ACHTUNG!!Nivea, this one's for you, baby!

So I decided to do a little definition searching this morning and stumbled upon this little gem…

Body Dysmorphia: Body dysmorphic disorder is a type of chronic mental illness in which you can’t stop thinking about a flaw in your appearance — a flaw that is either minor or imagined.

Ladies, this is television’s gift to you… A healthy daily dosage of body dysmorphia to remind you of what our suffragette sisters fought for all those years ago!

Enjoy!

Now, don’t get me wrong, even I can appreciate what a glamrock pair of glitter boots and a smudge of bright red lipstick can do for a girl once in a while… But with summer eveeeeentually approaching, the advertising game has me rethinking my TV subscription (as much as my world would not be the same without Graham Norton and CSI reruns!).

And Nivea, it’s all your fault.

Thanks.

You just couldn’t help but target me as yet another woman in your wildly imagined audience with a brain the size of a pea.

Because it’s not our brains but our tightly wound and regulated bodies that really matter, right?

For years now, I have dealt with a different body and tried to navigate the sense of shame and inadequacy that I have been encouraged to feel. I had gained 10kg after I began to take medication for bipolar disorder and went from a petite person for whom weight was never an issue to the me today who has to fastidiously monitor what she eats. I do this so I won’t have to go off my mood stabilisers if my weight becomes a serious issue for my health. And yeah, I’m a smart enough gal and my brain tells me that I look pretty healthy, and my body tells me that I feel pretty healthy. They’re good like that, when I have the good sense to listen to them… besides a bit of a rolly polly, it ain't half shabby for all I walk most everywhere, garden, clean, you know... Stuff.

But then, you, Nivea, have the audacity to tell me my skin is not firm enough?! That I need your cream and the body of a twenty-something, 6 foot model with wash-board abs to wear shorts on a sunny day?! I have two words for you.

FUCK YOU.

Crawl back under the rock from whence you came, you slimy fucking toads. (And here, let me extend a sincere apology to the world’s toads. It’s an unfortunate comparison.)

Of course, that is not to say that you, Nivea, are alone in this enterprise. You are but one tiny part of a very impressive empire. The misogynistic vitriol you spew is supported by adverts for slimming products (‘Buy 2 and get 1 free!’), by adverts for undergarments that will give the appearance of a flattened stomach or ‘lifted’ butt cheeks, by adverts even for exfoliating devices to keep the soles of our feet delicate and desirable…

But your loathsome kind have made one glaring mistake. You have underestimated me. You have underestimated us all.

I already know that the best trick of the colonizer was to first colonize the mind and the rest would follow… And capitalist enterprise has clearly taken a page out of the colonizer’s nifty handbook when it comes to the violent assault it has launched on the bodies of women.

We no longer have laws in place to police women in a democratic society.

But here’s the funny thing, we don’t need them...

So bombarded have we become, by advertising, by Hollywood, by the reality shows we salivate over, that we have begun to willingly and at times, even obsessively, police ourselves.

My yoga teacher was asked by a woman the other day if his classes would help her to lose weight. He wasn’t sure, he told her. That had never been the objective of his class. The real objective had always been to make people, men and women, irrespective of age or weight, proud of their bodies, to teach them to embody their bodies, to live and breathe in them. He told the woman that, whether or not she lost any weight, he guaranteed she would find this far more rewarding. This is the message we need; this is the message we deserve.

So please, my fellow sisters, my fellow warriors, do not give up what is perhaps the most fundamental right we have, and that is the right to dictate the terms for your own bodies. Do not turn your cheek and surrender as the beauty houses and the so-called ‘health’ industry grow fat off of insecurities they have crafted and manufactured, insecurities that are nothing but smoke and mirrors to get us to hand over our hard-earned cash.

You are intelligent. You are fierce. You are brave in the face of adversity. You are Woman. Your body is a finely-tuned instrument, a verse of spoken-word, a canvas quivering at the anticipation of artistic expression. Your body is so many beautiful things… But I will tell you, in all earnestness, the one thing it is not: it is not, and was never designed to be, a commodity for capitalist exploitation.