I believe the worst thing about being a woman is the way that we’re constantly encouraged to throw shade on each other’s authenticity. The worst thing you can call someone is ‘fake’. At my school, and my little sisters’ schools, and schools that haven’t even been built yet, every casual cruelty was, is, and ever will be accompanied by the words: ‘She’s just trying to be someone she’s not.’ It’s easier than ever to pretend, to build yourself a ‘better’ body, to change the shape of your body, the timbre of your tone, to prepare a separate face to meet for all the faces that you meet. ‘Real’ is, ironically, as elusive as a unicorn. The best kind of woman you can be, is a ‘real’ one. When every image presented to us has been manipulated at every stage of the presentation process, we pride ourselves on our cynicism and skill when it comes to calling out what is ‘real’ and what is ‘unreal’.
This might be why models like Kate Upton and, latterly, Myla Dalbesio, are getting a lot of work at the moment. The fashion industry has a reputation for being unreal, for celebrating extreme thinness, for employing people who are already very slender, and making them appear even thinner. So everyone gets very excited when they see women in magazines or on catwalks who have bodies and BMIs they recognise. ‘At last, real women!’ they crow. ‘Finally, the fashion industry accepts that real women have curves!'’ Or ‘I’m so sick of skinny girls, I want to look at real women!’ And they turn around, beaming at you, expecting that having strict, narrow preferences for the way women should look, and demanding that those preferences be honoured makes them ethical heroes who should be awarded some sort of prize.
Model Coco Rocha is a supermodel, and a real woman. She might be ‘traditionally sized’ (glossy as a human racehorse, legs until next Christmas) but she’s real enough to know this real/not real business is bullshit. The Huffington Post asked her about Dalbesio’s Calvin Klein campaign and the ‘plus size’ debate, and she responded: ‘Even when they say “real women” I hate that too. We're all real. When someone tells me that I'm not real, I say to them, 'Well, what about me isn't real?' I have not changed my figure. This is who I am. My mom [has this body], this is genetics. So for anyone to be called plus-size, petite or 'not real,' it just frustrates me…’
If someone calls you inauthentic, even by default (by saying that the people who do not look like you are ‘more real’ than you’) they are being incredibly rude. It’s easier for me to live in a world where Rocha is ‘unreal’ or fake, and women who look like me are seen as more serious and authentic because we have more trouble with doing up our zips. If I call myself a ‘real woman’, I’m still a contender in the daft attractiveness competition we never chose to enter, and I’ve changed the rules of the game and given myself the chance to win. But I’m dismissing my sisters. I don’t want people to judge me and decide whether they’re going to listen to me because of my body. So if I said that some women are ‘real’ and others aren’t, I’d be a total hypocrite.
‘Real women’ is an especially toxic expression because it excludes the trans and drag communities. It’s weird that fashion is so fascinated with ‘realness’ and boring, binary gender definition when some of the most beautiful and stylish women I know constantly experiment with their faces, bodies and gender. Many of them aren’t at home to ‘real’. ‘Real’ can fuck right off. But I also know that there are lots of women who feel real, and could do without the regular reminders that society wants to strip them of their Spanx, push up bras and hair extensions. The whole business makes me think of drowning witches. If she floats, she’s fake, and we must destroy her. If she sinks, she’s real, and speaks the truth, even if she’s kind of fat.
Two of my favourite models in recent times are Elliot Sailors and Andreja Pejic. Sailors is a woman working as a male model, Pejic worked as a male model on the woman’s runway until having gender reassignment surgery earlier this summer. Both models are breathtakingly eloquent about their experiences of working life and the part that gender has to play. There is nothing unreal or inauthentic about either of them. But if either of them got booked for that Calvin Klein shoot, no-one would comment about how great it was to see a ‘real woman’ in front of the camera.
READ MORE: Why Are 18 Million People Still So Ashamed Of Our Bodies We Won't Go Near The Gym
We can’t claim to be celebrating female diversity if we’re replacing one prescriptive, hard to attain ideal with another. Meghan Trainor courted criticism earlier in the year when some said her ‘body positivity’ anthem All About That Bass wasn’t positive at all. Talking about having the ‘right junk in all the right places’ is another way of making ‘realness’ into something divisive. It’s interesting that Diplo just cruelly offered to set up a crowdfunding page to buy Taylor Swift a ‘booty’ - it’s as if he’s implying that she needs something fake before he will take her seriously and see her as legitimate and real.
Tina Fey nails the issue of authenticity and diversity in Bossypants when she points out that the range of body types we see on screens and in magazines haven’t eased the pressures women face at all - they’ve just broadened the litany of expectations. ‘Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.’ If you possess any or all of those attributes, and they make you happy, you’re absolutely real, whether you’re genetically blessed or wearing bum enhancing pants, coloured contact lenses and hair you scalped from a Barbie and glued on yourself with No More Nails. But the next time you feel moved to praise a woman’s ‘realness’, stop and think. Unless you mainly hang out with cardboard cutouts and women that have been drawn on walls, the word is moot, and it’s damaging diversity.
Picture: Getty
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.