Image by Pragun Agarwal. Follow him on Instagram @pragunagarwal
There is a smear of powdered sugar on my black suit pants tracing the memory of a really good donut. The leftovers recall my mid-munch thought-process: “I shouldn’t eat this,” “damn, this is good,” “I might as well eat junk the rest of today and then erase the evidence by falling asleep and pretending it never happened.” In my experience, the inner-dialogue will linger as long as it takes for my digestive system to swallow the donut, likely longer.
In an attempt to distract from the aftertaste, I pick up my phone and start scrolling. Mentally filing images of idealized avatar versions of strangers never helped anyone digest a donut, but, I’m a masochist.
This morning’s Instagram scroll was light, only around 20 images and five ads. I love Instagram ads. (I recognize that is an unpopular opinion, so, I’ll deny it later if asked.) I enjoy tricking myself into thinking that the closer Instagram’s algorithmic predictions come to my aesthetic ideal, the more likely the real world is to view me as having a cohesive sense of style. And sometimes, if I’ve really lost the plot, I’ll pretend Instagram ads are digital personal shoppers catering to my whim. I double tapped two of the five ads and saved one to my archives: the cashmere sweatpants. Turns out, this swift “save” was my decisive flaw.
By lunchtime the cashmere sweats made it from my saved archives to item in my digital cart. I claim no responsibility. The ad was very, very well marketed and I’m only human. The simulacrum of a woman in a reading nook about halfway through an Anna Karenina-lengthed fiction curled up in her grey cashmere pants and – this part is a little incongruous – a black crop top showing off her tummy that is somehow still flat even when folded. Some elements not pictured but I know to be true: she has soft legs, a chill personality and an uncomplicated life.
In The Perfect Crime (1995) French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote, “Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath our excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information—the sign and reality sharing a single shroud.”
Following J.B. down the intellectual rabbit hole of our collapsing culture sounds way less chill than owning a pair of cashmere pants. I’m besotted by the promise of soft legs and a world as small and uncomplicated as a reading nook. So, I actively neglect my responsibility to myself and to society as a whole to critically examine why I laid claim to this particular marketing illusion.
I proceed to check-out and Baudrillard rolls his eyes from the dead. I tap-in my credit card number and reach the penultimate page before “Congratulations! Track the image you bought-into with this nonsensical string of letters and numbers.” The smaller, thumbnail version of the Instagram ad is staring at me. Maybe it’s the smaller size or the shifted context of this new webpage, but this time I see the image it doesn’t say, “have some pants, a side of cool, a copy of Anna Karenina and a free pass to The Land of No Responsibilities.” Instead, the image pierces the tiny red button between my ears – the one you need the pointy end of an unfolded paper clip to reach – triggering my brain to short-circuit. I fall straight from fantasy land into the graveyard where my body shame lays to rest. The gravestone reads:
Here lies she who did not look like that model in those pants.
When I return to consciousness, dirt abound, my brain gropes for logic by calculating how many days without sugar or trips to the gym are required to deliver me from evil. This morning’s donut – or at least the portion of it that didn’t end up on my lap – requires the tally of sugar-free days to net greater than the 2-day shipping that stretches between me and mothering cashmere. The results of my math force me to close the website tab.
I almost fell for it. When made to feel uncomfortable, as staring at waif thin models is apt to do, conformity is the instinctual salve. I inevitably turn inwards, deconstructing my appetites and attempting to manipulate my mind into genuinely believing I need to change myself to look like her (starting with her thinness which will, if all goes according to plan, end in my freedom from concern.) I manipulate myself into thinking I believe that sugar is a drug and therefore consuming it is a moral flaw, or, conversely that a sugar-free lifestyle will promise an invisible but totally real inner and outer glow, a bigger, better brain, and the utter annihilation of acne from my human experience. Sugar or the absence of it is not a miracle, a cure, the answer or even the problem.
The real mental retraining I require has nothing to do with dietary analysis and everything to do with kneeling down beside Baudrillard’s grave so he can remind me that: “The illusion of the sign is lost and only its operation remains.” And, “We continue to manufacture meaning even when we know there is none.”
No one body shamed me. No one needed to. That operation was all wrapped up in the advertisement. We are constantly consuming ads, even alone in a dark room where they playback from memory. My inherent failure to line up physically with images of what the media deem to be “worthy women” leads me to blame my body rather than blame the patriarchy, the media, or the universe. I’ve indoctrinated this cannibalistic logic partly due to social construct and partly due to the nature of ego assuming everything (good or bad) is always about me.
The automatic and powerfully magnetic impulse to pull shiny things from the outside world in towards us, to own them and thereby, hopefully, become associated with whatever they represent distracts from the real task at hand: actually getting to know yourself.
For the women consuming these expectations, we lose our minds. For the society enabling these expectations, we lose the diversity, dynamism and opportunity that would be the effect many different personalities colliding. As we grabble with our bodies, forcing ourselves into one-size-fits-all containers, womanhood turns greyscale. Sameness never inspired a dynamic personality, a unique thought, or a revolution.
Baudrillard would belittle my task; he would warn me that any attempt to understand an individual’s personality is ultimately futile as it is impossible to untangle where social expectations end and human flesh begins. However, endeavoring to resist the tendency to passively engage in simulacra as if they are real will only end in your body eating itself.
Sure, taking the mindful approach may seem less “chill” than the passive alternative, but when you’re done with your homework, there are donuts.