Body shaming – it wouldn’t be a British summer without it. It’s the time of year when you can barely move in front of media images of famous people, mostly women, in swimwear, which inevitably leads to public comment. Is she wearing a bikini? At her age? At that weight? Shouldn’t she be wearing a one-piece? Isn’t it all a bit undignified? And so it goes on. There are vested interests that make the almost naked bodies feel like they’re your business.
In such scenarios, the paparazzi cameras are not interested in sexualising their female victims. Apparently, their job is to make them look frumpy, misshapen and out of shape. Especially if they are wearing a skimpy bikini and have the audacity to be over 40, a size 6 or just happy in their own skin.
That’s when the telephoto lenses come in with a vengeance. They scan the stomach for signs of sagging. They zoom in on the butt to capture the sagging in high resolution. If there are no imperfections, make it look like there are. (The right angle can make a nymph look like a minotaur.) Great when they’re on a yacht looking rich (as always, part of this is “us & them” bingo). Best when they’re wearing a bikini and completely oblivious to the cameras. They bend over to lay out towels. They twist to apply sunscreen. They heave themselves awkwardly out of the water. They sag without thinking about the belly rolls. Basically, miles from red carpet perfection. These are the money photos. The photos people really want to see. But do we really?
Call me a sun-shy old goth, but I have little interest in swimwear choice, or what someone looks like trying to smear SPF 30 down their calves. What’s interesting about this annual gala of female humiliation is the cyclical nastiness of it all. In a recent article, bikini photos of supermodel Kate Moss on holiday with her daughter Lila and her friend, the singer Rita Ora, couldn’t do without the subject of Moss’s age (she turned 50 in January), prominently displayed as if she’d committed some terrible faux pas. Elsewhere, tiresomely spiteful photos of Rod Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster in her bikini were accompanied by the usual fawning, pseudo-celebratory headlines, slyly encouraging readers to disagree.
Why is it bikini season for women? Paparazzi are a part of celebrity life, but summer after summer it has become normal to flood the media with images of people on private vacations, with the unspoken permission to comment on whether their bodies meet seemingly unattainable standards.
Women aren’t the only ones to blame for their body issues (as far as the Paris Olympics are concerned, some male athletes seem to have evoked a certain level of inferiority in men), but the summer photo spree seems to be a media phenomenon almost exclusively devoted to women. You might get the odd beach photo of a famous man with a big belly in flip-flops, but so far there’s no wing of pop culture telling men they’re too old for their Speedos.
All this is linked to the general surveillance of the female body, where, just like the old-style Miss World pageants, there is a separate section for swimwear. If you look at certain parts of the British media in the summer, you might think Hamlet was wrong: to wear a bikini or not to wear it, The is the question. If normal women are not lectured about what swimwear they “need” for their figure, they are forced into “age-appropriate” one-pieces. It is assumed that most women do what they want and tell the bathing Stasi to suck their spaghetti straps, and that is a good thing.
When it comes to celebrity photos, I’m all for harmless banter, but all too often you sense a layer of toxicity simmering underneath: a determination to humiliate and degrade. And then there’s the cultural dissonance. Years ago, there was a big national discussion about the influence of magazines on young, impressionable minds, which included retouching, objectification, and the promotion of unrealistic beauty ideals.
With the focus so heavily on magazine/fashion culture, traditional media was sidelined, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been. If it’s unrealistic to push unusually thin, toned, flawless people on readers, isn’t it equally unrealistic to present a perfectly fine, if not pretty great female body that doesn’t care about the cameras and does perfectly normal holiday things, and insist that it be mocked and ridiculed?
There’s also no evidence to suggest that delicate young brains are no longer permeable and vulnerable. A recent Australian study suggests that watching less than 10 minutes of TikTok videos containing “anorexia-promoting” content and promoting eating disorders could be enough to negatively impact a young woman’s satisfaction with her body.
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Obviously, negative messages still penetrate deep and fast into people’s minds. With this in mind, what messages do celebrities’ summer photos convey? Don’t grow older, don’t get fat, don’t have children, don’t have fun. Anyone who dares to do any of these things risks being publicly ridiculed and criticized.
Recently, the phrase “bikini ready” (the dark art of getting women to their peak summer form) has received a long overdue brush-off. But aren’t parts of the British media “bikini ready” in a way – not to wear bikinis, but to attack famous women who do? It might be time to stop shrugging off this strange, malignant summer ritual – and understand that the “public domain” argument doesn’t really work when people are on private holidays and walking around half-naked.
Maybe it’s time to ask: Does summer always have to be the season of shame?
