Body normalizing and body shaming have a specialized channel in media. The cis-gendered body, therefore the one that conforms to gender expression and assignment, is reaffirmed in the same media-generated stereotyped heteronormative feminine attributes (Guillard, 2015). Normalization is imposed through homogeneity and the necessity of being part of a group, and to not conform leads to a road of discrimination, social rejection, and ridicule.
Establishing normative gender attributes make women a subject to a scrutiny exercised by family, schoolmates, coworkers or friends who thus both control and surveil our own bodies. This framework is then copied and applied in new media. For example, with the weakening of traditional and family relationships, the young girl looks at her classmates and friends to get a model and identify herself. Then, many commercials addressed to young girls figure older, pretty and cool example of female friends. Sisterhood becomes both a commodity to be consumed and a new market space, a concept with plays along with the patriarchal system because of its normative choices, policing and surveillance. In this example, the body is rewritten through a policy of guilt, punishment, and humiliation, where the role of female friendship is of
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surveillance and public shaming and broadcasted through television, the internet and social media (Winch, 2011).
The Panopticon is a good metaphor to understand how media regulates our vision of the world and the relationship with our daily life. The Panopticon is an ideal prison where a tower surveils the prisoners, but cannot be seen in turn by them. The result is that the convicts know they are being observed, they cannot look back at their viewers and fight them; thus, they have no choice but to regulate their acts. In the same way, video and digital surveillance techniques monitor society through a gaze without eyes. As happens in new media like Instagram, YouTube etc., people subject themselves to the gaze, they are aware they are being observed but have no influence and power on how the reporting goes. The gaze is both the consequence and central function of surveillance, where the power acts and controls language, body and social order (Godoy-Pressland, 2016). Through media, television, and internet we are exposed to beliefs, attitudes, and ideals about the real world that match the depicted world and, even if originally with divergent ideas, we tend to come to the same solutions after exposure (Harrison, 2003).
One of the most important characteristics of the surveillance understood as gaze, it is that it's specifically the male to female gaze (Godoy-Pressland, 2016). In other words, the active controller of the look is male. According to Mulvey and her studies in psychoanalysis (1975), the presence of phallocentrism depends on the castration of the woman. A woman can only exist as a symbol of castration. In the patriarchal society, she symbolizes the male "other", a symbolic presence that man can use to fulfill his obsession "through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning" (Mulvey 1975, 1). This is the reason why so many signifiers and connotations have been given to the female body; it's a blank space colored by sexual obsession. YouTube and other internet media can go against the dominant ideological concepts presented in cinema, by being an alternative place where other forms and concept of body, femininity, and woman can take place and the audience becomes a creator of content.
Still, I argue that for vloggers, Instagrammers and so on it is difficult to escape the controlling and voyeuristic gaze of the audience. The controlling and curious eyes of the viewers can at the same time make the atypical body glamorous, attractive and acceptable but also inscribe it in new domesticated frameworks of "to be-looked-at-ness" (Mulvey 1975, 4). Gaze as
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a control medium ensures that the female body, rendered an object, follows particular rules of heterosexual attraction. It is the perfect body proposed to the male gaze that becomes the example women has to adhere to. The surveillance techniques established in media put the body in four different frames: trivialized, when focusing on irrelevant reporting on sexuality, clothes, and activities, relationship and personality instead of the achievements. It is secondary when the body as an entity comes after its weight and the anxiety of keeping up with the surveillance exercised by both media and peers. The female body representation is commercial when women are not seen as sexual being or persons anymore; they are seen as body parts with no worth.
Lastly, it's feminine, when in an auto-surveillance situation, the woman represents the normative heterosexual femininity.
The determining male gaze imposes its desires onto the female body that is styled accordingly and thus, worrying about how people see her, the woman molds and decorates herself (Godoy-Pressland, 2016). Though, because of social surveillance putting every body in one frame, there's no discernation between different religions, practices and cultures, only the propagation of a constructed idea of beauty and identity (Gallagher&Pecot-Hébert, 2007). The threat of being seen by the man glaze used to strengthen up and reinforce techniques of control objectifies women and coerces them in behaving and managing their body in the same way (Morrison, 2007). There is a contradiction, then, also suggested by the growing popularity of DIY programs, blogs, and channels. On one side, contemporary selfhood is central to social transformation, and the individualization process that focused on the "choice" as an increasingly central factor for people's life, since their identities are formed through lifestyle-oriented decision-making rather than social collectives (Martin & Lewis, 2012). Therefore, women are willing to spend time and resources in being guided in food, style and life choices. On the other side, the idea of reflexive, choice-based life is merely a utopia, a fake creation inside structural constraints.
Lastly, according to a recent study, ideal proportions for modern, beautiful women are believed to be 36-24-36. With bigger breasts, a smaller waist and larger hips, the perfect body is not just thin, but also imbalanced, making the ideal even more so impossible to reach. Thin, but only if curvaceously. Everyone, even balanced fit women are found to be insufficient.
Consequently, idealization of thinness stops at the waist and its size, pushing body shaming to
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not look anyone in the eyes. It is for everyone. Those women who desire an ideal body cannot do it without going through surgical operations, strict dieting or disordered eating (Harrison, 2003).
Fat can thus be inscribed in heteronormative beauty standards, can be accepted, courted and domesticated when pleasurable to the man-gaze. Only parts of a body are acceptable, and only because they follow a hyper-sexualization standard of the woman. The woman then becomes merely an object of pleasure and desire (Afful & Ricciardelli, 2015).