On the Politics of Beach Body Readiness

D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.  

So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.  

I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.   

Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.

Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.         

Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.    

Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.   

Think of the Children

Helen Lovejoy: The Simpsons 

Throughout the European migrant crisis, the Helen Lovejoys and Corbynistas of this world have continually beseeched us to think of the children in an attempt to negate all serious discussion of what is an urgent political problem without any easy solution. 

Via the use of distressing images and necro-emotive language, powerfully compelling in its stereotypic consistency, campaigners who wish to welcome all refugees into Europe have transformed a complex question into a simplistic moral issue about which right-minded people everywhere must surely be in agreement. 

Bereft of any argument as to how Europe might accommodate (never mind assimilate) millions of people from very different cultural backgrounds - many of whom are fundamentally opposed to the values (or lack of values) of the West - humanitarians have simply pointed to the suffering and demanded Europeans share in it and, indeed, accept a large part of the blame for it; we are expected to feel not only pity and compassion, but guilt.     

The strategic use, however, of sentiment and stereotype to fill the void in thought is always suspect and all forms of logical fallacy and opportunism should surely be exposed as such.

Ultimately, we should think of the children - though not in that sticky, ideal manner in which perceived vulnerability is equated with innocence. But this should also include children who are native Europeans and not just young migrants. For presumably they too have the right to a secure and prosperous future on a continent that has its own distinctive history, culture, and destiny.

One really doesn't want to fall back into the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil - and Europe is, I think, more than an ethno-geographical space - but current events force one to think about race, demographics, territory, borders, identity and notions of otherness, etc. That is to say, all those politically contentious subjects that seem to come to the fore in times of crisis and Völkerchaos.  

Godwin's law is, it appears, far wider in its application (and has far greater explanatory power) than some people imagine. And, somewhat paradoxically, fascism marks not only the end of all serious debate, but the beginning too. It's certainly fair to say that most of the really provocative political thinking today is carried out by those on the far right.

And this, says Baudrillard, is precisely because everything moral, orthodox and conformist - everything which was traditionally associated with the right - has now passed to the once radical left, stripping the latter of its political and intellectual energy. You only pathetically think of the children when you have nothing better to do.