Latest / Unlearning Beautiful / Ep. 27 The New Thin Craze: Why Women Are Being Tricked into Staying Small
Transcript
- Kristina Bruce: Have you scrolled through any red carpet photos recently and felt this wave of deja vu? Across Hollywood and even in local communities, we're seeing a dramatic but familiar change in women's bodies. Prominent collarbones, sharp angular lines, and a hyperfixation on extreme thinness. This rapid shift isn't really new. Historically, we've seen that whenever women begin gaining public influence. Cultural beauty ideals shift back to favoring extreme thinness. It's a trap that has led so many of us to believe that playing by the rules of beauty is where our power lies. But looking good only ever gives us a false sense of power, an ego-driven security that requires external validation at the cost of our true suppressed power. Today we're exploring how we've been tricked into trading our real sovereignty. For a superficial aesthetic, how modern culture has suppressed feminine energy, and most importantly, how to break that spell so you can return to knowing what true unshakable power really is. Let's dive in. Welcome to Unlearning Beautiful, a podcast for women tired of trying to look good enough and ready to feel good from within. I'm your host, Christina Bruce, here to help you let go of the pressure to look right or do it all right. and reconnect with your inner guidance, your natural worth, and what truly makes you feel fulfilled. Because the freedom you're craving was never in how you look. For centuries, public power and the outer world has belonged to the masculine. Women were relegated to a smaller area of life, the domestic family. And while family care has immense value, women's freedom and worth were locked into this narrow scope. Alongside domestic life, a woman's primary societal expectation was to look good. Boys are praised for what they can do. And girls are praised for how they look. We see this ingrained everywhere in the media, amongst our friends, conversations that our mothers and aunts are having. We're conditioned to believe that appearance matters most. And because women historically have lacked systemic or legal power, looking good became a survival mechanism and a form of social leverage. In our culture, all a woman has to do is look good and she's awarded a basic respect. For a man, looking good is seen more like a nice add-on, but his worth and value comes more in what he does. But the thing is, is that relying on looks offers this false sense of safety. It's ego based. It requires a constant external validation. And it forces women into this toxic cycle of judging each other and living in comparison, either being more prettier or less prettier than somebody else. And then worse, we turn that judgment onto ourselves. But we're putting our sense of power and stake into something that is always changing, our body. It's the thing that is always gonna quote unquote get away from us. It's why there's billion dollar industries in cosmetic surgery. To try to hold on to and manage and shape this appearance that has value because we believe that's where our worth lies. If we look at the red carpets today, all we need to do is see that thinness is back. The rise of the GLP1s has really brought that to the forefront. But I see this as a backlash to the rise in the body positive movement of women owning more of their power. All we need to do is look historically to see the correlation of when the thin ideal was prominent came right after there was a rise of women gaining public power. We can go back to the 1920s, right after women achieved the vote. The cultural beauty aesthetic for women was the flapper, the really thin, boyish type of body where women were binding their chests to have more of a boyish look. We could fast forward to the 1960s where women gained reproductive autonomy with the advent of the pill. What became the beauty standard was the twiggy look. So again, a kind of adolescent figure that was lacking any physical substance. Shift forward a little bit further into the 1980s, where women were gaining more power in the workforce. And we could see that although it wasn't about hyper thinness this time, it was still a look that was absent of fat. Now women were super toned and more muscular. They were wearing shoulder pads, more of a masculine look. Fast forwarding to the 1990s and early 2000s, and heroin chic became popular. And that was at a time where women were rising in education. We are now at a point where women are more highly educated than men. Finally, bringing us today with the backlash to the body positive movement and the rise of GLP1s, we're now seeing. A hyperfixation on a very thin body devoid of almost all fat. There's two very interesting parallels that I see here. The first one is that whenever women rise into achieving more public power, their bodies become smaller or more energy goes towards controlling and managing the body. I really love the famous quote from Naomi Wolfe in the book The Beauty Myth. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. A quietly mad population is attractable one. I certainly know that when I was fixated on my body, a good 50 to 75% of my mental energy and focus was dedicated to keeping my body small. It was totally focused on what was I going to eat, how was I looking, making sure that I was getting a workout in, things that are super normal and common in this culture and even encouraged. But so much of my energy and focus was taken away from the deeper self. And we wonder why we're so depleted. It literally takes energy from us the more that we are focused on managing and controlling our appearance. But there's another side to this that I find even more interesting. This is talking about energetics. We could say that there's two different energetic qualities that we all carry, regardless of what gender we are. There's masculine energy and there's feminine energy. Masculine energy traits are more associated with the intellect and the mind. And it's all about action. It's linear, focused, disciplined, driven. Think of like, Taking the action to move forward. Feminine energy qualities are more in the heart. It's intuitive. It's the space where creativity comes from. It's fluid. It's cyclical. It's more in a way chaotic. And so for thousands of years, feminine energy has been suppressed. And we see it as a reflection of women being suppressed. It's not a surprise to me that when women were working to gain more power in the public