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Body-positive hashtags are continuously surfacing in their multitudes. Hashtags like: #loveyourlines, #mermaidthighs, and the all-encompassing #selflove - to name a few, are spreading like wildfire on Instagram. Ordinary women who are learning to love being in their own skin have finally come round to fighting age-old standards of beauty.
They are challenging the norms of what it means to have a “good body” and they are fighting chronic body shaming with pictures of body embracing. Nothing wrong with that. I am glad that for every picture proudly announcing a #thighgap there are now multitudes of pictures with proudly posed #mermaidthighs. I am glad that all the preachy #abcrack pics have found their equivalent “nemesis” in #loveyourcurves.
Women who could not check the boxes of all the shallow expectations of body image once forced on us by magazines and models and TV do not have to cower in the dark alleys of society anymore. They no longer have to feel insecure, ashamed and isolated.
Body-positivity has allowed women to organise a movement. A community. A place of belonging. And it is networks of like-minded individuals like these that create social change, support, and stimulate a more realistic and representative world.
It’s because of these body positivity hashtags and the communities they create that women are coming forward to challenge fashion, beauty and body standards. They’re making themselves visible and creating a space of acceptance and self-love that is long overdue. So all in all, as a feminist, I support body-positivity as a movement but… within limitations.
It’s controversial to say, and no one else wants to say it but I think a branch of the body positivity movement has become extreme and extremism is a problem. This dawned on me the other day when yet another craze hit the Instagram airwaves: #HipDips
Read more: #Hipdips is the new body-positive social media trend – but what is it?
Hip dips are the indentations some women have in the area between their hips and thighs. These dips result in an anti-hourglass figure. When you have hip dips, you have “violin figure” instead. They’re not a universal feature, not everyone has them. Just like not everyone has a Cindy Crawford mole or a Jennifer Lopez bum.
And apparently, hip dips need to be reclaimed because they used to be a problem. They made women feel insecure and ashamed. But no more. The violin will sing. The hashtag #hipdips is here to help us embrace and accept them. It took me a lot of reading and research to learn the above. I had no idea that hip dips were a “thing”. I had even less of an idea that that “thing” was a problem.
The first time I came across the trend on Instagram I literally screwed my face up hard enough to give Donald Trump a run for his money and loudly shouted WTF? And then obviously, I ran to the bathroom to try and practically figure all this out on my own self. Ladies and… ladies, I have hip dips. Who knew? I didn’t. And here’s what else I didn’t know: I didn’t know they were a problem until I was told to learn to embrace them.
This body-positivity trend called #hipdips made me feel more insecure about my body than I have felt in ages because it forced me to dissect myself and figure out what was wrong with me first before I could figure out why the thing that was wrong with me was right. What?!
I started out with no journey to take toward self-acceptance that day and I ended with a long road to walk toward embracing my hip dips. And that trip came with baggage.
I, admittedly, am a fitness glorifier. I believe in watching what I consume. I believe in at least trying to make an effort to be healthy. To me, the body is the mind made visible.
Just like I am careful and aware of what I read, watch and listen to because these are the things that will influence my thinking - I am also aware of what I put into my body and what I put out. And by put out, I mean how much energy I use to workout, because these are the things that will influence how good I feel.
Read more: This woman's yoga posts are challenging body stereotypes – and she's winning!
But, to clarify: just because I am a fitness fiend does not mean that I am victim to the plague of body-shaming hashtags like #thinspo and #bikiniridge and #ribcage or whatever. In all fairness, we have body-positivity to thank for their slow death on Instagram, and the reason they are becoming increasing unacceptable is because they are extreme. But #hipdips made me realise that “image embracing” is swinging in the same extreme direction and we need to be careful of what we consume on Instagram as well…
Is zooming in on a tiny portion of a woman’s body (previously considered completely irrelevant) and then comparing it to other women’s bodies really positive at all? Why must we be forced to accept details of ourselves that most of us accept anyway?
#Hipdips made me scrutinize an area of my body that I paid absolutely no attention to before. #Hipdips announced to me - on a loudspeaker - that I had an insecurity I didn’t know I had before. Isn’t this manipulative? Abusive even?
Body-positivity can be extreme. And anything extreme has the ability to debilitate us.
Disclaimer: The views of columnists published on W24 are their own and therefore do not necessarily represent the views of W24.
