the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle
Since reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and its parts about Covid and fitness influencer culture a while ago (especially the chapter "The Far Right Meets the Far Out"), I cannot help but see that “Pinterest clean girl fitness and fruit bowl gua sha yoga mat pilates in the forest” content as covert white supremacy and eugenicist ideals; dog whistles, shared far and wide by people who probably don’t know better and just think it looks good and want to be like that.
I cannot quote the entire book and how it adds it together and builds this narrative up, but I especially liked these parts:
"There are deep and healthy pleasures to be found in exercise, as there are in other aspects of wellness. For many of the evangelists in these worlds, however, both fitness and diet are intensely value-laden endeavors. Achieving goals means setting rigorous targets and displaying relentless discipline to meet them (a.k.a. "putting in the work"). That's how you reach your idealized body double. Which is all fine if it stays there. But the trouble is, it often doesn't. As Carmen Maria Machado draws out in her doppelganger short story, once the slim, perfect body has been achieved, the less controlled body that once was can persist as an ever-present shadow-self - and this discarded double is deeply loathed. [...]
And that is the trouble with this more private kind of doppelganger; when body mania sets in, the fit self may well not be satisfied with crushing its own unfit self; it may look for other targets, its self-hatred seeping out and projecting itself onto other people's less fit, less conventionally able bodies. These kinds of moralistic physical judgments deepened during the pandemic, especially when it became clear that obesity, diabetes, and some forms of addiction increased the risks posed by Covid-19, along-side other factors, including age. Much of the pressure to wear a mask and get vaccinated, meanwhile, was framed as a duty to care for those with greater vulnerabilities. It was then that wellness culture, and its barely submerged hostility toward less conventionally perfect bodies and less "clean" lifestyles, began to bare its teeth. [...]
The core Covid-era public health message - that we all needed to undergo some individual inconveniences for the sake of our collective health - enjoyed majority support. Yet it simply could not be reconciled with the wellness industry's own overarching message: that individuals must take charge over their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control, and competitive edge. And that those who don't exercise that control deserve what they get. Neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form. [...]
On the contrary, the lesson they seem to have extracted from the race and class disparities of Covid's early death toll was "This virus is going to kill people who do not look like me.". [...] This willingness to write off huge swaths of humanity that are cast as lesser within supremacist narratives is the strongest glue that binds together the pastel-hued, self-loving world of women's wellness with the fire-breathing, immigrant-bashing world of the Bannon right. [...]
These are the histories currently being conjured up in mainstream wellness culture, which has adopted Silicon Valley's notion of self-optimization, itself a by-product of the personal-branding culture that torments so many young people today. Every step counted. Every sleep measured. Every meal "clean". And it is in this context that has prepared the ground for a redux of the 1930s fascist/New Age alliance. The very idea that a human can and should be "optimized" lends itself to a fascistic worldview - because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean other people's food is extra-dirty. If you are safe because your immune system is strong, it can flip to man others are unsafe because they are weak. If you are optimized, others are, by definition, suboptimal. Defective. Next door to disposable."
Together with a lot of quotes of fitness trainers, and the fact that the Lululemon founder donated his money to right-wing causes.
I used to enjoy looking at this stuff.
Since reading, I notice how monotonous the entire aesthetic is, all these social media profiles and suggestions; it’s always white or racially ambiguous people, always women with European beauty standards and highly genderconforming bodies and style.
Always the minimalist white beige pastel pink outfits and surroundings, always huge living spaces that look basically unused, always so clean and perfectly styled that it insinuates either lots of available time or paid household help. It goes directly against much of the color celebrated in other cultures, something I already read about in Chromophobia by David Batchelor, in which the author makes compelling arguments that certain groups are obsessed with pure white design because color is seen as corrupting, as racialized and as queer.
It’s always with messages about working on yourself that are laid over bodies and food, subtle hints about how you can cure almost anything if you just eat extra clean, avoid evil chemicals, filter everything, drink herbal tea, take supplements and do the sort of exercise regimen that gives you a body like the images. The message is clear: this is what the happy, healthy, perfect body looks like, and everything else is gross, impure, sick, and in need of fixing. This is also presented as almost effortless, and you as the one being out of tune, your body derailed, that you have to get back into its natural equilibrium by detoxification and debloating (rapid weightloss).
How it got so out of balance? The poison they now put in your food, the water, the packaging, the air, whatever.
There is no space for visibly disabled and chronically ill bodies in this narrative that only permits good health as the default. Acknowledging them would mean admitting that your health is somewhat out of your control beyond the basics, and that it isn’t your juicing and Pilates regimen or your 300$ supplements keeping you together, but luck, genes, not having had an accident, and maybe handwashing. It would be admitting that you could end up sick and hurt despite all the money and time you pour into this, or that your body won’t look like this (for)ever. The other bodies are considered ugly, weak, lazy, a victim of their lifestyle, their greed.
It’s simply cooler and seemingly “natural” to throw herbs and greens into a smoothie and pretend that this is your medicine, than the sterile, branded packaging of a syringe or pill, which doesn’t look natural at all. I think especially in America, these content creators love the juxtaposition of the fat Black woman in a food desert with some KFC and burgers, and their white skinny selves in Erewhon.
What this content is after is somewhat an image of the Übermensch - the one basically never sick, always strong, beautiful, fertile, white or white-passing, disciplined, hardworking.
There’s a reason why so many fitness influencers are conservative or are even MAGA, why so many of them shifted to tradwife content, and how much tradwife content is just like the above but focused on very palatable and stereotypical household chores instead of gym fits, while still featuring almost the same foods and regimens.
They post “farmers market haul!” and it shows three impressively tasty looking leafy greens and other vegetables, and you just know that those three items cost what others need for 3 days of food, and can be used for just one meal, or more of you severely undereat. This can’t feed a family, and they couldn’t frolick through the park with their chives and kale in a bag if they really had to transport several cans of food and tetrapaks, too.
Wedged in-between are pictures from far-away, expensive travels: impressive beaches, forests, parks, mountains. People, posting in the tone of being just smol little beans !! 🥺, saying: taking a walk through my parents’ backyard! And it’s a whole forest. Generational wealth, but wholesome, ecological, wellness-focused, back-to-the-roots.
It’s where cottagecore aesthetic and eco-fascism are able to meet. It’s where criticism about cities, pollution, ecological collapse, loving nature aesthetics can be combined with “retvrn” and “reject modernity, embrace tradition”.
All that is why when seeing this type of stuff now, it looks dystopian, it looks like propaganda, highly exclusionary, eugenicist. And I have these feelings despite being the target group and easily passing for one of them as someone who’s white, going to the gym, with a fitting skincare routine, lots of supplements and eating lots of whole foods; the only thing not making me fit in is my chronic illness, and not fully adhering to heterosexual standards of beauty.
I know others will think it's "not that deep", but this stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum and frequently gets co-opted in meme warfare and the normalization of a certain standard. It makes me deeply uncomfortable, and thinking of when this really popped off, it paved the way into our current skinny/Ozempic culture and the rise of fascism in many areas.
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