world that was dominated by masculine energy traits, these traits that were valued, the intellect, the mind, action, discipline, focus is valued. And what is seen more as weak is intuition, reflection, space, emotion. Emotion is also a very feminine energy trait. These are suppressed. And so we see body types that reflect masculine energy. Fat is feminine, fat is soft, fat is not something that is controlled. And we see that suppressed. So is it a surprise then that when we live in a world that is dominated by masculine energy, when a woman gains more power, not only is her attention going to keeping her body small. But it also looks more like a man. We end up reducing our own feminine energy within ourselves. And women constantly run up against this and have challenges, particularly at two times in their life, puberty and menopause, because women naturally hold more fat on the body than men do. Men's bodies are more muscular by design and women's carry more fat because it's required to bear children. And so when a woman hits puberty, she naturally gains weight. But in a masculine energy-dominated culture that sees fat, the feminine, as bad, they say, uh-oh, this is a problem. You need to get rid of it. You need to get rid of your feminine essence because we are taught that it is weak and it is bad and we have no use for it here. That is also a time that a woman starts to come into her creative power because she's now able to sustain life. And what happens with that? It's suppressed. Now, fast forward to menopause, where a woman's body changes. She tends to gain weight around the middle. That has a lot to do with hormone regulation. And now it's told again that that's bad. What happens during menopause? While a woman now can no longer bear children. If you think of it metaphorically, there is now a womb space that is totally open for her own creative power, for her own wisdom to come forward and be birthed. And that is suppressed. That is told, no, that's bad. You need to get rid of it. All the attention and focus then goes to keeping herself small once again. So, as a culture, as a world, we're looking here at an extreme imbalance of energy. The masculine energy has been in power, but the feminine energy is starting to rise. Because, like I said, these energies exist in all of us, no matter what your gender, but they have been extremely imbalanced in our world. And to quote another segment from the beauty myth, at least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging. About a third of her body is made of fat. Both Symbols are being transformed into an operable condition, so that women only feel healthy if we are two-thirds of the women we could be. That is such a powerful quote. And if you think about it, that is what we've been taught to do, because we have not grown up in a culture that has valued feminine energy. As women, we have been taught to view our body as the enemy, our naturally changing. naturally more fat body is seen as wrong, bad, and not good enough. And then we take our energy, focus it on shrinking ourselves, cutting ourselves off from the feminine energy power that lives within us. Where we see this imbalance too with the masculine feminine energy is I was saying earlier that masculine energy is very much of the intellect and of the mind. So many women that I work with when they're Finally coming to a point where they're ready to make peace of their bodies and let go of dieting will say, I feel like I'm living in my head, detached from my body. And I'm saying, Yeah, of course you are, because that's where we've been taught to live. We have been using dieting and tactics and ways to manipulate and control our body in our mind, because you literally have to. Override your body's signals and your desires. You have to become disembodied from yourself in order to do that to yourself. But because we've been taught that this is what we're supposed to do, so many of us are doing it. And it's painful. But when it gives that false sense of power in a masculine-dominated world, when it feels safe to do so, that's why so many of us are doing it, but it's misguided. Because we're seeking it outside of ourselves in this culture that can't really give us power. The call now is to come back within, is to actually find this suppressed, hidden power within ourselves, the feminine energy power that is now beginning to rise on the planet. And that power is in the heart. I don't think that it's a surprise if I say we've been really lacking in heart energy. In our world. The wars, the ways that we treat each other would not happen if we were rooted in our heart. So we are lacking that connection to our heart, but we don't understand that the heart is not just this organ that pumps our blood and that we feel love in these close relationships. It's so much more powerful than that. It is a source of deep intelligence and wisdom that we all have that. is calling to us, but our mind suppresses it. Our mind distracts us from it. Our mind discounts it, rationalizes it away because we have the these beliefs and we are told our bodies are supposed to look like this. You're supposed to be like that. You should be doing this. You're too emotional. You're too sensitive. Whatever it may be, all of these feminine energetic qualities we've been out of relationship with, or we've been told are wrong and we need to suppress it. So the time now is to come back into the heart. It's to actually start to become embodied and discover what actually is in there. And that is where our true power as women lie. It's not in how our body looks. That is a false power. And that is a power that is going away because our bodies are going to die. But there is a deeper power within us that lasts, that cannot be affected by our changing bodies. So we need to bring both into balance now. This isn't about feminine energy rising and now we're gonna suppress the masculine. No, no, no, because again, we carry both within ourselves. We're only hurting ourselves if we do that. But because everything has been so out of balance, feminine energy is rising to come into equal balance with the masculine energy so that we can listen to ourselves. be in our sovereignty, listen to our desires, nurture ourselves, love ourselves, and then allow action, the masculine side, to come from that. But we have been devoid of that in our outside world. And it's time for us to go within and do it now. And how we do that is we stop trying to manipulate and control our body. We stop living from the