Harm

Far be it from me to publish another blog with a rant, but it looks like this is where we’re going. Last time, my target was Michael Winkler. This time, it’s Jane Fonda.

Let’s begin.

In 1982, Jane Fonda published Jane Fonda's Workout – a home video workout series that taught us all how to do aerobics at home. I was 10 years old in 1982 and that’s the year I went on my first diet. So, for me, Jane Fonda in her leg warmers is an iconic representation of the body dysmorphia and disordered eating that has plagued me ever since.

I love listening to the podcast We Can Do Hard Things and I was surprised to learn, during this interview with Fonda, that most, if not all, of the profits from Jane Fonda’s Workout went towards her activism. Wikipedia tells me that she funnelled a lot of money into Democratic campaigns and social and environmental issues.

And it got me to wondering: Does the good outweigh the harm?

I can’t blame Jane Fonda for our obsession with thin. And I suppose I can’t blame her for not changing a system she was within. Maybe Fonda is just a product of her times, a fish swimming in water polluted with body shame. But, to me, calling things out instead of perpetuating them, that’s where the power is. 

I need to acknowledge that I didn’t call anything out. Well, I was a child in the 80s. But I don’t have any excuses for the 90s and beyond.

In this fantastic article, writer Jasper Peach explains that the body positivity movement became mainstream in the 2010s. I want to pause and acknowledge those brave men and women who defied the prevailing culture and started celebrating the bodies they had. I, sadly, wasn’t among them.

Peach suggests that, these days, body neutrality is the way to go:

I see body neutrality as being similar to being cold and getting a jumper: you’d neither celebrate nor criticise someone for feeling cold, or for wanting to be warm. My body isn’t wrong because it’s cold. It isn’t wrong because it’s fat. I’m not an amazing person just because I’d be more comfortable if I was warm, or because I choose to eat an apple or hot chips.

I’m afraid I’ve got a lot of unlearning still to do. A tendency to equate fatness with badness – primarily in myself but sometimes in others, too – lurks in my consciousness. I could blame my early reading – we all know how the fatties are equated with baddies in stories from the likes of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. But it seems I’d prefer to blame Jane Fonda. Oh, and Kate Moss – she is famous not only for her thinness but also for promoting the mantra ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’

Peach says that they might have grown up differently if body neutrality had been a thing during their childhood. I feel the same way. Peach has recently published the children’s book, My Body Is My Home, to counter the sizeism and ableism we confront from a very early age. I celebrate this.

I know there’s some awful shit going down in the world right now – did someone say genocide? – and there’s a lot we need to work on. But I think we need to acknowledge the good work some people, like Jasper Peach, are doing: Dismantling the patriarchy. Labelling fat shame as a form of oppression. Teaching us that body neutrality, or even body positivity, is a way out.

I admire Jane Fonda’s activism. But I hate what she perpetuated: Thin is good. Fat is bad. Pain is gain.

Apparently, Kate Moss regrets using that mantra about skinniness.

I too have regrets. I regret ever reading Cosmopolitan magazine. I regret smoking for 11 years because I thought it would help me eat less. I regret being either on or off a diet for more than 40 years. I regret accidentally making my kid feel bad about their body by always feeling bad about my own. I regret all the ice cream I didn’t eat. And I definitely, definitely regret all those years of putting Splenda in my tea. Urgh.

Body shame still pollutes the water we swim in. It’s also polluted by the patriarchy, neo-liberalism, colonialism and capitalism. But now we know it and, even better, we’re brave enough to call it out.