A new wave of Russian feminism swept across social media. Women post photos of themselves showing acne, excess weight, cellulite or hair loss. Snapshots are tagged with #ComMnoyAllTak. Against were doctors who did not consider excess weight and skin diseases to be something natural or beautiful.
The project was initiated by a 17-year-old feminist and blogger Natalya Zemlyukhina from the Antonov farm in the Volgograd region. Its goal is to spread the philosophy of self-love without the standards of female beauty. According to the girl, the flash mob will help to resist the stereotypes imposed by fashion. Which reduce self-esteem and cause an eating disorder.
“Our bodies are perfect without retouching and correct poses. Stretch marks, scars, cellulite, bumps, acne are not problems. These are the properties of the body, each of which is individual,”the blogger explained. Natalia's appeal has already been supported by more than two and a half thousand Russian women.
Unfortunately, Natalia knows what she's talking about. At the age of 13, the girl decided to lose some weight, but could not stop, the weight dropped to 29 kilograms, she told the Komsomolskaya Pravda website. Natalia switched to a healthy diet and started to play sports. In parallel, I started a blog where I talked about treatment for anorexia. Now 1.2 million people have subscribed to it. And the girl has achieved excellent physical shape and earns on advertising, fitness courses and business projects. With her, indeed, everything is so.
Feminist Elena Klimanskaya supported the authors of the #ComnoyVseTak project. All people are different, so it is normal to upload photos showing the peculiarities of the condition of the skin or figure, they shared in a conversation with "360". Trying to live up to photoshopped ideals is not only useless, but also harmful. This wastes resources and forms a person's self-rejection, which leads to social, medical and financial problems.
Feminist Olga Lipovskaya explained to "360" that by participating in this project women show society that there is nothing wrong with not meeting beauty standards and not aiming to achieve an ideal appearance. They destroy the stereotype that “women should be beautiful, and men should be smart”, demonstrate that “you don't have to be beautiful”. But they are not at all trying to show that being overweight or skin problems is something to be proud of or to promote.
Change of fashion
Olga Vainshtein, a fashion and cultural historian and a leading researcher at the Institute of Higher Humanitarian Research, Russian State University for the Humanities, is confident that the publication of photographs showing acne, cellulite or excess weight is a reaction to a pre-existing inflection in the opposite direction. When “perfect faces and lean bodies” were presented as a role model, many girls in pursuit of an unattainable ideal of beauty earned anorexia and an inferiority complex.
Currently, there is a tendency in society to move away from the glamorous canon, which dictated an orientation towards a slender figure, smooth skin and tan. The reason is in the changes in the global fashion system, in the spread of the ideology of tolerance. Getting used to novelty is destructive for fashion, for its development, it is necessary to overcome the boundaries of the familiar, to revise the criteria of "normal". Once the ideal was considered to be overweight, and thinness - a disadvantage, and then the situation changed.
Now the formation of new bodily canons is underway, and no one is surprised by the models with disabilities, blacks, overweight or older models appearing on the catwalk and in advertisements. In addition, with the development of graphic programs, the value of traditionally understood beauty has greatly decreased, since each user can use Photoshop to correct a figure or hide unwanted facial features.
Body dissidence
MD, nutritionist and neurologist Miriyat Mukhina said that the trend towards “my body is my business”, the promotion of plus-size models is the same as advertising for obesity or skin diseases. Because of this, each subsequent generation is born sicker than the previous one.
“There is a zombie on the destructive tendencies of society. And all this is done under the beautiful sauce of freedom and human rights. You see, human rights work wherever there is a person. And here they want to make a person out of him - an animal that does not brush his teeth and does not cure diseases,”said the doctor.
The same distortion occurs with the concept of "free will and choice." Healthy people are "sniffed" by the idea of being natural, for example, unkempt or dandruff. But the same dandruff, the doctor emphasized, is a fungus that needs to be treated, and not declared that "I want to be free." Mukhina emphasized that the topic with body positivity reached "insanity", turned into body dissidence. People have ceased to understand that everything related to beauty comes from health.
“The norm of the human body is the same constant as blood pressure or hemoglobin. And body positive women eat up to 120 kilograms and say that these are my diseases, I can cope with them myself. But they go to the state polyclinic for treatment, the state allocates money for them,”the doctor concluded.
