Day after day, our bodies accomplish miraculous feats. In a single 24 hours, our hearts beat 100,000 times, pumping approximately 2,000 gallons of blood through our veins. Our blood vessels stretch up to 100,000 miles, enough to cover the Earth’s circumference 4 times. Our bodies are marvels of renewal. Skin cells turn over. Bones rebuild. Entire organs regenerate. Our brains are biological super computers, processing incredible amounts of information at extraordinary speed.
Yet we treat our bodies like they’re unforgivable flaws to be remedied. Looking in the mirror is as agonizing as a CIA interrogation. We examine ourselves with ruthless self-scrutiny. “My stomach is too fat.” “My ass is too flat.” “Why don’t I have an airbrushed complexion like those influencers on Instagram?”
So we sign up for pilates and HIIT classes, cut carbs and take GLP-1s, get Botox and fillers, buy extraordinarily expensive skin care treatments like red light therapy masks and bee venom facials and chemical peels and micro needling.
This reading list explores our bodies: how we judge them, how we labor to maintain them, how we mold and mend and contort them to conform to society’s ever elusive idea of “beauty”:
“On Maintenance,” Nora Ephron
In this candid essay, romantic comedy queen Nora Ephron examines the endless and exhaustive labor of beauty maintenance. Though “maintenance” suggests occasional upkeep like getting your oil changed every 3 months, a woman’s regular beauty routine is costly and time consuming. Day after day, week after week, women have to do a million and one things just to maintain some semblance of presentability: blowouts and bikini waxes, manicure and pedicures, hair cutting and hair coloring (“Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death,” she writes with her characteristic blend of provocative wit and irresistible relatability).
What—I wonder—would Ephron think about our Botox and blepharoplasties and elaborate 10 step skin care routines?
“The Trash Heap Has Spoken,” Carmen Maria Machado
After reading her infectiously inventive memoir In the Dream House, I can’t get enough of Carmen Maria Machado. In her signature style of blending memoir and cultural criticism, Machado reframes fatness as power. “Fat” women—her flamboyant grandmother who “wore leopard-print nightgowns and smelled like White Diamonds”; Marjory, the wise oracle trash heap from Fraggle Rock; Ursula, the lasciviously red-lipped villain from The Little Mermaid—aren’t just fat: they’re intelligent, ambitious, unashamed.
Ultimately, such women are threatening because they take up space. “The Trash Heap Has Spoken” is an unapologetic rallying cry for fat women—or anyone who doesn’t conform to conventional beauty standards—to refuse to shrink.
“A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter,” Jennifer Egan, Salon
Where does hatred for our bodies come from?
Egan suggests how you feel about your body is partly inherited like your father’s Roman nose or your mother’s red sauce recipe. Growing up, Egan’s own mother obsessively watched her weight, dieting to confirm to the waifish 1960s beauty standard. Restriction was her religion. To say “no” to second helpings at dinner was righteous; to indulge in a slice of chocolate cake was a cardinal sin. The scale in her mother’s bedroom was a supreme being who “revealed whether [she] had been Good or Bad.”
These disordered ideas about food and weight fuel Egan’s later struggles with anorexia. “A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter” stands as a heartbreaking but urgent reminder that we women can shape the body image of our daughters.
“Why Do We All Have to Be Beautiful?” Megan Nolan, The New York Times
In the 2010s, the body positivity movement broadened our conception of beauty. Beauty was no longer narrowly defined as thin, blonde and white—it accommodated more shapes, more sizes, more colors. Self-help gurus told us to stand in the mirror naked and chant affirmations (“You are beautiful”). Makeup lines expanded their shade ranges. Clothing brands tried to be more size inclusive.
But Nolan makes a radical suggestion: what if we don’t all have to be beautiful?
What if beauty is simply something “some people are born with and some people aren’t, like a talent for swimming, or playing the piano?”
The insistence that all people are beautiful suggests we should be beautiful. Body positivity still places beauty on a pedestal. For women, worth remains tied to the reflection in the mirror. What would be truly revolutionary would be for women to not care about beauty at all.
“What My 3 Plastic Surgeries Couldn’t Fix,” Nick Dothee, The Cut
In this poignant personal essay, Nick Dothee recounts his pathological obsession with attaining the “perfect” body. Despite undergoing 3 painful plastic surgeries, Dothee is perpetually dissatisfied (“The outline in the mirror still didn’t match the one in my mind. My stomach was flatter, yes — but never flat”, he writes). No cut of the surgeon’s knife ever slices away his self-loathing. Devastating and deeply felt, this essay is a must read if you’ve ever despised your body.
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