Repost: Flaws

I’ll be taking the week off regular programming to spend time with my family and relax a bit. Hope many of you can do the same, and enjoy these tidbits from the archive!

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I feel fairly certain that a marketing professional was the first person to refer to socially undesirable physical traits as “flaws.” And I’m totally certain that those “flaws” were on a woman’s body. When the concept of generating previously non-existent insecurities about beauty and bodies first arose in the marketing world, it arose as a means of selling stuff to women. But eventually, the idea of flawed bodies seeped out beyond cosmetics and girdles and hair removal systems and into the world of fashion. Now, every style expert spouts off about “hiding figure flaws” and “downplaying your flaws.” Every fashion mag claims it can reveal the secrets of “flawless skin” and “a flawless figure.” The language of body flaws is ubiquitous and unavoidable.

And it makes me livid. Livid, I tell you! Because the assertion that bodies can even have flaws implies that some bodies are flawless. It creates an imaginary and impossible hierarchy of beauty that women strive to ascend. It makes us all feel inadequate on a fundamental level because flaws are damage, errors, mistakes. Flaws are wrong.

But your body is not wrong. Nothing about your body is a flaw. I don’t care how many scars or warts or zits it’s got. I don’t care how much or little you weigh, how tall or short you are, how much or little hair you’ve got or what color it is. I don’t care how you’re proportioned or where you stash your cellulite or how big your boobs are. And I sure as hell don’t care how old or young you are. Your body is NOT WRONG. Your body is NOT FLAWED. Your body is also not perfect, but guess what? Neither is anyone else’s, and that’s just biology. Anyone who wants to talk to you about how to hide or mask or eliminate your flaws wants to sell you some crap that they’ve invented. And whatever crap they’re selling may slowly, subtly strip away your humanity and uniqueness. Because the Beauty Machine believes that we all want to look like identical airbrushed photos of former humans, and it sells us that desire over and over again.

You get to decide what you love about your body and what you want to show off. You also get to decide what you don’t love about your body and what you don’t want to show off. This is not to say that if you haven’t learned to adore and proudly display your keratosis pilaris that you’re a failure. No, indeed. Bodies are complex and our relationships with our bodies are complex. You as an individual get to make choices about how you dress your body and why, what you downplay and what you highlight.

But I implore you: Consider the implications of referring to your body’s features as “flaws.” Because they’re just not. Not a one of them. Even the ones you hate and wish you could change, and the ones you hate and are actively seeking to change right now.

Your body is not wrong, and the less you tell it that it is wrong, the stronger it’ll become.

Image courtesy handels.

  • romy

    I think this video from “That Mitchell and Webb look” makes it clear:

    And it’s exactly how I see it! The advertising treats men as winners like “you’re the best, and inspired by your amazing and perfect way of being, we have created …” for women would be something like “You have to be perfect to be loved, we’ll help you improve your flaws”. It’s like men are perfect and they add the X product to that perfection, women are imperfect and they need X product to fix themselves….. Pure sh@#$t! I don’t buy it anymore, I prepared myself to consider ads like “enemies”, so every time I see a new ad I’m ready to intercept the punch. I’m mentalized that ads will mine my self esteem and it works. Happy new year Sally!

  • Maggie

    Here is a challenge: when my petite slender 12 year old wonders if she is fat because when she bends over, rolls appear on her tummy. And when she won’t stop using foundation as a concealer. And when she wonders if her nose is “wrong”. We engage only in positive body talk at our house, she never hears me say anything negative about my own body or anyone else’s, etc. and yet the talk among 12 year olds seems focused on flaws….

  • Ignorant Awareness

    Isn’t it even funnier though, that what we deem as ‘flaws’ can actually be seen as ASSETS by others?!

    I mean not to be crude, but being a natural pear shape means my rear end is big/ shapely (however you want to see it). As a child, my mother would always indoctrinate into me, the idea that this was a part of my body I desperately needed to fix- to quote her, I was ‘ok from up top’, but I ‘really need to sort out the bottom!’ I’d exercise endlessly just to try & get it to disappear, not really understanding that I can’t change my actual body shape without plastic surgery etc. I was made to feel that no man would ever want to be with me with a body ‘FLAW’ like this.

    Maybe that would have been the case if I were to get a traditional arranged marriage, considering the fact that she’d decide who I’d get with (& that man would probably inevitably hate body shapes like mine).

    You know what, though? Since shedding that twisted opinion, I’ve actually found the opposite to be true- any man I’ve ever been with has been crazy about that part of me! I still remember the horrified look on my partner’s face when I even suggested liposcution lol!

    Just goes to show that all of these ‘flaws’ are just in the mind, nothing more- don’t let someone else’s insecurities fuel your own! :)

  • Suze in CO

    I started reading this post, then went back to the photo and … laughed! As someone with bad knees who is looking at knee replacement (not immediately, but at some point) and as someone who is the daughter and grand-daughter of women who each had double knee replacements, I don’t see the scars on those knees as “flaws”. Mt first thought was, “I bet she feels a lot better now.”

  • Laura

    Excellent! I’m copying and emailing to my daughter! Thank you.

  • Aging fashionista

    Well, all good points, I totally agree we should accept ourselves as we are at any point in time. BUT, obesity IS a health risk, and exercise and diet is a validated way to prolong healthy life. So can we agree to commit to improve/maintain health but still accept our natural shapes (with occasional chocolate indulgences?)

    • Shaye

      Can we agree instead not to concern troll fat people?

      To put it another way: I don’t buy into the obesity hysteria that says I’m putting my health at risk by refusing to try to change something that 95% of the time will not change even with effort. I fact, it’s more dangerous to yo-yo diet (which 95% of diets are) than it is to just be fat. Statistically, if I diet, in five years I’ll just be more fat, and not incidentally, will have paid a heck of a lot of money for the privilege.

      But based on your comment, I doubt we’re going to see eye-to-eye on that. So if I want to put my health at risk, what exactly makes that anyone’s business but mine?