sag).
We should also be suspicious of modifications that distort our idea of the average. If you want Botox and can afford the good stuff, I do chafe at the idea of banning it. However, and as Chambers argues, we should not pretend the ethics here end with individual choice: if you eliminate your fine lines, you will change how others feel about theirs. When you’ve seen enough strangely ageless faces, your own normal creases begin to feel like deformities.
And finally, we should query modifications that are displays of pure female submission — by which I mean the extreme and dangerous forms of plastic surgery, but which arguably includes a great many of the less intrusive things I do. Chambers describes makeup as the ultimate in self-objectification, because when we wear it, “we see ourselves as others see us, and treat their perspective as the one that counts”.
I baulk at this — my face is a means of communication, and makeup is a fun way to play with the vocabulary of expression — but I should, at least, accept the possibility that I might be wrong. Beauty may be laborious. But declining to do beauty is its own kind of hard. In a society that judges women in particular so harshly on the way they look, it’s an announcement of non-compliance, and it’s often met with hostility.
The point is, even when a woman decides she will not make a statement with her body, she is making a statement. The point is, this is exhausting. The point is, it’s supposed to be: even on the days I’m not spending hours in a salon or carefully painting wings along my lash line, I’m still distractedly thinking about how I look at least some of the time. And if I stopped thinking about it? Someone else would still be thinking about it for me, judging me. The point is, there is no way out. We’re damned if we care, and damned if we don’t.
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