For the past few months, I have felt the need to rebel by doing three obscenely controversial things: eating, exercising and wearing less make-up.
What am I rebelling against? I’m not exactly sure.
A few weeks ago, I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, rocking back and forth in a hammock on the island of Koh Phangan, Thailand, where I’d gone for a week-long Muay Thai camp. It was a humid 37-degree day and I was cooling off between training sessions, keeping half an eye on two hornets buzzing around in circles at the corner of my bamboo hut. A video of Hilary Duff’s latest campaign with the fitness app Ladder, called “Stronger, Not Smaller”, appeared on my feed.
“Strength isn’t optional for me,” Duff says at the start of her campaign video. “Being able to carry my kids and give my best on stage, all while feeling confident in my body, is everything.”
Next, I watched a red-carpet interview she did with a Time magazine reporter, who asked her about the meaning behind the campaign. She said she felt pressure to conform to the thinness culture of the early 2000s despite spending years as a child doing gymnastics and building natural strength.
“That’s not natural for my body, and for most of our bodies,” she said on the red carpet. “I used to be embarrassed [by] my strength, and I just don’t need to be any more. I … grew up during that time where all of us were trying to, like, disappear and be waifs.”
The word “disappear” made that strange, rebellious feeling rear its stubborn, angry head. This time, between the amorous buzz of the hornet lovers, the shade of banana and papaya trees and hordes of sticky geckos crawling above me on the bamboo ceiling, I knew why.
I was born with a strong pack of muscles. Jacked, if you will. My calves were always bigger, more defined than boys’. Most of the time, so, too, were my arms and thighs.
In high school, when I was 17, I joined a gym and started training three or four times a week. Having only done a few years of dance growing up, I was shocked to see bubbles of muscle protruding from my back when I flexed in the mirror after lifting weights for a few weeks. My thighs began to expand, forming dense loaves of muscle that hovered above each knee.
A persistent voice inhabited my teenage mind around this time and began relentlessly comparing me to what it deemed better: thinner girls, and the perfectly filtered faces I saw on social media. It convinced me to quit weight training and pile concealer beneath my naturally dark undereyes. I have since named the voice Dysmorph.
When the pandemic shuttered exercise facilities, it felt like the perfect excuse for me to embody the traits that Dysmorph said would make me a Peak Woman: someone who tracked kilojoules, restrained exercise to soft cardio and spent most of my Kmart pay cheque on “miracle” skincare lotions.
I suddenly weighed less than one of the iron plates I used to shoot in the air while doing hip thrusts. Meanwhile, YouTube make-up tutorials taught me how to manipulate my features if I couldn’t afford filler. I Never Felt Happier. I was 19 years old.
Dysmorph’s role as a main character in my brain ended in my early 20s. I gained back the weight (thanks to hormones), decided against cosmetic procedures (thanks to feminist literature and being broke) and started weight training again (for the dopamine, really). This time, however, I welcomed the return of my Bubbly Back and Loafy Legs. After all, I was born Jacked.
As celebrities become thinner and weight-loss drugs and casual cosmetic procedures filter into mainstream culture, women are being subliminally told that if their cheekbones don’t protrude horizontally from their face and their spines do not accessorise a backless dress, they’re not desirable or feminine.
You are watching it happen to one of the world’s most successful athletes, tennis star Serena Williams, who is making a comeback on court at 44 while promoting a weight-loss drug from healthcare firm Ro. “Serena’s on Ro,” the promotion reads, adding that it helped her lose 34 pounds (about 15 kilograms). “Are you next?” the promotion then asks the reader.
I feel as though women are starting to disappear all around me, along with their cellulite, muscles, fine lines, dark undereyes and rolls of fat. I never thought looking like a Normal Woman would be political. Being ugly, bumpy, ripped or saggy is beginning to feel like a rebellious act in itself.
When I went down the TikTok rabbit hole on Duff’s campaign, I was working out under a strict regimen at the Muay Thai gym. It was two hours of training in the morning and two hours again in the afternoon, starting with 15 minutes of skipping, followed by stretching, clinching, sparring, technique training and rounds of hitting trainers’ pads or a punching bag. It was hundreds of push-ups, knees, elbows, punches and kicks a day. Sometimes I did additional personal training sessions at noon when temperatures edged 40 degrees.
But between the gentle swings of the fading, royal-blue cotton hammock on that sticky afternoon, surrounded by amorous but deadly insects and my gravity-defying reptilian spectators, I wondered what I would say to the 17-year-old me who’d hated her Bubbles and Loaves and bowed to Dysmorph’s commands and judgments.
I would ask her to cherish her eyebags and her strength. I would tell her to fuel her hunger. Because the older me knows there is something better than looking perfect, even if that were achievable. It is the loud thwacks you produce when you kick, knee or elbow those pads, you Jacked Beast.
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Kayla Olaya is a culture reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
