31

You are putting a few packets of chips in the overloaded shopping cart as the lean muscular androgynous man stares back at you, from the hoarding in front. Another hoarding has only a pair of lips, perfectly shaped, full, red smiling at you as you stare hypnotically.
The social media is full of bodies that are almost always unlike yours. Irrespective of our shape, BMI, or weight, never before have we been so acutely aware of ourselves – looking, critiquing, capturing, tweaking, filtering the self and offering versions of ourselves for public consumption. It makes for a deeply personal engagement with the bodies we live in, in ways that are deeply impersonal and alienating. This creates a strange dynamic between our sense of the self and the bodies we live in.
We find ourselves at the deep end of the shallow business of beauty. And we drown in the not so shallow waters of shame, self-loathing, inadequacy and anger towards our own bodies, subjecting it all kinds of violence. This violence is subtle, layered and surprisingly funny! Funny because we recognise it spot on! Funny because it is ours collectively, even when it is intensely private.
Funny because we don’t talk about it and yet it’s funny, until it’s not.