Your Body Is Worth Everything!!!

Is anyone else really enjoying the commercialisation of individual value at the moment?  It’s beautiful.  It’s awesome.  It’s…

… a wee bit insidious, in it’s way.  In it’s affable sorta way.

Take, for example, the recent trends in ads by companies like Boots the Pharmacy, Dove (soaps and shampoos) and various fashion outlets including Selfridges and M&S, those bastions of women-who-wear-navy-blue-with-style.  After years of trying to sell anorexia to women; after years of explaining that sexual satisfaction only came with a certain kind of face cream and by wearing magic knickers that transformed your backside into a carved bit of moonrock; after generally being lambasted for reducing female identity down to a simper and a smile, they’ve got with the 21st century.  Now they’re using models who actually look like women; women with saggy bits (like me) and squelchy bits (like me) and legs that start at their hips and end at their feet and don’t seem to go on a voyage through space and time in between.  And hey!  Sometimes they even use women who are over 24 and aren’t white.  Dig that getting down with modernity.

And as they do so, they tell us a very important truth.  Women!  You are beautiful.

We are all beautiful.

Just as we are.

Our bodies are wonderful and should be celebrated; our charisma comes from a thing within our souls that can’t be sculpted or shaped by the desires of fashion.  We have our choices and we make them and these choices are unique to our identities and that’s great!  Let’s celebrate the beauty of our uniqueness and the best way to celebrate that…

***… is with 40% off the ‘real woman’ range coming now to a store near you!***

It doesn’t stop there.  If you’re worried that your clothes are being made by people on a few dollars a day working in sweat shops in China or the Philippines (but you really like cheap clothes) you can now go watch helpful videos about how THIS t-shirt was in fact made by a collective of women in Malawi who are using their funds to pay for cleaner water in their community yay!  And maybe you didn’t need their t-shirt before, but now buying these clothes is so much more than a silly unnecessary purchase – now it’s an ethical choice that empowers OTHER women who are, yes, tragically less privileged than you but who cares?  We’re all sisters in it together, so spend spend spend!

Or maybe you’re about to have this conversation with a woman who’s stopped you in the street as you pass her freshly opened store…

“Hey!  We’re having a promotional day; would you like to come inside?  We’re selling hand creams and face creams and body products but more than that, we’re about selling a way of life.  We believe in affordable luxury, but more importantly we believe that our products can really help you find a moment to be with yourself, to put the beauty back into the mundane so that as you cleanse your face with our products (£18.99 for 50ml, special offer) it’s not just about getting clean, it’s about taking time to appreciate your own senses.  Come inside: we’re doing breathing exercises and we have a range of products which I think would be especially good for you, to help bust your daily stresses and reconnect with your inner certainty.  Ah – I didn’t know that translated from Chinese we’ve called this product line ‘the way of the way’ but um… it smells nice, doesn’t it?”

And yes.

It smells lovely.

And no, it’s not very affordable and no, please don’t talk to me about toxins it’s a guaranteed way to piss me off and oh my but you actually geniunely have a Buddha sat at the back of your shop…

As Tim Minchin once expressed regarding Christmas… “I’m against commercialisation of a dead Palestinian press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer… but I quite like the songs.”  So I suspect that the Guatama may not have foreseen that the eight-fold path would one day be quite so useful in selling vitamin-enriched night-cream for that soothing ‘it’s just me’ feeling.

Hey – generally speaking I’m a sucker for all of this.  I am absolutely the kind of girl who will spend a few quid more to buy something from the Friends of the Earth Shop because it’s ‘ethical’; and though most of my wardrobe is charity-shop special, if you are selling a bra under the tagline ‘because we believe in protecting women’s breasts from cancer and empowering female choice’ then hell, I’m there.

And yes, your hand cream smells very nice indeed, and absolutely, there is a certain awesomeness in spending a part of my day getting my head out of my backside, and living in this moment, and enjoying the basic pleasing experience of every day life, and the calming ride that the beauty of this world entering upon my senses.  Boom.  I am well down with that.

And I’m down with being told that my body is beautiful, and that I shouldn’t have to wear stupid fucking clothes in order to aspire to a stupid bloody inhuman ideal of beauty.  This is all awesome.

It’s all really expensive, profit-making awesome.

A bit like organised religion, humanity has once again taken some really nice ideas, and found a way to make money out of it, and right there we wobble back towards a fail.  Because I shouldn’t need an advertising campaign to tell me that I’m great, or a soap to prove it.  I shouldn’t find buying a t-shirt an acceptable alternative to actually giving to a charity that does fantastic work for the poorest of this world.  (Tiny Spark has excellent guidance on how to go about doing this well.)  And I shouldn’t have nice women speaking to me in a soft voice while smeering goo on my fingers as the only way I know of to chill out in life.  Especially when that goo costs more than I’m comfortable contemplating.

It’s good, in it’s way, that the world is beginning to recognise that empowerment is important, and individuality is good, and that we are not all begging to be moulded into fashion’s model.

It’s really kinda sinister that this revelation has a price tag slapped on top of it.