I ask myself this often.
what the fuck is empowering about wammin in underwear? bra burning happened 50 FUCKING YEARS AGO. I cannot in anyway understand the concept that “fuck off im in my drawers deal with it” means empowered self love. Actual underwear ads are literally selling something- underwear. Is it some sort of subversive version of that? Because rolly polly bekah in her ugly saggy color Block bra and panties looks insane. She looks like Aunty Merle got into the schnapps again at Christmas at her dementia kicked off and the family found her sitting in her knickers in the gazebo grinning weirdly.
I'm throwing myself in here too. Confused AF millennial. And this goes beyond the fatties, I don't understand it of the skinny, conventionally 'hot' (read: fake) thots. It's not that I'm a prude or anything, ho it up, talk about all the dick and pussy you're getting, swap notes with ya girls, live your best life. But why do you have to get EVERYTHING out on EVERY instagram post? It's fucking pathetic in my eyes, just so desperate. Like a well placed thirst trap is all well and good, but I feel the feed has just become ass shot, box shot, inserting yourself in a meme about kink when you know the girl is a fucking starfish in the sack.
Sorry for the OT but for real, I'm just confused. The photos of women that have stopped me in my tracks and made me say 'DAAAYUM' they are all fully clothed. Get your ass outta my face.
I'm an old GenXer, and don't get it either.
The only explanation I can come up with is that they had parents who didn't want to impose too many rules and boundaries on behavior, or seem too strict and judgmental, so they left their kids to figure out the right way to be in this world. So where did these kids go for guidance? Entertainment media, advertising, and popular self-help culture. Which has been a fucking disaster (and it's been just as disastrous for young men, too, just in different ways).
And it didn't help that the late '90s and '00s were a time when even very young girls were being aggressively hypersexualized--that was the era of Britney, Christina Aguilera, and other teenage pop-tarts; "princess" shit; and Bratz dolls. And it was also a time when every mother of daughters I knew was bewailing how slutty even little girls' clothing had become. After the '70s and '80s, during which gender divisions in toys and kids' clothing were still there, but a lot less rigidly defined, those gendered divisions came roaring back with a vengeance--if you were a girl, you were supposed to want pink and sparkly everything. Spoiled princess or slutty pop star seemed to be the main roles to aspire to.
And socializing among children changed drastically during that era--while us '70s kids used to go run in packs, and be gone for hours at a time with no parental interference, '90s and '00s kids became increasingly isolated and sheltered from each other, with their interactions overseen and moderated by adults--while at the same time they were the first kids to grow up online, with all that entails.
Looking back, I'm not surprised that so many of today's young women who were kids during that period either sexualize themselves for an audience by posing semi-nude on Insta, or are trooning out (or going genderspecial), deciding that they must not really be women, after all.
The influence of advertising alone is really obvious: You deserve to have whatever you want; being overtly sexual is liberating; self-indulgence has no consequences (or shouldn't).
And fatgirls are no less immune to the allure of being a sexy, confident Instathot than thin women are; they've been taught to believe they deserve to be seen as beautiful and desirable, and that posing in your underwear is what beautiful, desirable women do. And even if a fatgirl doesn't really believe she's beautiful and desirable, she can convince herself that posing in her underwear, revealing every bulge and stretch mark, somehow makes her more honest, more authentic, more real. An ad campaign at some point told her so, and the followers and upvotes she gets simply confirm it.
(I've been thinking about this a lot lately, but it's still a mess of ideas in my head that I haven't had time to sort through and arrange, so yeah, it's kind of sloppy.)