#and i am feeling rage towards diet culture and modern fashion

[discountalien-pancake]

Kay i have rainboxed and i have half a spoon and that’s gonna have to be enough, so if you spot any typos, no you didn’t. Let’s get on with it. Body talk under the cut, as usual. Here’s why spanx is evil and needs to die.

Modern elastic shapewear is the underwear equivalent of “no make-up makeup.” It, at its core, is about trying to look “naturally” slimmer. It is enforcing the ideal of a body with no lumps or bumps or fat rolls, but more importantly it is reinforcing the idea that that is how your actual flesh and blood body is supposed to look. Which is never going to happen! It is making you chase after an impossible ideal while making you feel bad for being unable to achieve it! Elastic shapewear is evil because it makes you feel guilty about not having the “right” body for what you want to wear.

Elastic shapewear makes you feel like a failure for not being able to naturally maintain a certain shape through diet and exercise. They are literally guilt-tripping you constantly. I fucking mean it when I say shapewear is evil.

The reason this isn’t a problem with historical corsets is that the point of a corset was not to look natural. A point of a corset is openly acknowledged artifice. It’s fake and it’s not pretending to be real. It’s not trying to convince you that that is how your real, actual, flesh and blood body is supposed to look. The shape of the clothes going over it is the shape of the corset, and not the shape of your body. The shape of the corset and the clothes is what was fashionable, and not the shape of your fucking fleshpuppet body. I’m going to keep repeating this because it’s important!!

Putting on a corset was like putting on a pair of shoes. No, that’s not the real actual shape of your foot, and it’s not trying to be! You were not expected to have the perfect body. You were not expected to physically look like a mannequin. Clothes were not designed with the expectation of the wearers being human coat-hangers. Shapes came and went out of fashion, but they were silhouettes and not sizes.

A lot of women and fem-presenting people talked about how covid changed their relationship with makeup, because they spent so much time with their faces covered by masks. No one could see your face, and so it didn’t matter what your face looked like under it. The fact that it was socially acceptable to hide your face was so freeing for so many people.

But shapewear does the literal fucking opposite of that. It is worn with the premise that your body is flawed and needs to be corrected so that when you wear these tight, clingy modern clothes that show every lump of your figure, you look effortlessly skinny and lump-free. It’s just as artificial as corsetry, but the catch is that you’re expected to actually look like that. It’s fake that should be real, according to society. And if you don’t look like that, it’s because you aren’t working hard enough, so why don’t you shove your defective fleshpuppet into this horrible thing so you can trick people into thinking you’re not a failure of a human being (heavy sarcasm)? It’s horrifying that this is the mindset that pervades society without most people ever consciously realizing it.

In an ideal world, we would stop caring about whether someone has fat rolls or if their stomach bulges when they sit down. In this imperfect world, where people spend way too much time staring at each other and judging other people for their perceived “life choices”… shapewear is just evil. It is a “solution” to a “problem” that doesn’t exist and only makes you feel worse for failing a test that is rigged.