head and all of these false beliefs that we learned and we start coming into our heart. But it can feel scary. We're unfamiliar with it. It's also where emotion lives that has been suppressed, where maybe past hurt needs to be healed. So it feels like this scary underwater place that we don't really want to go to. But we need to, in order to reclaim our power, it's where our freedom lies. And when we start to release the old wounds and heal that, and we start to sense into our own power. That is where we're going to find our true freedom, our peace, and our ease. It's not going to be a reflection of our body. And we can use now our mental energy and that masculine energy to be able to create what we want in this world. Because true power does not come from being validated by how you look, by looking young forever. It doesn't rest on an aesthetic. So we have to stop viewing ourselves as mere physical shells. Because Feminine energy feels kind of elusive. And unless you've really been in women's circles or you've been exploring the divine feminine, it's not something that's really talked about. It's something that might be seen as woo or has no real tangible value because again, we've been living in the c intellect. We want hard facts, we want logic. That's what's been valued at the cost of this deep hidden power that is within us. So I want to talk about. Three power centers in our body that we can look at to reclaim our feminine energy. The first is our sacral center, that's where the womb is. Now, society says our bellies need to be flat and sucked in and ornamental. It's valued to have hard abs. We're taught that our bodies are supposed to look masculine, not soft, not feminine. That's a result of the devaluing of the feminine. But the true power of our bellies and our sacral center is creativity. Wouldn't it feel so good to know in your belly that it's not something wrong or bad, but actually a core part of your power? The second center that we can look at is the heart. And I often talk about this, especially when I'm with my clients, is coming back into the heart instead of the head. There is a wisdom in our heart. It is rooted in love and support. And the distortion of this in our life has been to be nice and accommodating and people pleasing, making others comfortable and always doing for others, but not often turning that back on ourselves. As the saying goes, you have to put your oxygen mask on first in order to be able to help somebody else. We need to be able To give ourselves that unconditional love, to check in with ourselves and say, what actually is making me feel fulfilled? The trick in making your body quote unquote look good and thin and acceptable in this current beauty standard is that it can make us feel safe and make us feel powerful, but at the cost of our own internal well-being, because it's rooted in a place of my body isn't good enough as it is. When we start to come into our heart center and listen to that first, it will always guide us in a direction that cares and supports ourselves and our body and brings us back into balance. Because if we are out of balance and our body isn't in the healthiest shape, our heart will guide us back into it. But we've been taught to use our head to control our body instead of listening to our heart to allow balance to emerge. And the last part would be not so much a center, but our emotions. A lot of us have suppressed anger, grief. We felt ashamed of having emotions. That again has been a suppression of the feminine energy. So when we suppress it, it will come out in ways that don't serve us necessarily, can come out in projection, in chaotic explosions, or it will just silently. Feed away at our energy. We have to be able to go inward to start to become familiar with our emotions, not swept up and taken away by them, but be able to feel them with presence and observation, not make them wrong or bad, but allow them to move through us, to release it from our bodies because our intuition goes on feeling. It doesn't go on intellect. This is where we can start to have a Healthy relationship with our own feeling and use our internal guidance system to let us know what is right or what is wrong for us. Something I found really interesting is that the 12-year calendar cycle that we have was put in place by Pope Gregory as a way to remind people in the Roman times to pay their taxes. The calendar we used to have prior to that when on the moon cycles, it was 13 months. And those months each had 28 days. So it was deeply connected with the natural rhythms of the earth. We have seasons in our body that we're going to be feeling more productive. We might need to rest more. That is moving with the natural cycles of the world. Living in a masculine energy-dominated culture that's in the head has disconnected us from the natural world around us. So our true power comes when our feminine energy isn't equal to our masculine energy. We need to be able to value and respect both of them. Constantly manipulating your weight and your body size coming from the head and from the intellect is not going to work long term. It's why I advocate saying. We need to come into the feminine energy. We need to reconnect from the heart instead of seeing our bodies as wrong and bad. And we need to manipulate and dominate and control, which is totally masculine energy from the head, disconnected from the body. Our true power as women was never in our appearance. It has always been within us. And when we are coming within, we can listen to our desires. We can follow our wisdom and that is when we are truly going to be fulfilled. That is the work that I do in my body piece coaching to help you make this shift at the deepest fundamental level. If you are ready to make that shift for yourself and you would like some guidance and support from me, check the description below for my one-to-one and small group coaching. If you're watching this episode on YouTube, let me know in the comments below. What stuck out to you and resonated most? Thanks so much for being here today. Look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to Unlearning Beautiful. If this episode resonated with you, follow the show and share it with another woman who's ready to see beauty and herself in a new way. And if you feel moved, leave a rating and review. It will help this show reach more women who need to hear it. Remember, you're already everything you've been trying to become. Enough worthy and free. I'm Christina Bruce. Until next time.