EVERY BODY IS BEAUTIFUL: BODY ACCEPTANCE ACTIVISM IN MY NEIGHBOURHOOD

Crossposted at my personal blog.



On my way to work, I cycle past a gym called Greens. It's a Health and Fitness Club, in fact, or perhaps even more of a lifestyle centre, complete with "stylish, fully licensed bar and brasserie" and "luxurious health and beauty salon".

Outside the car park, on the corner of a main road where hundreds of people must see them every day, Greens have two large advertisements. The posters, which are changed regularly, used to be the size of the ones in bus stops. They recently replaced the old boards with two enormous ones, nearly ten feet tall and each completely covered with a new ad.

The images below are representative of the Greens advertising style. The new ad in question featured the bum of a woman in bright pink shorts, and if I remember correctly, the model was actually pointing her finger directly at her rump. The caption read, "Does my bum look big in this?"

These ads present the female body - usually divested of its head or any other indication that it belongs to an individual person - in a purely passive, sexual way. Even the two women who seem to have been exercising, one with a Swiss ball and the other with boxing gloves, are posed to be coy, inviting, sexually receptive. This is the only image of female beauty that is possible in the Greens advert. Additionally, this is a beauty only attainable by women who have the means to buy a membership to this expensive and luxurious health club and the leisure time to spend many hours working out there.

Greens offer many classes (in aerobics and so on) and talk about health benefits on their website. I'm sure you could get fit there, but according to their advertising the primary reason for women to join is to conform to this sexualised, exclusive and unrealistic notion of beauty. For the men? Either they don't need to be advertised to, or Greens is counting on the timeworn idea that a few shots of tits and ass will lead them wherever the advertiser wants.



I say, "if I remember correctly," because I came back past Greens yesterday to find that the posters had been pulled down and the graffiti above sprayed on one of the boards: Every body is beautiful.

I was overjoyed to see this - activism for body acceptance and against this unrealistic beauty standard, in my very own neighbourhood. I have been annoyed with these ads - which are put up in several other places around the area too - since I started noticing them, almost as much for the bad puns they sport as for their representation of female beauty (they never feature men). I'd never really moved on from annoyance to anger or determination to act, though. I think part of my pleasure in seeing this graffiti is because it's a reminder that kicking against these images, which dominate our public spaces without our consent, is possible and has an effect.

I wonder who wrote this? I'd like to meet them.

Guerrilla Gardening

Life in modern Britain is often described as a series of dissociations. People have become estranged from public spaces, which have become the preserve of private business, of crime or of state surveillance supposedly in response to that crime. They have lost connection with their communities and with the origins of their food.

I can't offer a panacea that will fix all of these problems, but I have found a way to work against them: guerrilla gardening.

Guerrilla gardening takes place all over the world, and gardeners see their work in many lights: purely as art, or to press for reconsideration of land rights; to build communities and reclaim public space for the public; for the effect of beauty, humour or surprise; to provide fresh food for local people or even work towards self-sufficiency; or sometimes as part of a larger protest. At the London May Day protests in 2000, for example, Reclaim the Streets "repurposed [Parliament Square] as a gardening area, with rockeries, a village pond and tress and plants."

This afternoon, I met up with the Cambridge Guerrilla Gardeners group, who state on their Facebook group:

We want to make Cambridge beautiful (and maybe even vegetable producing). We're always looking for new people to help out and new places to plant things - join up or get in touch : )

A small corner of land by a busy intersection of roads, otherwise neglected and ignored, is now a beautifully haphazard collection of foxgloves, roses, onions, cabbages, swedes and poppies: it's a certain improvement.

For information and inspiration on guerrilla gardening, Guerilla Gardening.org is essential. Local groups abound and can be found by a quick web search. All you really need to get started with this grubby, hopeful movement, though, is a few seeds and a forgotten patch of dirt somewhere in your local area.