Social Culture
Adele is a 6-time Grammy award winner and has bagged the Brit Award for Best British Album of the Year in 2012. This is in spite of the many awards she’s won and been nominated for as a songwriter. She’s sold over 40 million records, 50 million singles and her songs, Someone Like You, Rolling in The Deep, Hello etc. are phenomena in the world. Despite her success, she has a distaste for fame, vainglory — an attribute that is extremely strange in our celebrity culture of self-petulance. She gets derided a lot about her weight; but while the “Facebook” age of flawlessness has coerced most of us into the mainstream, controlled social animals that live by the dictates of popular culture and sanity cornered, a person like Adele remains an incredible exception. The German artist and designer, Karl Lagerfeld, is once quoted taunting Adele as “a little over too fat.” One would expect, given her fame, to be thrown off and vindictive in her response to a misogynistic bully who takes pride in body shaming; but she shows no weakness, for the worst of us, comes out when we give in to negativity. The stoic, Seneca, wrote about this several years ago that “all cruelty springs from weakness.” Weakness is mutually cohesive to derogation and a breeding ground for negative thoughts and emotions. Our worst moments come out in our weak moments, and mainstream media has programmed us so.
See, Adele could choose to come out harsh, and of course, she would be right. But just like a few of us, she favors humility over condescension, and this is the reflex of her life and music. Not responding to Karl directly, she admits to having body image issues, but never let them rule her life because there are more important things in the world that needs her attention. Even though she has repeatedly expressed that she’s only “here to sing love songs, not to be famous,” it doesn’t spare her from attack of how she looks (fat, weighty), something celebrities or people in general aren’t supposed to be, because it’s not, as they say, healthy to be so. She champions a cause that seems unpopular, but vibrant as it is, about body positivity. She pays attention to what’s important to her rather than how she looks. “I’d rather have lunch with my friends than go to a gym,” she said. For someone like Adele, you can only be hypothetical about why she fears being ‘slim” to ‘fat’, but it’s safe to admit that she’s an outlier and a representation, as she says, of not just “majority of women”, but a wholesome of people who struggle with self-esteem because of external pressure to be something likably beautiful — something people appreciate, or good enough to be worthy of respect in a mainstream culture where everyone is supposed to be in the bodybuilding business in order to appear suitable, like a product to be bought.
Today, a lot of people are dissatisfied with how they look because the ads on our social media pages won’t let them be happy in their bodies. Their bodies, instead of being a haven of peace and harmony, have become a battleground of self-doubt, low self-esteem and social isolation. This is especially prevalent because we’ve become victims of our social culture as a byproduct of social media and the fashion industry whose only model of beauty is thinness. Bullying from peers, just like a friend did to me two weeks ago ranting and scolding me to get myself some muscles at the gym, is a social factor. Don’t take my word for it; a study by Park Nicollet Melrose Center shows that “approximately 80% of US women don’t like how they look. 70% of normal weighted women want to be thinner. And over 80% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat.”
These appearance issues are not by happenstance. They spring from our definition of beauty and the value that comes with it. On the one hand, women want to come out thin, medium sized boobs, thin waist, sexy, lovable. On the other, men crave muscles, six-packs because it’s appealing for social media and our peer groups to be hot and sexy — whatever that means. But who sets the standard for beauty? Who defines good appearance or bad appearance? Who said that being fat is tragic and otherwise is perfect? Who’s setting these rules that everyone wants to conform to? The concept of beauty is deceptively an absolute abstract concept. And no one epitomizes this position than Nietzsche, and in times like these, it’s his juxtaposition that is altruistic, “in the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases, he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty — he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world -alas! Only a very human, an all too human, beauty.” Nietzsche is apparently one person who saw how doomed humanity has become by its own socially constructed standards that are robbing us of our true values and isolating us from personal happiness. And what has happened now, especially with body image and shaming, is depression and anxiety in most of us that affect how we see ourselves. Every day, people get scorned, bullied because of how they look, and the result is but a depressed generation of people who keep indulged in ‘pervasive negative body esteem.’
Very recently at the “Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week”, the singer Celine Dion, was body shamed on social media for being “too thin and unhealthy.” Apparently being fat is just as problematic as being a certain kind of thin — a milestone that only the fashion and bodybuilding industry can determine. Celine’s reaction, “to be honest with you, I think I’m at the best of my life right now and I really want to enjoy and embrace every moment of it,” is amazing as what it proves for every social deviant (I mean this in a positive way) is that there’s no right way to be beautiful. The concept of beauty, unlike the popular culture, is a matter of the self, determined for the self by the self. Before now, Nietzsche had a better way of saying it — “you have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Our culture, our society, our social norms, our social gatherings have made us internalize anxiety, self-doubts, and feeling of misery. And this is intolerably grotesque.
While most of us are lost in popular culture, people like Adele have looked within themselves and found peace. And there can be no better model for a lost generation as ours. Tackling low self-esteem issues proliferated by social media and the fashion industry starts with defining beauty for ourselves and paying less attention to the toxicity with which beauty and appearance are treated. And as Adele would say “no matter what you look like, I think the key is to be happy with yourself. Exploiting yourself sexually is not a good look.”
