My jaw is aching slightly, from clenching through the bits of the Wagatha Christie trial that involved educating the judge in matters of Instagram. Whole days in an oak-panelled room turned on nuance previously reserved for teenagers at bus stops. What it means when someone unfollows you, for your ego, for your social standing, for who you are as a human. Who follows whom and why, the shade when someone messages you and you know they’re only pretending to be a mate and on and on, millions of pounds turning to dust as the internet is explained piece by piece, like grandchildren giving a lesson in how to use the new telly remote at Christmas.
It’s funny, but it’s also shocking, the fact that the next generation lives in a new and different world, with its own language, laws and rules of beauty. And that, for all the mapping of said world, for all the Duolingo lessons in its grammar, dialect and phrasing, those who have not grown up there are destined to forever remain tourists, squinting at the view.
In another oak-panelled room down the road in Westminster, in an inquiry into body image, the Health and Social Care Commons Select Committee was boggling at the power of social media. Eighty per cent of their poll of social media users had told them the way they look was damaging their mental health, and 71% said their body image had led to them enjoying life less. Giving evidence to the committee, their “lived experience witness” Kim Booker, a woman who lives with body dysmorphic disorder, said she used to take magazines to hairdressers, showing them the style she wanted. “Now, you go through Instagram and you take that picture in to [aestheticians] and say, ‘I want my face to look like this.’” So familiar had she become with her Instagram face, “When the video flipped off to my natural face, I got a bit of a shock. I hated what I saw, because you get used to the filtered version of yourself.”
In response, MP Dr Luke Evans discussed his Body Image bill, introduced in parliament in January, which would require advertisers and influencers to put a logo on images that have been digitally altered. “Would that have stopped you from getting to where you are?” he asked Booker. “It’s tricky,” she replied. “Although my logical mind can see that the image is altered, subconsciously my brain is seeing an image and trying to replicate it.” She was talking about the two worlds, then and now, and how complex and treacherous the journey is from one to the other.
That dissonance struck me again when I read Victoria Beckham’s recent claim, “It’s an old-fashioned attitude, wanting to be really thin.” She was talking about her new line of bodycon dresses which go up to a size 18. “I think women today want to look healthy and curvy. They want to have some boobs and a bum.” I have a lot of time for Beckham, a camp, smart and reliably jolly celebrity, but one nonetheless speaking from a place of extreme thinness, who has eaten (according to her husband) only steamed vegetables and grilled fish every day for 25 years. And this “healthy” look she’s promoting is just as difficult to achieve as that unfashionable thinness – the Brazilian butt lift, which involves transferring fat from the thighs or belly to the buttocks, is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery procedure in the world. The pursuit of thinness, while chaotic, destabilising and occasionally fatal, was never the problem. The problem was the idea that an ideal body must be pursued at all.
We’ve spent a lot of time inside over the past couple of years, a lot of time alone – a lot of time alone, inside our bodies. It’s only recently that we have returned to a world where we’re no longer disembodied faces on a screen, and perhaps it’s because of this shocking leap back into the pool, where we once again feel scrutinised, unfiltered and raw, that negative body image is so high. But, however much they might recognise the implications of an Instagram filter, isn’t it vaguely torturous seeing how long it takes the people in charge to learn what it actually does? That they might truly understand the “lived experience” of a person online seems unlikely.
While the adults try – and God bless them for that, their large fingers stabbing away at an unsheathed screen – it seems clear to me that more focus should be on teaching children how to navigate the two worlds they’re born into, rather than on how the grownups might police it. This means consuming media critically and encouraging conversation about unrealistic ideas of beauty in order to reduce the internalisation of them, and learning how to read an image, and avoiding forensic analysis and judgment of bodies which dash in and out of fashion before a season’s through. Then, perhaps, we can be spared the agony of another tired politician having to learn about the ethics of Facetune or how long Instagram stories last. Life is short and both worlds are melting – let these old ladies live.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman