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What's body fascism doing in a nice riot like this?

Christine Feynmann | 27.06.2009 23:02 | G20 London Summit | Climate Chaos | Gender | Other Press

Imagine the following scenario: a reporter from a mainstream magazine goes to a Climate Camp event, and asks for someone to do an interview with. The media team sends a camper to do the interview, and this camper happens to be Asian, or black. The reporter says: "Sorry, our readers prefer to look at pictures of white people. Do you have anyone white we could interview?" How would the Climate Campers react? Hopefully they would tell this reporter to fuck the hell off, at the very least.

Something similar happened last April at Climate Camp in the City in London. The reporter was from Grazia magazine, and they didn't specify that they wanted to interview someone white - instead, either overtly or otherwise, it was made clear that they only wanted Climate Campers who were young, female, and cute. And the Climate Campers quite happily complied.

A lot of people think that body fascism isn't "real" oppression, in the way that racism and homophobia are real. In fact 16,000 people a year die of anorexia, between 1 and 2% of women between 15 and 30 have an eating disorder, and many more are unable to live full and happy lives because they cannot get over their feelings of shame about not having the "correct" body shape. This is oppression, and it is very real. The fact that women are bombarded with the twin messages that how they look is more important than what they do, and that there is only one correct way to look, contributes to the fact that women on average have lower pay and are less likely to occupy positions of power. Our society is still a patriarchy, meaning that most power is held by a small elite, and this elite is almost exclusively male. Body fascism helps keep it that way.

Of course it is true that the Climate Camp has always made compromises when dealing with the mainstream media. For instance the media team invited the Daily Mail to do interviews, even though the Daily Mail often prints articles that are very racist. The difference though is that while many Daily Mail articles are racist, when the Daily Mail does an interview with a Climate Camper, the Climate Camper does not express or agree with racist views. However when Climate Campers agreed to do the Grazia interview, with the understanding that only Climate Camp women who more or less fit into the standard "correct" body shape demanded by body fascism would be welcome to do it, they implicitly agreed with and promoted the extremely oppressive ideas that there is only one correct way for a woman to look, and that a woman's physical appearance is the most important thing about her. The Climate Campers could have insisted that anyone who wanted to be in the photo-shoot could be in it. They could have insisted on having a range of ages and body types. They didn't do this (presumably because it would have led to Grazia refusing to do the article at all).

It could be argued that the Grazia article was justified because it brought information about the Climate Camp to a wider audience, and thus could lead to more people getting involved in Climate Camp. This may be true. However the Grazia article has contributed to the loss of at least one Climate Camper. While I have been involved in the Climate Camp movement since 2006, I have been a feminist far longer than that. As a teenager I bought into the ideas of body fascism, and thus I viewed myself as a failure because I was "ugly" and "fat". I spent years deconstructing the oppressive messages that we are bombarded with every day, and teaching myself to view my actions as being more important than my body shape. I had to become a feminist before I could become an activist. If I had not become a feminist I would not have had the confidence and the self-belief necessary to help run a social centre, to participate in large meetings, or to blockade a factory. After all that I have been through, belonging to an organization that thinks this Grazia article is alright, or at least harmless, feels like a massive step backwards. As a result of this I will be less a lot less up for doing Climate Camp stuff in the future.

Christine Feynmann

Additions

The article

28.06.2009 01:53

Someone sent me a copy of the Grazia article after I wrote this - I hadn't seen it before, I'd searched for it on the Internet but couldn't find it, so only knoew about it through word of mouth. Having seen the article it's not at all a typical Grazia article, and nowhere near as bad I'd expected. So what I wrote was probably overly harsh. I'm sorry. I was just feeling really angry and scared at the thought of the Climate Camp venturing into the realm of "women's magazines" which are actually so incredibly oppressive to women, without having an analysis of that. I still think the stuff I wrote about is important to think about generally. But what I wrote was way to harsh toward the people who were involved in that article so I'm sorry for that.

Christine Feynmann


Comments

Display the following 17 comments

  1. what did — ballz
  2. Yes Women — Danny
  3. Here is the article. It's pretty good! — Georgie Hibbs
  4. Re: The Article — Anonymous
  5. the article is crap! — not a nice girl
  6. I threw up — Valerie Solanos
  7. Climate camp needs to wake up and smell the oppression. — anarchist feminist
  8. Grazia's target audience — FFS
  9. climate camp did smell it — sarah jackson
  10. whether about children or media team — are we nearly there yet?
  11. Re: are we nearly there yet? — Ms Anne Thropy
  12. ... — Ms Anne Thropy
  13. What's a nice girl like me doing having opinions at all? — Jaime
  14. ' — censored
  15. a few things to consider — a climate camper and media activist
  16. We need to reach out to EVERYONE — AG
  17. Truth hurts? — Ben
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