Body Dysmorphia Feels More Fascist Than Ever

Fascism, a political ideology emphasising extreme nationalism and the supremacy of the state over the individual, often involves rhetoric about maintaining the purity of the blood of the nation’s inhabitants. Fascists strive towards a homogenous national community by suppressing dissent and promoting militarism through a charismatic leader.

Fascism is obsessed with bodily morality. Body morality is one of the core components of fascism, with a nation being conceived as made up of individuals as part of the state’s collective. Therefore, individuals are expected to conform to what is perceived to make the country stronger, namely, healthy, able, beautiful bodies that project genetic superiority.

While men are perceived to have the ideal body when they are strong, tall, and muscular, making them suitable as military personnel, women are expected to be sexually attractive to men. This is because female citizens are expected to become mothers to provide fresh blood for the nation state, and maintain domestic harmony, as the nuclear family produces workers and allows the state to exploit women’s unpaid labour.

Fascism, focusing on racial purity, also emphasises reproducing with good genes, which they define as other members of their superior race. Over time, this ideology is less evident than it was back in history when it was publicly accepted, such as when slave ownership was common. In today’s society, racial rhetoric adopts newer, more subtle forms, where instead of prohibiting procreation with other races, they ascribe and associate traits they label as negative to racial minorities.

American sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in her book Fearing the Black Body (2019) that, while masculinity and bulkier figures were associated with Black women due to the slave trade, waifish, brittle bodies were related to white women, whose delicate nature was linked to refinement and aristocracy. As opposed to behaviours labelled barbaric, such as eating a lot, denoting a lack of self-control, the restriction of eating and drinking became evidence of refinement. By extension, the thinner figures such behaviour produced were held as the ideal bodies.

Strings (2019) notes that at the same time, gluttony and fatness were associated with African women in scientific racial literature. Meanwhile, the arbiters of taste and purveyors of morality decreed that delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer physique were associated with English women. Far from being a coincidence, the fear of being uncultivated, and thus like racialised others, lay at the heart of these developments.

Right now, with the rise of MAGA and the normalisation of misogynistic sentiments, we are seeing the rise of fascism marketed to women as tradwife aesthetics, where women are encouraged to be submissive and domestic to be better than other women or to escape the fate of a wage slave under capitalism. One of the components of being the ideal woman under fascist ideology is to control and mould one’s body to fit within the demands of the ideology.

In fact, body dysmorphia is a full-time job. Body dysmorphia shifts women’s energy to focus on controlling themselves as opposed to doing something about the society that oppresses them. You are your own police, being in charge of your own “health”, and “health” in this context has nothing to do with the woman’s actual quality of life, and much more to do with how desirable she is to the men dictating what she is supposed to look like.

Eating disorders kneecap a girl’s critical thinking ability through starvation. Not only do eating disorders and body dysmorphia conceptually distract the sufferer from changing their external environment to moulding their internal self to fit the unrelenting demands of what is outside their locus of control, but also starving yourself results in your stomach releasing ghrelin, the hunger hormone, resulting in the sufferer to not be able to think about anything else but to obsess over food excessively.

Keeping women spending most of their time chasing beauty to appease others takes away time to build community, develop skills, and change the system. The homogenous beauty standard strips women of their individuality, and what does it mean to be human if it were not for our uniqueness?

Under fascism, people are not encouraged to be humans with individual identities, but as parts of the greater whole that is the state. To combat fascism, women should take a critical look at their desires and see whether the desire to be thin and frail is authentic or if it is a byproduct of propaganda. After all, the most significant test of determining this is to ask: Cui bono? Who does it benefit? Who benefits from my weakness, myself, or the party of oppressors?

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Previously Published on Medium

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